Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of inter-stimulus interval on the acoustic change complex elicited with tone-complex and speech stimuli

Background: Acoustic change complex (ACC) is an auditory-evoked cortical potential elicited for a change in the physical properties of the sound. It can be elicited for a change in frequency, amplitude, or periodicity in the ongoing speech and nonspeech stimuli. Earlier investigations have established a significant effect of stimulus-related factors on the cortical auditory-evoked potentials. However, investigations to understand the effects of stimulus factors on the ACC are rare. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the effect of inter-stimulus interval (ISI) between the stimuli on the ACC elicited for speech and tone-complex stimuli. Research Design: This is a cross-sectional study. Method: A total of 12 young adults aged between 18 and 22 years with normal hearing in both ears participated in the study. The ACC was elicited using a consonant-vowel syllable/sa/and frequency-changing tone-complex. Tone-complex had an onset frequency of 1000 Hz and changed its frequency to 2000 Hz at 120 ms after the onset. Both stimuli had a total duration of 350 ms and changed their characteristics at 120 ms after the onset. The stimulus was presented monaurally with ISIs of 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 ms, and the ACC was recorded from Cz to Fz. Results: The present study showed a significant effect of ISI on peak latencies and peak-to-peak amplitudes. Shorter ISI was found to elicit peaks with smaller amplitude and slightly longer latency, whereas longer ISI elicited peaks with larger amplitude and shorter latency. Further, the amplitude of response for tone-complex was larger than response for syllable/sa/. Conclusions: ISI is one of the stimulus-related factors which significantly affects the ACC. Longer ISIs (≥1500 ms) should be used to elicit the ACC.
Spatial Agent-Based

Archaeologists were among some of the earliest users of agent-based modelling, but recent years have undoubtedly seen a surge of interest in the use of this technique to infer past behaviour or help develop new theories and methods. Although ABM software is much easier to use than it was even 20 years ago and sufficiently powerful computers are more readily available, the success of a modelling project is still largely determined by decisions made about the purpose and design of the model, and the subsequent experimental regime. This chapter guides the reader through those key issues. It covers epistemological topics such as the role of the model in a wider project, the trade-off between realism and generality, the idea of generative modelling and the importance of adequate experimentation. It also discusses technical issues such as options for the integration of ABM and GIS, and even the dangers inherent in poor design decisions about the scheduling of agent behaviour.
The Political Economy Dynamics of Rural Household Income Diversification: A Review of the International Literature

This paper presents a summary of the international literature published on the thematic area of the political economy analysis of income diversification related to the activities of rural households with emphasis on the importance of these activities in economic growth, poverty reduction and sustainable development over time. The review provides information about the overall effect of income diversification on economic welfare of rural householders. Typically, a positive relationship exists between income diversification activities and economic welfare indicators such as income, wealth, consumption and nutrition. However, recent empirical literature evidence shows that income diversification could also increase income inequality and contribute to marginalization of certain groups of people. For example, there is evidence to indicate that in some parts of the world that relatively few better-off rural householders with sufficient capital inputs achieve higher levels of income diversification from multiple sources of income portfolios partly due to increased support services from State and community sources. The benefits of income diversification have not been fully realized by many poor rural households largely due to capital constraints, weak links to the political power structures, and conflicts that adversely affect these households. Overall, income diversification can be an important poverty-reducing strategy if its use as a policy strategy is continuously examined and assessed in terms of its political economy dimensions with regards to productivity, equity and sustainability of rural livelihood activities with particular attention paid to vulnerable and marginalized groups.
Contributions of Quaternary botany to modern ecology and biogeography

ABSTRACT Quaternary (last 2.6 million years) botany involves studying plant megafossils (e.g. tree stumps), macrofossils (e.g. seeds, leaves), and microfossils (e.g. pollen, spores) preserved in peat bogs and lake sediments. Although megafossils and macrofossils have been studied since the late eighteenth century, Quaternary botany today is largely dominated by pollen analysis. Quaternary pollen analysis is just over 100 years old. It started primarily as a geological tool for correlation, relative dating, and climate reconstruction. In 1950 a major advance occurred with the publication by Knut Fægri and Johs Iversen of their Text-book of Modern Pollen Analysis which provided the foundations for pollen analysis as a botanical and ecological tool for studying past dynamics of biota and biotic systems. The development of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s freed pollen analysis from being a tool for relative dating. As a result of these developments, pollen analysis became a valuable implement in long-term ecology and biogeography. Selected contributions that Quaternary botany has made to ecology and biogeography since 1950 are reviewed. They fall into four general parts: (1) ecological aspects of interglacial and glacial stages such as location and nature of glacial-stage tree refugia and long-term soil development in glaciated and unglaciated areas; (2) biotic responses to Quaternary environmental change (spreading, extinction, persistence, adaptation); (3) ecological topics such as potential niches, the nature of vegetation, and tree and forest dynamics; and (4) its application to ecological topics such as human impact in tropical systems, conservation in a changing world, island palaeoecology, plant–animal interactions, and biodiversity patterns in time. The future of Quaternary botany is briefly discussed and 10 suggestions are presented to help strengthen it and its links with ecology and biogeography. Quaternary botany has much to contribute to ecology and biogeography when used in conjunction with new approaches such as ancient-DNA, molecular biomarkers, and multi-proxy palaeoecology.
Robust random walk for leaf segmentation

In this study, the authors focus on the task of leaf segmentation under different imaging conditions (e.g. backgrounds and shadows). A new method - robust random walk (RW) is proposed to propagate the prior of user's specified pixels. Specifically, they first employ RWs to take the relationship of pairwise pixels into consideration. A superpixel-consistent constraint is added to make the edges of segmentation smooth. