Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Good Dispensing Practice Among Drug Stores in Mizan AmanTown, South West Ethiopia

Background: Good dispensing practice refers to the delivery of the correct drug and medical supply to the right patient in the required dosage and quantities in the package that potency and quality for a specified period and clear drug information. The role of such practice in realizing rational drug therapy is enormous. In this regard, although the major contribution is expected from pharmacists rational drug therapy requires the concerted efforts of all health care professionals towards the goal. Objective: To assess good dispensing practice of drug stores in Mizan-Aman town, bench Maji zone, SNNPR, South west Ethiopia Results: The study was conducted on a total of 15 drug stores each of which are headed by a druggist. To this effect, a total of 422 clients of the drug stores were studied. Out of 15 drugstores the availability of cold storage facilities and sufficient lighting in their environment were in 14 (93.3%) of the drugstores followed to this the number of lockable cabinet and adequate number of shelves were recalled in 13 (86.6%) and 12 (80%). in all drugstores the arrangement the medicines were pharmacologically which is 100%. the highest percentage of drug libeling information that were written by the druggist were frequency in 12 (80%) of the drugstores. during this studies in seven patient counseling activities frequency of the drug counseled in 13 (86.6%). in this study 88.1% of POMs were dispensed without a prescription among those drugs 76.3% were non OTC drugs and 42.6% of the clients were didnât get as they needed its b/c of couldnât pay for the drugs and in some cases unavailability of the drugs. of the 15 drugstores 35.5% of the druggist asked for whom the needed is for self or someone else and age 23% were the most commonly requested questions. Conclusion and Recommendations: Dispensing POMs without a medical prescription was major practice in each drugstore; dispensers often didnât ask further questions when requested for specific drugs. Assessment of the cases was far from the optimum practice and responses or recommendations are inappropriate. The health bureau of Mizan Aman town should establish tighter control over the dispensing practice of drugstores and Training on responses of symptoms should be provided to the druggist by pharmacy departments in the local university.
First attempts towards the restoration of gorgonian populations on the Mediterranean continental shelf

In the Mediterranean Sea, gorgonians are among the main habitat‐forming species of benthic communities on the continental shelf and slope, playing an important ecological role in coral gardens. In areas where bottom trawling is restricted, gorgonians represent one of the main components of trammel net bycatch. Since gorgonians are long‐lived and slow‐growing species, impacts derived from fishing activities can have far‐reaching and long‐lasting effects, jeopardizing their long‐term viability. Thus, mitigation and ecological restoration initiatives focusing on gorgonian populations on the continental shelf are necessary to enhance and speed up their natural recovery. Bycatch gorgonians from artisanal fishermen were transplanted into artificial structures, which were then deployed at 85 m depth on the outer continental shelf of the marine protected area of Cap de Creus (north‐west Mediterranean Sea, Spain). After 1 year, high survival rates of transplanted colonies (87.5%) were recorded with a hybrid remotely operated vehicle. This pilot study shows, for the first time, the survival potential of bycatch gorgonians once returned to their habitat on the continental shelf, and suggests the potential success of future scaled‐up restoration activities.
Pollination Ecology of Caesalpinia crista (Leguminosae: Caesalpinioideae)

The flowering phenology, pollination ecology and breeding system of Caesalpinia crista L. were studied in Dinghushan Nature Reserve, Guangdong, China. The species started blooming in February or March, then last till late April. It took about one week from first flower appearance to its full blooming, which lasted for 2--4 d. The pollen-ovule ratio was 18000±500. The breeding system was self-incompatible, and protogynous xenogamy. Hymenoptera constituted the major group of pollinators. The pollination type is ambophily, the species could be pollinated by wind if the pollinators were unavailable: this is the first record of ambophily in the genus Caesalpinia. The floral structure adaptation to the pollinating behavior of carpenter bees was described. The influences of artificial treatments in pollination biological studies on the flowering and fruiting of the plants wre also discussed.
A Mini-Review on the Therapeutic Potential of Zingiber officinale (ginger)

