Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Food Sovereignty in the Era of Land Grabbing: An African Perspective

Food is a basic human right. One of the humanity’s significant achievements has been to produce adequate food for the largest growing population. However, the co-existence of chronic hunger and malnutrition with presence of adequate capacities to address it is one of the gravest paradoxes of our time. In one-third of African countries the average daily calorie intake remains below the recommended level of 2100 kcal. The need and importance for greater food sovereignty has emerged out of broader concerns over the negative impact of world’s food system on food security and environmental sustainability. Adoption of the food sovereignty principles are essential to empower local communities to have greater control over their productive resources, use and sustain ecologically friendly means of production, and access local markets as well as nutritious and culturally accepted food. The majority of African farmers are smallholders. However, the existing trend of land grabbing in Africa seriously affects food sovereignty in an unprecedented level. Based on the secondary sources, this paper explores different dimensions of the complex relationship between food sovereignty and land grabbing in African countries. It also analyses the various aspects on how the ongoing process of land grabbing in Africa affects food sovereignty which in turn leads to food insecurity of millions. The introduction of intensive agricultural production, due to land grabbing often based on a transformation of complex farming systems for commercial purpose can seriously threaten biodiversity. There is a need to balance the local circumstance while favouring large scale agricultural projects.
Formulation and evaluation of bioadhesive buccal drug delivery of repaglinide tablets

The purpose of this research was to formulate and evaluate bioadhesive buccal tablets of repaglinide using HPMC K15M as a sustained release polymer, chitosan as a bioadhesive polymer and ethyl cellulose as an impermeable backing layer. The tablets were evaluated for weight variation, thickness, hardness, friability, surface pH, mucoadhesive strength, swelling index, in vitro drug release, ex vivo mucoadhesion time and ex vivo drug permeation. A 32 full factorial design was used in present study for optimization. Tablets containing HPMC K15M and chitosan in the ratio of 1:1 and lactose as a filler (F2) had the maximum percentage of in vitro drug release. The swelling index, friability and in vitro drug release was affected by type of filler as dicalcium phosphate (DCP) had good binding ability compared to lactose. The surface pH of all tablets was found to be satisfactory (between 6.26 and 7.01), close to neutral pH; hence buccal cavity irritation should not occur with these tablets. F2 batch was considered optimum based on good bioadhesive strength (17.83±0.51 gm) and maximum similarity factor (64.43). The drug release from optimum batch followed zero order kinetics with non-Fickian diffusion. Drug-excipients compatibility study showed no interaction between drug and excipients. Stability study of optimized formulation showed that tablets were stable at accelerated environment condition. Thus, buccal adhesive tablet of repaglinide could be an alternative route to bypass hepatic first pass metabolism and to improve bioavailability of repaglinide.
Improving support vector machine level-based for person domain categorization

Classification technology refers to assigning of one or more suitable categories from multiple categories data sets. While previous work in classification focused on single classifier, we propose classification method of improving support vector machine level-based that can classify multiple categories. Actually, we use the weight calculation method of TFIDF and combine DAG-SVM and KNN algorithm to improve precise of classification. An experiment has been carried out to measure the performance of our proposed classification method. The results show that our method performs better for person domain data set comparing with single DAG-SVM method.
Cystatin C as Marker of Cardiorenal Syndrome and Poor Prognosis in Patients Hospitalized with Acute Heart Failure and Normal Renal Function

