Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Structure of an Outbreak on a College Campus

Mathematical modeling is a nebulous process because it is based on an underlying principle best stated by the statistician George Box: “All models are wrong; some models are useful” [9]. This innate ambiguity makes the transition between traditional “textbook” mathematics and real world applications particularly challenging for students and requires a complete change in perspective. Nevertheless, in summer 2012, we ventured into this mysterious realm and applied for a grant through our home institution, the University of the Pacific, to investigate the following three questions:
The micro-politics of cultural change: a Chinese doctoral student’s learning journey in Australia

ABSTRACT Considerable research has investigated Chinese students’ intercultural insights in different national contexts, where culture is understood as coterminous with nationality/regionality. However, few have explored the more micro-political aspects of Chinese doctoral students’ narrative experiences in national settings, within a more cultural framework. This article seeks to take such an approach through a reflexive narrative account of the first author’s experiences as a Chinese doctoral student in Australia. To do so, we draw upon Bhabha’s notion of ‘in-between space’, and work by Gill on intercultural adjustment. We show how the first author’s doctoral journey was characterised by a sense of ‘in-betweenness’ at the micro-political level, including in relation to the cultural boundary crossing associated with having to change fields of study and supervisors. This narrative provides a nuanced account of an international student’s experiences and reflects the usefulness of examining the particularity of international doctoral students’ learning experiences at a much more fine-grained level, via a more intercultural lens.
How Comprehensive Medication Management Contributes to Foundational Elements of Primary Care

Pharmacists are more often being recognized as a critical component of the primary care team. Previous literature has not clearly made the connection to how pharmacists and comprehensive medication management (CMM) contribute to recognized foundational elements of primary care. In this reflection, we examine how the delivery of CMM both supports and aligns with Starfield's 4 Cs of Primary Care. We illustrate how the delivery of CMM supports first contact through increased provider access, continuity through empanelment, comprehensiveness by addressing unmet medication needs, and coordination through collaborating with the primary care team and broader team. The provision of CMM addresses critical unmet medication-related needs in primary care and is aligned with the foundational elements of primary care.
Synthesis and Functionalization of Ordered Large-Pore Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications

A dual surfactant synthetic approach was employed for the synthesis of large-pore mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs). The as-synthesized mesoporous silica exhibited not only 2D hexagonal mesostructure with an average pore size of about 7 nm but also a spherical nanoparticulate morphology. A delayed co-condensation synthesis method was further employed to create site-specific core-shell bifunctional MSNs. These core-shell large-pore MSNs are biocompatible and can be efficiently taken up by cells. They are therefore promising nanocarriers for cellular delivery purposes.
Halal strategies on official government tourism websites: An extension and validation study

The current research extends the current literature of halal tourism by applying information seeking models to analyze the halal culinary marketing strategies. It aims at identifying the halal marketing strategies from the official tourism providers' perspective (the supply side) by extending and validating the halal culinary framework of Yousaf and Xiucheng. A content analysis of the government websites of the top Muslim inbound destinations among non-Islamic nations (as a vital source of information) is employed. The results of the content analysis revealed that several non-Islamic destinations did not pay attention in their official tourism offerings to promote the interests of the unique requirements of Muslims. It is found that only three destinations; New Zealand, Singapore, and Australia promote halal strategies on their government websites. Nevertheless, they could not promote all aspects of halal tourism requirements on their official websites.
Effects of Coexistent Ions on 137Cs+ Rejection of a Polyamide Reverse Osmosis Membrane in the Decontamination of Wastewater with Low Cesium-137 Concentration

Fly ashes generated by the incineration disposal of radioactive pollutants contain a large amount of radionuclide, such as 137Cs. The radioactive cesium can be removed from these ashes by water washing. However, this method produces a large amount of radioactive contaminated wastewater. In this study, we investigated the effect of coexistent ions on 137Cs+ rejection of polyamide RO membrane in the decontamination of wastewater with low level radioactivity. The 137Cs+ rejection increased with the increase of monovalent cations concentration, while it decreased with the increase of bivalent cations concentration. However, the effect of bivalent cations was diminished by coexistent monovalent cations in the treatment of model wastewater that simulated the washing water of radioactive fly ashes. In addition, the polyamide RO membrane had a high resistance for long-term radiation of 137Cs. Thus, a polyamide RO membrane shows sufficient performance in the decontamination of wastewater with low level radioactivity.
Seminars in surgical oncology—Pancreas cancer adjuvant therapy trials

Adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer has undergone a paradigm shift in the last 30 years. Before the 1990s, surgery was the main treatment with high morbidity and minimal long‐term survival. In the mid‐1980s, GITSG showed a doubling of overall survival from 11 to 20 months with 5‐fluorouracil‐based chemoradiation and now the PRODIGE trial showed the benefit of FOLFIRINOX with the longest overall survival to date approaching 5 years. Further investigation on the agents, duration and sequencing of therapy remains ongoing.
Contemporary trials evaluating neoadjuvant therapy for resectable pancreatic cancer

While the use of neoadjuvant therapy is well‐accepted in the treatment of borderline resectable and locally advanced pancreatic cancers, the benefit of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with resectable disease has been a topic of debate. Recently, key trials evaluating neoadjuvant chemotherapy for resectable pancreatic cancer have reported results. This review describes key clinical trials evaluating the use of preoperative therapy in patients with technically resectable pancreatic cancer with a focus on their contribution to the available evidence.
Employee Attrition Estimation Using Random Forest Algorithm

Today, almost all companies are concerned about retaining their employees. However, they are not able to recognise the real factors that make them quit their jobs. Many factors could be responsible for that (for example: cultural, financial, etc.). Each company has its way to treat its employees and assure their happiness. But often no measures are taken of the satisfaction rate. As a result, in many cases, employees quit their employment suddenly without an apparent reason. In the last decades, Machine learning (ML) techniques have gained popularity among researchers. It can propose solutions to a wide range of problems. Then, ML learning has the potential to make predictions to anticipate employee attrition. In this paper, the authors compare state-of-the-art solutions for the proposed machine learning algorithms using a real data set sample size of 1469. The results could be used to warn managers in order to change their strategies or behaviour. It could also be used to make recommendations to the managers to add some policies in order to retain their employees in the company. This study aims to present a comparison of different machine learning methods to give a prediction of employees who are likely to leave their company. The data set includes information about the current employees and the employees who had already quit their job with almost 50 valuable information units. This last combines many factors: social, cultural, financial, professional, and relational factors. Six different ML algorithms were used in this paper. Experimental results show that the Random Forest algorithm demonstrated the best capabilities to predict the employees’ attrition. The best prediction accuracy was 85.12, that is considered as good accuracy.
Pancreas Segmentation in CT Images: State of the Art in Clinical Practice

Pancreas adenocarcinoma is a lethal disease with poor outcomes. With increasing incidence worldwide, it is predicted to become the second leading cause of cancer death in many countries. The main factor influencing disease outcome is the tumor stage at the time of diagnosis. The first step to successfully diagnose and treat pancreatic cancer is the efficient recognition and segmentation of the target organ. Several methods based on deep learning and data fusion for pancreas segmentation have been developed and applied over the years. This paper presents a state of the art in the application of the existing methods that have been presented for the pancreas and pancreatic cyst detection and segmentation. The most successful method so far has accuracy equal to 90.18% and AUC equal to 94.55%. Also, this paper looks into software designed for 3D segmentation that is simple and potentially might be used by users from non-medical fields.
Parallelization of the K-Means++ Clustering Algorithm

K-means++ is the clustering algorithm that is created to improve the process of getting initial clusters in the K-means algorithm. The k-means++ algorithm selects initial k-centroids arbitrarily dependent on a probability that is proportional to each data-point distance to the existing centroids. The most noteworthy problem of this algorithm is when running happens in sequential mode, as this reduces the speed of clustering. In this paper, we develop a new parallel k-means++ algorithm using the graphics processing units (GPU) where the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) platform is used as the programming environment to perform the data assignment phase in parallel while the Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) technology is used to perform the initialization step to select the initial centroids in parallel on CPU. The focus is on optimizations directly targeted to this architecture to exploit the most of the available computing capabilities. Our objective is to minimize runtime while keeping the quality of the serial implementation. Our outcomes demonstrate that the implementation of targeting hybrid parallel architectures (CPU & GPU) is the most appropriate for large data. We have been able to achieve a 152 times higher throughput than that of the sequential implementation of k-means ++.
Decision Support System for Stock Portfolio Selection Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Investing in stock market requires in-depth knowledge of finance and stock market dynamics. Stock Portfolio Selection and management involve complex financial analysis and decision making policies. An Individual investor seeking to invest in stock portfolio is need of a support system which can guide him to create a portfolio of stocks based on sound financial analysis. In this paper the authors designed a Financial Decision Support System (DSS) for creating and managing a portfolio of stock which is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) and combining the traditional approach of mathematical models. We believe this a unique approach to perform stock portfolio, the results of this study are quite encouraging as the stock portfolios created by the DSS are based on strong financial health indices which in turn are giving Return on Investment (ROI) in the range of more than 11% in the short term and more than 61% in the long term, therefore beating the market index by a factor of 15%. This system has the potential to help millions of Individual Investors who can make their financial decisions on stocks and may eventually contribute to a more efficient financial system.
Integer Flows and Modulo Orientations of Signed Graphs