Different cultures and civilizations throughout the history of the world have acknowledged the possible usage of ginger for the treatment and prevention of various diseases. Different studies associated with ginger and its extract support the potential effect in a wide range of applications. It has been thought that different essential medicinal compounds present in ginger would reduce the risk of various diseases like cardiovascular, anti-tumor, anti-diabetic and also show beneficial results against gastric problems. The ingredients available in ginger and their long term effect and exact mechanism are still unknown. So, for this purpose more extensive studies are recommended to elucidate their mechanism of action as well as their safety in the treatment of numerous diseases.
A Pilot Study to Assess At-Home Speed of Processing Training for Individuals with Multiple Sclerosis

Objective Cognitive impairment is a common symptom of multiple sclerosis (MS), yet treatment is currently limited. The primary goal of this pilot study was to assess the feasibility and acceptability of an at-home, five-week computerized speed of processing (SOP) training intervention for MS patients. In addition, we examined the utility of the intervention to improve speed of information processing, memory, executive function, and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Method Fifteen subjects were assigned five weeks of SOP training, two times per week, for a total of ten sessions. Subjects were trained on five computerized SOP tasks that required processing of increasingly complex visual stimuli in successively shorter presentation times. Subjects were given a neuropsychological test battery that included measures of speed of information processing, verbal memory, visual spatial memory, and executive function. Subjects were also administered patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures to assess HRQOL, depression, and work productivity. Neuropsychological and PRO batteries were completed at baseline and after five weeks. Results Eighty percent of subjects completed the five-week intervention (n = 12). Significant improvements were observed on some, but not all, measures of speed of information processing, verbal memory, and executive function. There were no significant changes in HRQOL. Conclusion This pilot study supports the feasibility of an at-home SOP training intervention for individuals with MS. SOP training was associated with improvements in several cognitive domains. Larger, randomized controlled trials are warranted.
Importance Sampling of Realistic Light Sources

Realistic images can be rendered by simulating light transport with Monte Carlo techniques. The possibility to use realistic light sources for synthesizing images greatly contributes to their physical realism. Among existing models, the ones based on environment maps and light fields are attractive due to their ability to capture faithfully the far-field and near-field effects as well as their possibility of being acquired directly. Since acquired light sources have arbitrary frequencies and possibly high dimension (4D), using such light sources for realistic rendering leads to performance problems.In this thesis, we focus on how to balance the accuracy of the representation and the efficiency of the simulation. Our work relies on generating high quality samples from the input light sources for unbiased Monte Carlo estimation. In this thesis, we introduce three novel methods.The first one is to generate high quality samples efficiently from dynamic environment maps that are changing over time. We achieve this by introducing a GPU approach that generates light samples according to an approximation of the form factor and combines the samples from BRDF sampling for each pixel of a frame. Our method is accurate and efficient. Indeed, with only 256 samples per pixel, we achieve high quality results in real time at 1024 × 768 resolution. The second one is an adaptive sampling strategy for light field light sources (4D), we generate high quality samples efficiently by restricting conservatively the sampling area without reducing accuracy. With a GPU implementation and without any visibility computations, we achieve high quality results with 200 samples per pixel in real time at 1024 × 768 resolution. The performance is still interactive as long as the visibility is computed using our shadow map technique. We also provide a fully unbiased approach by replacing the visibility test with a offline CPU approach. Since light-based importance sampling is not very effective when the underlying material of the geometry is specular, we introduce a new balancing technique for Multiple Importance Sampling. This allows us to combine other sampling techniques with our light-based importance sampling. By minimizing the variance based on a second-order approximation, we are able to find good balancing between different sampling techniques without any prior knowledge. Our method is effective, since we actually reduce in average the variance for all of our test scenes with different light sources, visibility complexity, and materials. Our method is also efficient, by the fact that the overhead of our "black-box" approach is constant and represents 1% of the whole rendering process.
The Efficient Solubilization and Refolding of Recombinant Organophosphorus Hydrolyses Inclusion Bodies Produced in Escherichia coli