Background: The development of renal dysfunction in patients hospitalized for acute heart failure is known as cardiorenal syndrome type 1 (CRS). Worsening renal function (WRF) during hospitalization is associated with poor prognosis. Cystatin C has emerged as an alternative renal function marker to creatinine.Objective: The aim of this study was to demonstrate the usefulness of cystatin C as predictor of WRF and prognostic factor in patients with acute heart failure and normal renal function assessed by creatinine level on admission.Methods: A prospective, observational study was performed on consecutive patients with acute heart failure and normal renal function defined as serum creatinine <1.3 mg/dL on admission. Cystatin C was measured on admission. The primary endpoint was WRF, and secondary endpoints were in-hospital mortality, total mortality and rehospitalization for heart failure.Results: A total of 166 patients were included in the study. Median age was 85 years (IQR 77.7- 89 years). The incidence of WRF was 29.7%, with in-hospital mortality of 3.1% and total mortality of 24.4%. Median follow-up was 193 days. Serum cystatin C was significantly higher in patients who developed WRF (1.72±0.58 mg/dL vs. 1.51±0.41 mg/dL, p=0.03) and in patients who died during follow up (1.76±0.49 vs. 1.51±0.46, p=0.004). Multivariate analysis showed that cystatin C was an independent predictor of mortality (OR 3.03, 95% CI 1.22-7.47) and WRF (OR 2.38, 95% CI 1.02-5.5). The optimal cystatin C cutoff point was 1.6 mg/dL, with 61.22% sensitivity and 60.34% specificity for the development of WRF, and 61.54% sensitivity and 61.98% specificity for total mortality.Conclusions: Cystatin C on admission is a predictor of in-hospital WRF and increased mortality in this population hospitalized with acute heart failure and preserved renal function.
Development and in‐vitro evaluation of colon specific satranidazole tablet for the treatment of amoebiasis

The delivery of drugs to the colon through oral route is valuable in treating diseases of the colon with the expectation to protect the drug during the transit time in the gastrointestinal tract and to allow its release only in the colon. The objective of this study was to develop colon targeted drug delivery system for satranidazole that is used in the treatment of amoebiasis. Matrix tablets containing a combination of guar gum and hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose (HPMC) K4M in different ratios were prepared by wet granulation technique followed by enteric coating with Eudragit S100. Citric acid was also added, which might further facilitate drug dissolution and absorption. All formulations were evaluated for hardness, swelling, drug content and in‐vitro drug release studies. The results of the studies showed that colon targeted matrix tablet of satranidazole containing guar gum and HPMC K4M in the ratio proportion of 3:1 does not released drug in 0.1N HCl (pH 1.2) and small intestine (phosphate buffer, pH 7.4). When the dissolution study was continued in colonic fluids (phosphate buffer, pH 6.8), the matrix tablets released 79.21% drug while in the presence of 4% rat cecal content,it was 94.08% at the end of the 24 h. It was expected that guar gum could be degraded by colonic microflora containing anaerobic microorganism and the release may be controlled by HPMC K4M and citric acid. Studies demonstrated that orally administered Satranidazole matrix tablets can be used effectively for the delivery of the drug to the colon.
Enabling Multipath and Multicast Data Transmission in Legacy and Future Internet

The quickly growing community of Internet users is requesting multiple applications and services. At the same time the structure of the network is changing. From the performance point of view, there is a tight interplay between the application and the network design. The network must be constructed to provide an adequate performance of the target application. In this thesis we consider how to improve the quality of users’ experience concentrating on two popular and resource-consuming applications: bulk data transfer and real-time video streaming. We share our view on the techniques which enable feasibility and deployability of the network functionality leading to unquestionable performance improvement for the corresponding applications. Modern mobile devices, equipped with several network interfaces, as well as multihomed residential Internet hosts are capable of maintaining multiple simultaneous attachments to the network. We propose to enable simultaneous multipath data transmission in order to increase throughput and speed up such bandwidth-demanding applications as, for example, file download. We design an extension for Host Identity Protocol (mHIP), and propose a multipath data scheduling solution on a wedge layer between IP and transport, which effectively distributes packets from a TCP connection over available paths. We support our protocol with a congestion control scheme
The tape winding current impact on the motor’s torque curve

The paper presents numerical simulations of the tape winding current impact on the motor’s torque curve. The tape winding is a novel type of a motor’s stator organization, allowing the large current flowing through the winding. Consequently the main flux of the permanent magnets changes. The estimation method of the developed torque dependence over the rotor and stator angular position is shown. Taking into account the control current effect the dependence is deformed, in particular it rotates relatively to the center.
Fairness and Compliance in the Extortion Game

In this paper we introduce the “extortion game” and propose a set of experiments aimed at studying both the extorter’s and the victim’s behavior. The primary focus of our experiments is understanding what determines both the extent of the extortive request and the victim’s reaction in terms of compliance. Our results show that the extorter’s requests are proportional to the victim’s earnings, similar across victims and positively correlated with the level of request the extorter perceives as “fair”. Punishment is rare and the extorted sums are rather small. Results also shed light on the motivations that make a victim compliant with extortive requests, confirming that punishment plays a role in promoting compliance, but also showing the importance of other concurrent factors like information about peers’ behavior and the perceived fairness of the request. Overall, our results indicate that fairness concerns matter even in a context of extra-legal taxation, shaping both extorters’ requests and victims’ compliance
The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC) and the framing of Local Climate Policy

The paper contributes to the research on understanding local global warming politics. Strategic documents from The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC) are analysed to show how CCPC has constructed climate change protection as a local issue. The paper's premise is that the climate change issue must be translated or framed to enable actors to work with this problem in a local context, and that successful framing requires establishing a coherent method of describing social reality. CCPC emphasises that the different elements of local and global sustainable development agendas can be mutually reinforcing, and that climate change protection can be reconciled with local priorities and initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases (GHG). It is argued that this framing of climate change makes it difficult to see why and how climate change should be an important concern for local communities. The modest reductions of GHG in CCPC cities thus far highlights that finding meaningful new ways of linking the global and the local should be a core concern of CCPC.
Representation par maillage adaptatif deformable pour la manipulation et la communication d'objets video

Situee dans le cadre des services de video-communication numeriques, cette these traite de l'utilisation des maillages pour la manipulation et la communication d'objets video, a la fois pour les modes de codage intra (images fixes) et inter (sequences d'images). Une analogie peut etre faite entre un maillage et un echantillonnage irregulier, et une representation par ondelettes. L'approximation de l'image s'effectue avec interpolation des valeurs aux nuds des facettes. Pour les videos, le maillage permet de modeliser des deformations en donnant des informations de deplacement aux nuds. Les objectifs varies de cette these sont parfois contradictoires, comme le fait, par exemple, de rechercher une representation de qualite maximale mais parallelement d'imposer de tres bas debits de codage, avec en prime la volonte d'une souplesse d'utilisation, afin de permettre differentes sortes de fonctionnalites telles la scalabilite ou la progressivite. Notre travail a consiste a elaborer des methodes fournissant une representation basee objet et hierarchique de qualite optimale en fonction de contraintes specifiques telles qu'un debit donne ou un niveau de qualite souhaite ; le fil conducteur de notre etude etant d'optimiser le rapport debit/distortion. Generalement, lors des phases de suivi de maillages sur sequences d'images, des problemes d'occultations, apparitions ou disparitions d'objets apparaissent. Nous avons alors introduit un nouveau concept base sur les lignes de rupture. Nous avons aussi propose des representations de l'image et de la video a differents niveaux de qualites et couts de codage afin de pouvoir generer des flux scalables a l'encodeur tout en proposant egalement des bitstreams progressifs. Par ailleurs, nous avons propose un schema complet de codage de sequence video de type (1,t) avec rafraichissement eventuel par codage intra des images de la sequence. Cette methode de codage ouvre par elle meme de nouvelles perspectives, notamment pour la transmission robuste de videos sur les reseaux.
Designing an Educational Game: Design Principles from a Holistic Perspective

