Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Achieving boosted expansion of transplantable hematopoietic stem cells by co-culture with autologous endothelial cells

Currently, hematopoietic stem cells derived from the bone marrow or from cord blood are used to treat patients who require hematopoietic stem cell treatment. In spite of the varied sources from which hematopoietic stem cells may be obtained, there is still shortage of genetically matched hematopoietic stem cell grafts. As a result, many patients requiring transplantation cannot benefit from the procedure. Efforts have been made in time past to expand this unique type of adult stem cells in culture, with little success. These stem cells, even in the presence of several exogenous cytokines, serum factors and support from (mesenchymal) cells do not propagate the stem cells beyond a few days. However, reports from recent studies indicate that long-term propagation and large-scale expansion of hematopoietic stem cells is now possible with the use of endothelial cells in co-culture with hematopoietic stem cells. These studies have demonstrated that the presence of endothelial cells is necessary for promoting self-renewal of Hematopoietic Stem Cells (HSC), for long-term survival of repopulating HSCs and for increasing the number of these cells in culture. Endothelial cells from blood vessels constitute the basic building blocks of the human vasculature, being a key constituent of the bone marrow and vascular niche that support hematopoietic mobilization, maintenance and regeneration. Researchers have not only found that endothelial cells could greatly expand HSCs but the proliferation induced by endothelial cells carries no risk of tumor formation. There is a dire need to translate this revolutionary finding from the laboratory into routine clinical use. The purpose of this review therefore, is to glean the several studies related to the subject into a practical protocol scalable for clinical application. *Correspondence to: Ayodele O Ilesanmi, Kwara State University, Malete, Kwara State, Nigeria, E-mail: ayodeleilesanmi2002@yahoo.com
ELISA-Based Development of Functional Antibodies for the Efficient Detection of Mycotoxigenic Fusarium (F. oxysporum and F. circinatum) and Diplodia (D. pinea) Species

Fusarium contains the most toxigenic and important fungal pathogens, producing a wide range of mycotoxins that include the more toxic secondary metabolites called fumonisins. This study analyzed the presence of common exo- and mycelium-soluble antigens, purified proteins using reducing SDS-PAGE and the expression of antibodies against different fungal pathogens. The results showed the presence of common antigens between pathogens and development of antibodies against antigens from F. circinatum, F. oxysporum and D. pinea. A strong reactivity against the antigens ranged between 0.510 to 0.868 in F. circinatum and F. oxysporum isolates. The reactivity of anti-D. pinea antibodies was relatively low, with the highest absorbance value of 0.650, accompanied by a minimal cross reactivity. Overall, these findings indicated that, antibodies against mycelium-soluble antigens were the most immuno-reactive and could be helpful for the development of a rapid Fusarium detection tool for use in various industries.
Serological Study of Human Cytomegalovirus in Thalassemia Patients and Blood Donors and its Relation to IL-6 in Kirkuk City

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship of human cytomegalovirus in thalassemic patients and blood donors in relation to IL-6 in Kirkuk City through screening of antihuman cytomegalovirus IgM and IgG antibodies in the serum of thalassemic patients and blood donors by using ELISA technique to detect the IgG and IgM in blood samples. Blood samples were collected from 200 thalassemic patients and 180 samples from blood donor. The study revealed that the positive rates for HCMV-IgG , HCMV-IgM and both HCMV IgM/IgG were positive among 152(76.0%),14,(7.0%) and 3(1.5%) respectively. The rates of HCMV antibodies among 180 blood donors HCMV-IgG was detected in 68 (37.77%), the seropositive for HCMV-IgM was 7(3.88%), while for both HCMV-IgG and HCMV-IgM was 4(2.22%). The HCMV elaborate cellular and immune manipulation strategies to maintain the virus-host equilibrium and the human immune response by humeral and cellular immunity including some cytokines as IL-6, so the rates of increased serum IL-6 was high among most HCMV seropositive subjects enrolled in this study although the highest rate were within thalassemic patients.
The US in Afghanistan: Consequences of an Untimely Withdrawal