Introduction: Organophosphorus hydrolase(OPH) is an enzyme that can degrade organophosphorus compounds in pesticides. High expression levels of OPH in Escherichia coli lead to form inclusion body in cytoplasmic space which is an inactive form of protein and needs a solubilizing and refolding process. The aim of this study was to compare different methods for solubilization and refolding of recombinant OPH expressed in E. coli. Materials and Methods: OPH was expressed in E. coli and purified by the Ni-NTA column. The refolding efficiency of this protein was assessed by 4 strategies: dialysis, rapid dilution, on column and combination of rapid dilution and dialysis. In each case, the refolding efficiency was evaluated by SDS-PAGE analysis and enzyme activity assay and was compared to find the best procedure. Results: The refolding efficiency of these 4 strategies was estimated at about 12%, 10%, 14% and 50% for on column, rapid dilution, dialysis and combination of rapid dilution and dialysis, respectively. Results showed that during the refolding process, most proteins did not reach the correct structure and aggregated again while the combination of 2 methods, rapid dilution and dialysis provided an appropriate procedure to refold. Conclusions: The combination of rapid dilution and dialysis is an efficient method for refolding OPH. The efficacy of this method for refolding other recombinant proteins can be further investigated.
Antimicrobial activity of various extracts of Sargassum glaucescens on the antibiotic resistant organisms

The antimicrobial activity of brown alga methanol, ethyl acetate, hexane, and chloroform extracts on bacteria Gram positive, Gram negative, and fungi was evaluated by using nutrient broth macrodilution test. Sargassum glaucescense was collected around the coastal area of Chabahar (south of Iran) protected marine area of the Oman sea in April and May 2015. Six pathogenic organisms including; Enterococcus faecium ATCC 51299, Streptococcus mutans ATCC 35668, Shigella boydii ATCC 25923, Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27853, Klebsiella pneumoniae ATCC 13883, Salmonella enteritidi PTCC, 1709, Candida albicans ATCC 10231 and Aspergillus fumigatus PTCC 5009 were investigated by the broth dilution method. Methanolic Extract for six strains showed good activity amongst eight strains. Hexane extract, after methanolic extract has good effect on antimicrobial activity against five strains. All bacteria strain in this survey has showed resistance against ethyl acetate and chloroformic extracts. S. glaucescens using four various solution extract against eight different human pathogens showed an important antimicrobial and antifungal activity. However, more investigation has to be done on separation, purification and detection of the active ingredients in order to recognize their antifungal and antifungal activity.
Crowd cookbooks: usando conhecimento de multidão a partir de sítios de perguntas e respostas para documentação de apis

Developers of reusable software elements, such as libraries, usually have the responsibility to provide comprehensive and high quality documentation to enable e ective reuse of those elements. The e ective reuse of libraries depends upon the quality of the API (Application Program Interface) documentation. Well established libraries typically have comprehensive API documentation, for example in Javadocs. However, they also typically lack examples and explanations, which may di cult the e ective reuse of the library. StackOver ow.com (SO) is a Question and Answer service directed to issues related to software development. In SO, a developer can post questions related to a programming topic and other members of the site can provide answers to help him/her solve the problem he/she has at hand. Despite of the increasing use of SO by the software development community, the information related to a particular library is spread along the website. Thus, SO still lacks an organization of its crowd knowledge. In this dissertation, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the information available on SO in order to build a kind of documentation for APIs, called cookbooks (recipe-oriented books). The cookbooks generated by the approach are called crowd cookbooks. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, cookbooks were generated for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT,LINQ and QT. Desired features that cookbooks must meet were identi ed and a study with human subjects was conducted to assess to what extent the generated cookbook meet those features. Through the study it was also possible to identify what is the perceived usefulness by the subjects in relation to the use of cookbooks in APIs learning. The results showed that the cookbooks built using the proposed strategy, in general, meet the identi ed features. Furthermore, most human subjects considered that cookbooks do not have an appropriate format to the learning of APIs.
Workload characterization: motivation, goals and methodology

Understanding the characteristics of workloads is extremely important in the design of efficient computer architectures. Accurate characterization of workload behavior leads to the design of improved architectures. The characterization of applications allows one to tune the processor micro-architecture, memory hierarchy and system architecture to suit particular features in programs. Workload characterization also has a significant impact on performance evaluation. Understanding the nature of the workload and its intrinsic features can help to interpret performance measurements and simulation results. Identifying and characterizing the intrinsic properties of an application in terms of its memory access behavior, locality, control flow behavior, instruction-level parallelism, etc. can eventually lead to a program behavior model, which can be used in conjunction with a processor model to do analytical performance modeling of computer systems. In this paper, we describe the objectives of workload characterization and emphasize the importance of obtaining architecture-independent metrics for workloads. A study of memory reference locality using some generic metrics is presented as an example.
Targeting glutamine metabolism enhances tumor specific immunity by inhibiting the generation of MDSCs and reprogramming tumor associated macrophages

Myeloid cells comprise a major component of the Tumor Microenvironment (TME) promoting tumor growth and immune evasion. By employing a novel small molecule inhibitor of glutamine metabolism not only were we able to inhibit tumor growth but we markedly inhibited the generation and recruitment of Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cells (MDSC). Targeting tumor glutamine metabolism led to a decrease in CSF-3 and hence recruitment of MDSC as well immunogenic cell death leading to an increase in inflammatory Tumor Associated Macrophages (TAMs). Alternatively, inhibiting glutamine metabolism of the MDSC themselves led to activation induced cell death and conversion of MDSC to inflammatory macrophages. Surprisingly, blocking glutamine metabolism also inhibited IDO expression of both the tumor and myeloid derived cells leading to a marked decrease in kynurenine levels. This in turn inhibited the development of metastasis and further enhanced anti-tumor immunity. Indeed, targeting glutamine metabolism rendered checkpoint blockade-resistant tumors susceptible to immunotherapy. Overall, our studies define an intimate interplay between the unique metabolism of tumors and the metabolism of suppressive immune cells.
The Pose Estimation of Mobile Robot Based on Improved Point Cloud Registration

Due to GPS restrictions, an inertial sensor is usually used to estimate the location of indoor mobile robots. However, it is difficult to achieve high-accuracy localization and control by inertial sensors alone. In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate an indoor mobile robot pose with six degrees of freedom based on an improved 3D-Normal Distributions Transform algorithm (3D-NDT). First, point cloud data are captured by a Kinect sensor and segmented according to the distance to the robot. After the segmentation, the input point cloud data are processed by the Approximate Voxel Grid Filter algorithm in different sized voxel grids. Second, the initial registration and precise registration are performed respectively according to the distance to the sensor. The most distant point cloud data use the 3D-Normal Distributions Transform algorithm (3D-NDT) with large-sized voxel grids for initial registration, based on the transformation matrix from the odometry method. The closest point cloud data use the 3D-NDT algorithm with small-sized voxel grids for precise registration. After the registrations above, a final transformation matrix is obtained and coordinated. Based on this transformation matrix, the pose estimation problem of the indoor mobile robot is solved. Test results show that this method can obtain accurate robot pose estimation and has better robustness.
Characterization of Human Affective States Using Multichannel Multiscale Entropy (MMSE) Analysis Method

This work is based on the recently introduced multivariate multiscale entropy (MMSE) analysis method. In this article, MMSE analysis method is applied on a multimodal dataset provided by Sander Koelstra et al. for analyzing emotions from physiological signals in order to characterize human affective states. The multimodal dataset contains electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals recorded from 32 participants while the participants were watching 40 selected music videos of one minute duration. Each participant rated their emotional response to 40 music videos along the scales of valence, arousal, dominance and liking. The MMSE analysis curve obtained using this multimodal dataset shows differences in terms of complexity among different affective states, which can be used for emotion detection and classification for machine vision applications. Keywords—Emotion classification, EEG, Physiological signals, MMSE, multimodal dataset, machine vision applications, Affective states computing ——————————  ——————————
Effect of Hydrothermal Reaction Time on Electrical, Structural and Magnetic Properties of Cobalt Ferrite