This paper studies the fundamental relations among integer ﬂows, modulo orientations, integer-valued and real-valued circular ﬂows, and monotonicity of ﬂows in signed graphs. A (signed) graph is modulo-(2 p + 1)-orientable if it has an orientation such that the indegree is congruent to the outdegree modulo 2 p + 1 at each vertex. An integer-valued 2 p +1 p -ﬂow is a ﬂow taking integer values in {± p, ± ( p + 1) } . Extending a fundamental result of Jaeger to signed graphs, we show that a bridgeless signed graph is modulo-(2 p +1)-orientable if and only if it admits an integer-valued 2 p +1 p -ﬂow. It was conjectured by Raspaud and Zhu that, for any signed graph, the admission of a circular r -ﬂow implies the admission of an integer-valued (cid:100) r (cid:101) -ﬂow. Although this conjecture has been disproved in general, it is conﬁrmed in this paper for bridgeless signed graphs if r = 2 p +1 p and p ≥ 3.
MicroRNA Expression Differences in Blood-Derived CD19+ B Cells of Methotrexate Treated Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a complex disease with a wide range of underlying susceptibility factors. Recently, dysregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) in RA have been reported in several immune cell types from blood. However, B cells have not been studied in detail yet. Given the autoimmune nature of RA with the presence of autoantibodies, CD19+ B cells are a key cell type in RA pathogenesis and alterations in CD19+ B cell subpopulations have been observed in patient blood. Therefore, we aimed to reveal the global miRNA repertoire and to analyze miRNA expression profile differences in homogenous RA patient phenotypes in blood-derived CD19+ B cells. Small RNA sequencing was performed on CD19+ B cells of newly diagnosed untreated RA patients (n=10), successfully methotrexate (MTX) treated RA patients in remission (MTX treated RA patients, n=18) and healthy controls (n=9). The majority of miRNAs was detected across all phenotypes. However, significant expression differences between MTX treated RA patients and controls were observed for 27 miRNAs, while no significant differences were seen between the newly diagnosed patients and controls. Several of the differentially expressed miRNAs were previously found to be dysregulated in RA including miR-223-3p, miR-486-3p and miR-23a-3p. MiRNA target enrichment analysis, using the differentially expressed miRNAs and miRNA-target interactions from miRTarBase as input, revealed enriched target genes known to play important roles in B cell activation, differentiation and B cell receptor signaling, such as STAT3, PRDM1 and PTEN. Interestingly, many of those genes showed a high degree of correlated expression in CD19+ B cells in contrast to other immune cell types. Our results suggest important regulatory functions of miRNAs in blood-derived CD19+ B cells of MTX treated RA patients and motivate for future studies investigating the interactive mechanisms between miRNA and gene targets, as well as the possible predictive power of miRNAs for RA treatment response.
A Novel Gene vp0610 Negatively Regulates Biofilm Formation in Vibrio parahaemolyticus

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is an important foodborne pathogen and its biofilm formation ability facilitates its colonization and persistence in foods by protecting it from stresses including environmental variation and antibiotic exposure. Several important proteins are involved in biofilm formation; however, the identity and function of many remain unknown. In this study, we discovered a hypothetical protein, VP0610 that negatively regulates biofilm formation in Vibrio parahaemolyticus, and we found that the loss of vp0610 typically results in pleiotropic phenotypes that contribute toward promoting biofilm formation, including significantly increased insoluble exopolysaccharide production and swimming motility, decreased soluble exopolysaccharide production, and decreased bis-(3′-5′)-cyclic dimeric guanosine monophosphate production. Pull-down assays revealed that VP0610 can interact with 180 proteins, some of which (Hfq, VP0710, VP0793, and CyaA) participate in biofilm formation. Moreover, deleting vp0610 enhanced the expression of genes responsible for biofilm component (flaE), the sugar phosphotransferase system (PTS) EIIA component (vp0710 and vp0793), and a high-density regulator of quorum sensing (opaR), while reducing the expression of the bis-(3′-5′)-cyclic dimeric guanosine monophosphate degradation protein (CdgC), resulting in faster biofilm formation. Taken together, our results indicate that vp0610 is an integral member of the key biofilm regulatory network of V. parahaemolyticus that functions as a repressor of biofilm formation.
Plant Size Plays an Important Role in Plant Responses to Low Water Availability and Defoliation in Two Woody Leguminosae Species