The following paper attempts to analyze the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan by critically evaluating the insurgent ideology, its past, current and future relevance. The paper draws on lessons from the recent Afghanistan history and discusses the irrelevance for the future of Afghanistan. It traces the success of Taliban insurgency by highlighting the role of „mullahs‟ and „madrasas‟ in the Afghan society. It argues that the US policy in Afghanistan thus far has failed to isolate the public from the insurgents, which poses serious present and future challenges. By drawing parallels between the sudden Soviet withdrawal in the early 1990s and a potential US withdrawal in the near future. It also points out that an untimely US withdrawal from Afghanistan may entail an end of US engagement but it will not be an end of war for Afghanistan itself. The essay stresses the importance of a consistent long-term US policy aimed at addressing the very root causes of insurgency in the region.
Modelling the effects of implementing the Uruguay Round: A comparison using the GTAP model under alternative treatments of international capital mobility

The Uruguay Round (UR) of trade negotiations was a significant first step towards capping the level of protection for agriculture, manufacturing, services and intellectual property to the status quo. It also committed members to significan t liberalisation in manufacturing and agriculture. What are the quantitative effects of i mplementing this agreement? The answer depends, in part, on what is assumed about the move ent of inter-regional capital flows. This paper models the effects of completing the implemen tation of the UR, using the GTAP model of world trade under alternative treatments of inte r ational capital mobility. The welfare decomposition which (i) provides an unambiguous ind icator of regional welfare, and (ii) decomposes this welfare measure into its contributi ng parts, is modified to take account of international capital mobility.
Forecasting the Frequency of Recessions∗

The US economy has experienced only two recession in the last twenty four years. This follows a period of nearly 150 years when the US had experienced recessions on average every four to five years. Using Bayesian methods simple autoregressive models allowing for structural breaks are estimated. The implied frequency of future recessions from these models is considerably lower than past experience whereas the models match the historical frequency of recession.
Simulation Models for Multi-echelon Inventory Management Problem: A Literature Review

Inventory management is a fundamental lever of supply chain management. Through effective inventory management, companies can prevent high levels of inventory while providing a good customer service level. With the increased complexity of the supply chain nowadays, multi-echelon inventory management has become a challenging and interesting research area. In particular, it considers the entire system as a whole which allows for managing the interdependencies between different stages of the supply chain. Today, solving the multi-echelon inventory management problem with analytical models is not sufficient anymore. Numerous researchers developed simulation models to overcome the restrictions of mathematical modeling and to reflect the dynamic behaviors of different parameters involved in multi-echelon inventory systems. This paper provides insights into the use of simulation modeling to assist in making multi-echelon inventory management decisions. A classification of several simulation models of multi-echelon inventory systems according to a set of features used by the literature is established as well.
PRESTON INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT

Rewards play a vital role to increase satisfaction. To satisfy the employees, there is an important role of non-financial rewards. Though financial rewards are considered to be very effective and is an important form to escalate job satisfaction, non-financial rewards are still overlooked at times. This study measures the impact of non-financial rewards on job satisfaction at workplace in private companies of Pakistan. Data is gathered through SelfAdministrated Questionnaire containing 5 nominal and 12 Likert scale questions from a Sample of 100 employees by convenience sampling technique. The data is analysed through SPSS. Correlation and regression tests are applied to analyze the data. The results reveal that recognition, flexible working arrangement, feedback to employees, freedom, advancement opportunities, promotion, empowerment, competitive work environment and individual reward preference positively impact job satisfaction in the workplace. It would further be suggested that focusing the factors that positively impact job satisfaction would enhance the performance of employee and create a positive work environment which will also help grow the organization’s productivity.
Software Defined Networking: A Paradigm Shift in Networking for Future, Emerging Trends and Applications

Software defined Networking is an emerging topic in area of networking aimed at providing efficient and faster implementation of networking devices to support various applications in current world aimed at dynamic scaling of the network infrastructure to provide minimum time for upgrading as well as testing new protocols. The main aim of SDN lies in the separation of the currently co-existing control plane and data plane. This decentralisation involves providing greater leverage of access and intelligence to the control plane for controlling multiple network devices efficiently with minimum manpower. The control plane is designed such that the interactions with the application layer offer users to more programmatically control and define the network control. This papers aims at providing an insight into the concepts of SDN, the features of the SDN controller, applications of SDN and emerging areas of SDN implementation as well as points to be considered in developing efficient and secured SDN controllers.
PAIN, FUNCTIONAL STATUS, ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, AND SOCIAL INTERACTION IN OLDER ADULTS WITH RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS

Aim: The aim of this study was to assess pain, functional status, anxiety, depression, social activity, and social support and their interactions in older adults with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and to assess possible differences by gender, marital status, age, duration of disease, and co-morbidity. Methods: Pain intensity was assessed by the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), functional disability by the Stanford Health Assessment Questionnaire – Disability Index (HAQ-DI), anxiety by the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), depression by the Zung Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS), social activity by the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales 2 (AIMS2) with scale of Social Activity (SA), and social support (SO) by AIMS2 with scale Support from family and friend in 60 elderly with RA. Results: There were found average strong pain, moderate to severe functional disability, moderate anxiety and moderate-to-marked depression, and limitation in social activity in elderly with RA. The best score was found in scale of social support. Significant (p ≤ 0.05) mild to severe relations were confirmed between explored objectives by Pearson’s correlations. Between genders no significant differences were recorded. Worse score (p ≤ 0.05) was detected in anxiety and social support in elderly living alone compared to married elderly. Between age and anxiety, duration of disease and depression, co-morbidity and functional disability, and depression were confirmed significant (p ≤ 0.05) positive relationships. Conclusion: According to results, not only pain reduction and improving/maintaining of functional status is the priority of care in elderly with RA, but also reduction of anxiety and depression is important, mainly in older, with longer duration of disease, co-morbidity and also for elderly living alone.
Impact of transverse shear on turbomachinery endwall flow

Development of an axisymmetric turbulent boundary layer (ATBL) over a stationaryrotating-stationary cylinder was investigated using large-eddy simulation (LES) for a turbomachinery-relevant configuration. In this case, the rotating speed was set to twice the axial free-stream velocity, aΩ = 2U∞, where a is the cylinder radius, and the inlet Reθ to 4060. The rotating cylinder creates significant turbulence production through a Taylor-Couette-type flow regime and its coupling with the boundary layer. The nearwall transverse flow propagates to the outer region and contributes to a transverse mean flow. As a result, the upstream two-dimensional (2D) boundary layer turns into a threedimensional (3D) ATBL. The LES results show that the strong smaller-scale turbulence near the rotating wall propagates toward the outer region of the downstream stationary region. Finally, flow simulation of the same configuration using the standard k-ω model was also conducted for comparison.
Evaluating Deviant Art as an Educational Tool for Collaborative Learning

The widespread use of technology has reshaped the field of language teaching and has transformed the learning experience for language learners. The implementation of multimedia tools has nurtured opportunities for more student-centred, real-world-like learning environments where students can become more autonomous and collaborate with their peers. Pedagogically, the collaborative nature of these tools is founded under the social constructivist theory according to which learning takes place through social interactions and language use, and knowledge is shared and becomes more meaningful. The multimedia tool involved in the present study is Deviant Art, an international online community for art enthusiasts, featuring artwork, photography and videography. Within this social community, artists can connect through their art, share their work, engage in constructive feedback and keep their own journal about their work. The present pilot study focuses on the evaluation of Deviant Art as an educational tool, as it was used in the course English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) in the Fall Semester of 2019, at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT). The evaluation was based on the experience of 11 first-year students of the Department of Fine Arts. The aim of the paper was to investigate students’ perceptions on Deviant Art as an educational tool for creating collaborative learning opportunities and to examine up to what extent they intended to continue with the Social Networking (SN) tool after the termination of the course. Data was collected through the students’ reflection journals, the instructor’s field notes and through an online questionnaire, submitted at the end of the semester.
Meta-models for Software Quality and Its Evaluation: A Systematic Literature Review