When designing games with learning purposes used in a classroom, there often occur problems about the lack of learning content or the lack of game contents. Other disadvantages of existing educational games are the difficulty to provide a continual balance between the challenge and the pupils’ skill to control and solve the given task. In this paper we suggest three different perspectives that need to be communicated across in order to design a useful educational game: teachers, pupils and game designers. It is our intention with this paper to suggest some design principles for educational games, and to integrate teachers, pupils and game designers needs and requirements. To set up these design principles for educational games we have used a holistic perspective. This means that the design principles must be seen in coherence within the social and physical environment. The design principles relate to the world in which the game is going to be used. This involves integration of thinking, feelings, perceiving, behaving, culture and context from game designers, teachers and pupils. The most important point in developing design principles for educational games may be that good games engage both pupils and teachers, and the interplay between game play, pupils and teachers creates some dynamic learning opportunities.
Analysis of Short and Long Term Variability of Nasal Mucus versus BreathCondensate Inflammation Markers in Healthy Individuals

Objective: Inflammation markers were measured in nasal mucus and exhaled breath condensate (EBC) to assess the normal variability of these markers among healthy individuals. The measurement of protein markers in those matrices is valuable to provide information on inflammation endotypes and local reaction of the immune system. Methods: Inflammation markers (IFN-γ, IL-1β, IL-8, IL-10, IL-13 and TNF-α) in nasal mucus and EBC from six healthy adults were measured by Meso Scale Discovery technology. Nasal mucus was collected with sponges of polyurethane foam, which is a recently developed sampling technique. EBC was sampled via an optimized breath manoeuver with the RTUBETM device. Both collections were done within a limited sampling time of two minutes. The samples were taken on the same day and within a time period of twenty days for the determination of short and long term variability, respectively. Results: All inflammation markers were detectable in nasal mucus. This was in contrast with the measurements in EBC, in which only IFN-γ, IL-8 and IL-13 were detectable in the majority of the samples. EBC collected with the applied breathing technique gave a repeatable almost constant volume (448 μL (95% CI: 429 to 467 μL)). The collected volume of nasal mucus was more variable (from 0 to 200 μL). The variability of nasal analytes was similar over the short and long time period. The nasal inflammation marker levels were more stable within an individual than between different individuals (0.72 ≤ ICC ≤ 0.96). This was in contrast with the measurements in EBC that were highly variable over time (0.08 ≤ ICC ≤ 0.51). Conclusion: We indicate – given the good detectability and low variability of the inflammation markers determined in nasal mucus – that nasal mucus, more than EBC, is potentially a good matrix to assess inflammation in the respiratory system.
Fault-zone healing effectiveness and the structural evolution of strike-slip fault systems

SUMMARY Numerical simulations of long-term crustal deformation reveal the important role that damage healing (i.e. fault-zone strengthening) plays in the structural evolution of strike-slip fault systems. We explore the sensitivity of simulated fault zone structure and evolution patterns to reasonable variations in the healing-rate parameters in a continuum damage rheology model. Healing effectiveness, defined herein as a function of the healing rate parameters, describes the post-seismic healing process in terms of the characteristic inter-seismic damage level expected along fault segments in our simulations. Healing effectiveness is shown to control thespatialextentofdamagezonesandthelong-termgeometricalcomplexityofstrike-slipfault systems in our 3-D simulations. Specifically, simulations with highly effective healing form interseismically shallow fault cores bracketed by wide zones of off-fault damage. Ineffective healing yields deeper fault cores that persist throughout the interseismic interval, and narrower zones of off-fault damage. Furthermore, highly effective healing leads to a rapid evolution of an initially segmented fault system to a simpler through-going fault, while ineffective healing along a segmented fault preserves complexities such as stepovers and fault jogs. Healing effectiveness and its role in fault evolution in our model may be generalized to describe how heat, fluid-flow and stress conditions (that contribute to fault-zone healing) affect fault-zone structure and fault system evolution patterns.
Antitumoral activity of oncolytic vaccinia virus expressing the interferon-induced ds-RNA dependent protein kinase PKR