Plant size influences plant responses to combined environmental factors under climate change. However, their roles in plant ecophysiological responses are not fully understood. Two rapidly growing Leguminosae species (Robinia pseudoacacia and Amorpha fruticosa) were used to examine plant responses to combined drought and defoliation treatments (two levels of both treatments). Both 1.5 month-old seedlings and 3 month-old seedlings were grown in a greenhouse, and seedling growth, leaf gas exchanges, stem hydraulics, and concentrations of non-structural carbohydrates were determined after 60 days of treatment. Our results indicated defoliation had no significant effect on plant height, basal diameter, and total biomass whatever plant sizes and species. Under the low water availability treatment, the defoliated seedlings significantly increased by 24% in stem water potential compared with non-defoliated seedlings in large R. pseudoacacia. Compared with the high water availability in large non-defoliated R. pseudoacacia seedlings, the low water availability significantly reduced by 26% in stem starch concentration to maintain the stem soluble sugar concentration stable, but not in small R. pseudoacacia seedlings. We also found a negative correlation between leaf and root soluble sugar concentration under low water availability in A. fruticosa. The results demonstrate defoliation could relieve the effect of low water availability in large seedlings. Large seedlings had more compensatory mechanisms in response to defoliation and drought treatments than small seedlings, thus species with large carbon reserves are more recommended for vegetation restoration under combined drought and defoliation conditions. Future studies with more species are crucial for obtaining more rigorous conclusions.
Fostering Well-Being in the Elderly: Translating Theories on Positive Aging to Practical Approaches

This article overviews positive aging concepts and strategies to enhance well-being in the elderly and then presents a translation of theories on positive aging to practical approaches for Positive Aging. Drawing upon positive psychology and positive aging research and tools, this program is designed to help older adults improve their well-being by acquiring skills and strategies to cope with present and future challenges. The Mental Fitness Program for Positive Aging (MFPPA) can enhance seniors' quality of life by increasing their vital involvement and active engagement in life. This model is most appropriate for community dwelling individuals. It can easily be conducted in wide range of adult education programs in community centers, sheltered homes, and primary care clinics. It can also be conducted through online psychoeducational training.
IL-21 Receptor Blockade Shifts the Follicular T Cell Balance and Reduces De Novo Donor-Specific Antibody Generation

Donor-specific antibodies (DSAs) play a key role in chronic kidney allograft injury. Follicular T helper (Tfh) cells trigger the humoral alloimmune response and promote DSA generation, while T-follicular regulatory (Tfr) cells inhibit antibody production by suppressing Tfh and B cells. Interleukin (IL)-21 exerts a distinct effect on Tfh and Tfr. Here, we studied whether blocking IL-21R with anti-IL-21R monoclonal antibody (αIL-21R) changes the Tfh/Tfr balance and inhibits DSA generation. First, we investigated the impact of αIL-21R on CD4+ T cell proliferation and apoptosis. The results showed that αIL-21R did not have cytotoxic effects on CD4+ T cells. Next, we examined Tfh and regulatory T cells (Tregs) in an in vitro conditioned culture model. Naïve CD4+ T cells were isolated from 3-month-old C57BL/6 mice and cultured in Tfh differentiation inducing conditions in presence of αIL-21R or isotype IgG and differentiation was evaluated by CXCR5 expression, a key Tfh marker. αIL-21R significantly inhibited Tfh differentiation. In contrast, under Treg differentiation conditions, FOXP3 expression was inhibited by IL-21. Notably, αIL-21R rescued IL-21-inhibited Treg differentiation. For in vivo investigation, a fully mismatched skin transplantation model was utilized to trigger the humoral alloimmune response. Consistently, flow cytometry revealed a reduced Tfh/Tfr ratio in recipients treated with αIL-21R. Germinal center response was evaluated by flow cytometry and lectin histochemistry. We observed that αIL-21R significantly inhibited germinal center reaction. Most importantly, DSA levels after transplantation were significantly inhibited by αIL-21R at different time points. In summary, our results demonstrate that αIL-21R shifts the Tfh/Tfr balance toward DSA inhibition. Therefore, αIL-21R may be a useful therapeutic agent to prevent chronic antibody mediated rejection after organ transplantation.