Software quality has been a very critical issue in software engineering for the last four decades and still maintains its importance. Various quality models with different characteristics have been proposed for quality evaluation of software products. Also, static code analysis tools have been widely used to measure specific characteristics of software in fixed quality models. In order to combine the isolated views on software quality and its evaluation (SQiE), meta-models that formalize whole or partial aspects of software quality models as a base for tool support or further research have been proposed in literature. I n this paper, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to comprehensively examine the meta-models proposed for SQiE in scientific literature is reported, with an aim to understand their purpose of use, content, and structure. The most-known seven digital libraries were searched, and 28 studies were identified out of 114 initially selected and 6488 initially retrieved in this area between 1997-2020. Re-sults show that majority of meta-models are for general purposes, take ISO 9126 as reference and propose for various types of software. Most of them evaluate quality objectively using metric data and provide quantitative results. Majority of them are structured to enable extension with new quality models.
DEVELOPMENT OF TIME DELAY CURRENT CONTROL FOR LEAD ACID BATTERY 12 V DC BY USING ARDUINO NURUL SYAZRAH BINTI MAT YATIM

Development of time delay current control for lead acid battery 12 V dc by using Arduino is the aim of this thesis. The development problem is necessary before applying control techniques to guarantee the execution of any task according to a desired input with minimum error. The main objective of this thesis is to design the time delay has on the performance of a current controlled for the buck-boost converter. The time delay controller is generally regarded as a nuisance to a control system. In addition, the performance of the Arduino and MATLAB as a signal processing device interface time is used. The feedback of open loop and closed loop time delay controller is also been analyzed. Based on results, the experiment of closed loop hardware gives better results than simulation in terms of output current. Through this study it is proved that the time delay controller is successfully designed to control current for lead acid battery. PTTA PERP UST AKA AN TUN KU T UN AMI NAH
THRIFTY: Training with Hyperdimensional Computing across Flash Hierarchy

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is a brain-inspired computing paradigm that works with high-dimensional vectors, hypervectors, instead of numbers. HDC replaces several complex learning computations with bitwise and simpler arithmetic operations, resulting in a faster and more energy-efficient learning algorithm. However, it comes at the cost of an increased amount of data to process due to mapping the data into high-dimensional space. While some datasets may nearly fit in the memory, the resulting hypervectors more often than not can't be stored in memory, resulting in long data transfers from storage. In this paper, we propose THRIFTY, an in-storage computing (ISC) solution that performs HDC encoding and training across the flash hierarchy. To hide the latency of training and enable efficient computation, we introduce the concept of batching in HDC. It allows us to split HDC training into sub-components and process them independently. We also present, for the first time, on-chip acceleration for HDC which uses simple low-power digital circuits to implement HDC encoding in Flash planes. This enables us to explore high internal parallelism provided by the flash hierarchy and encode multiple data points in parallel with negligible latency overhead. THRIFTY also implements a single top-level FPGA accelerator, which further processes the data obtained from the chips. We exploit the state-of-the-art INSIDER ISC infrastructure to implement the top-level accelerator and provide software support to THRIFTY. THRIFTY runs HDC training completely in storage while almost entirely hiding the latency of computation. Our evaluation over five popular classification datasets shows that THRIFTY is on average 1612× faster than a CPU-server and 14.4× faster than the state-of-the-art ISC solution, INSIDER for HDC encoding and training.
Impact of population growth and population ethics\xmlpi{\\} on climate change mitigation policy

aWoodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; bDepartment of Philosophy, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405; cYale–NUS College, Singapore 138527; dCenter for Human Values, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; eInternational Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964; fDepartment of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; gDepartment of Economics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712; hEconomics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, India, 110016; iAndlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; and jInternational Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria A-2361
Bone mineral density and fragility fractures in stroke patients

Results. The males with stroke had significantly lower parameters of total body, upper extremity and trunk BMDs compared to indexes of the control group without any differences in lower extremities BMDs in contrast to women with stroke who had lower BMDs of total body, trunk and upper/lower extremities compared to parameters of the control group. Almost all measured BMDs were significantly lower on a paretic side compared to BMDs on a non-paretic side, except distal radius and total lower extremities BMDs in men with stroke in contrast to women who demonstrated significantly lower femoral neck and total femur BMDs compared to the control group. Most BMDs were decreased in females with post-stroke period duration of more than 1 year in contrast to data in men who did not show any BMD differences, except significantly decreased BMD of upper extremities compared to the control group. Fragility fractures were revealed in 21.4 % of patients after stroke (31.8 % in women and 10.0 % in men, P < 0.05), their frequency was higher only in women compared to the control group patients.