Tumour cells generally become more susceptible to virus infection than normal cells due, in part, to a deficient interferon (IFN)induced antiviral pathway. One of the key IFN-induced enzymes with potent antiviral action is the ds-RNA dependent protein kinase PKR, that once activated blocks protein synthesis, triggers apoptosis and prevents cell growth. Among viruses, vaccinia virus (VACV) lacking selected viral genes or armed with cytokines or tumour specific antigens has been used in preclinical and clinical studies as a therapeutic agent against different tumours. Here we showed in a mouse model of aggressive cancer by subcutaneous inoculation with prostate TRAMP-C1 cells, that a VACV recombinant expressing low levels of human PKR (VV-PKR) and lacking thymidine kinase (TK), is capable of reducing tumour burden when administered by a systemic route in immunocompetent C57/BL6 mice. In addition, expression of PKR was found to attenuate the virus, thus ensuring safety. A catalitically inactive enzyme PKR with a point mutation (K296R) induced similar oncolytic activity as the control virus lacking TK. These find
Strategic bidding in sequential electricity markets

Wholesale electricity markets can be organised into different types of markets-energy markets and ancillary services markets-that are cleared sequentially. The paper proposes a stochastic-optimisation model to obtain the distribution of the electricity resources of a generation firm among the different sequential markets within a wholesale electricity market. Market power is modelled by linear approximations of the residual-demand curves. In addition, the model obtains the bid curves of a generation firm that are submitted for every hourly period of each market comprising the sequence. A methodology to estimate the stochastic residual-demand curves for every hour of each market based on decision trees has been designed. The model has been developed for a Spanish utility to operate in the Spanish electricity market. A case study illustrates the performance of the proposed model.
A Cycle Deep Belief Network Model for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate time series (MTS) data is an important class of temporal data objects and it can be easily obtained. However, the MTS classification is a very difficult process because of the complexity of the data type. In this paper, we proposed a Cycle Deep Belief Network model to classify MTS and compared its performance with DBN and KNN. This model utilizes the presentation learning ability of DBN and the correlation between the time series data. The experimental results showed that this model outperforms other four algorithms: DBN, KNN_ED, KNN_DTW, and RNN.
GOLF DRIVE LAUNCH ANGLES AND VELOCITY: 3D ANALYSIS VERSUS A COMMERCIAL LAUNCH MONITOR

The purpose of this study was to compare initial ball direction and velocity for a golf drive collected using a commercially available launch monitor and 3D data, collected using a retro-reflective motion analysis system. Six golfers (handicap: 2-20) completed 10 drives each, with data simultaneously recorded by both a 12 camera Vicon MX system (400Hz) and a Vector Pro launch monitor. Both systems produced outputs for launch angle, side angle and ball velocity. The launch monitor data were compared against the ‘benchmark’ 3D results and showed a high correlation (0.93 – 0.96). Mean errors (launch angle 0.5o, side angle 1.1o, ball velocity 1.1m/s) were also relatively small. The results of the study suggest that if a high speed 3D system is not available or practical, a launch monitor such as the one tested, should provide accurate measurements of golf ball launch data.
Problems of Bad Contrast in Conventional Microscopy Solution and Speckle Elimination with a Laser Fourier Holographic Microscope

The problem of bad contrast in conventional microscopy is well-known and was solved in part by colouring the samples. It is shown theoretically that a laser Fourier holographic microscope produces images undisturbed by speckle-noise. A laser holographic microscope (LHM) is investigated experimentally. The instrument uses visible radiation of λ = 0.514 µm, Mach – Zehnder scheme optical setup, and CCD detector of the hologram. Images are reconstructed digitally. The standard slide of Parascaris Univalens Iarva (ascaris) is studied without any drying as for electron microscope. Comparison of the pictures of the same ascaris cell, observed by the LHM and high-quality Nikon conventional optical microscope with immersion oil and green filter indicates dramatically different contrast. The ultrahigh contrast of the LHM gives much more micromorphological information.