Abstract Cobalt ferrite was synthesized by hydrothermal route in order to investigate the effect of hydrothermal reaction time on structural, magnetic and dielectric properties. The synthesized cobalt ferrite was characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared and Vibrating-Sample Magnetometer (VMS). XRD data analysis confirmed the formation of cubic inverse spinel ferrite for complete time series as the high intensity peak corresponds to cubic normal spinel structure. The ionic radii, cation distribution among tetrahedral and octahedral sites, lattice parameters, X-ray density, bond lengths were also investigated cobalt ferrite prepared at different hydrothermal reaction time. The crystallite size was found to be in the range of 11.79–32.78 nm. Tolerance factor was near unity that also confirms the formation of cubic ferrites. VSM studies revealed the magnetic nature of cobalt ferrite. The coercivity (1076.3Oe) was observed for a sample treated for 11 h. The squareness ratio was 0.56 that is close to 0.5 which shows uniaxial anisotropy in cobalt ferrite. Frequency dependent dielectric properties i.e. dielectric constant, AC conductivity, tangent loss and AC resistivity are calculated with the help of Impedance Analyzer. Intrinsic cation vibration of cubic spinel ferrites are confirmed from FTIR analysis in the range of 400–4000 cm−1. In view of enhanced properties, this technique could possibly be used for the synthesis of cobalt ferrite for different applications.
1517-P: A Longitudinal Study of a Panel of Adipokines and Gestational Diabetes Risk

Prospective studies with measurement of a comprehensive panel of adipokines in early pregnancy and gestational diabetes (GDM) risk are sparse, and studies of adipokines for prediction of GDM are limited. We investigated a panel of adipokines in relation to GDM risk. In a nested case-control study within the NICHD Fetal Growth Studies-Singleton cohort (2009-2013), we identified 107 GDM cases and selected 214 controls matched on age, race/ethnicity, and gestational week (GW) at blood draw. Plasma Leptin, Soluble Leptin Receptor (sOB-R), Free Leptin, Chemerin, Fatty Acid Binding Protein 4 (FABP4), Retinol Binding Protein 4, Adiponectin, Omentin1, and Vaspin were measured prior to GDM at GWs 10-14, 15-26. Adjusting for maternal age, GW of blood collection, nulliparity, and family history of diabetes, conditional logistic analysis was performed to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) for associations of adipokines with GDM. Receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) curves assessed the predictive value of adipokines for GDM diagnosis. Leptin, Free Leptin, Chemerin, and FABP4 concentrations were significantly higher. Adiponectin, and sOB-R were significantly lower among cases than controls. At GW 10-14, Adiponectin, and sOB-R were significantly and inversely related to GDM risk. For example, across increasing quartiles of sOB-R the aOR were 1.00 (ref), 0.37 (0.19, 0.74), 0.28 (0.13, 0.59), and 0.24 (0.11, 0.52) (Ptrend≤.0001). In contrast, Leptin, Free Leptin, Chemerin, and FABP4 were significantly and positively associated with GDM risk. In general, associations of adipokines with GDM were stronger at GW 15-26. In addition, at GW 15-26, sOB-R significantly improved GDM prediction over conventional risk factors (age, GW, race, nulliparity, family history of diabetes, prepregnancy BMI) and glucose (P = 0.02). A panel of adipokines may be implicated in the pathogenesis of GDM with significant associations and incremental predictive value detected in early pregnancy before GDM is usually screened for. Disclosure E.C. Francis: None. M. Li: None. S. Hinkle: None. J. Chen: None. L. Chen: None. C. Zhang: None. Funding National Institutes of Health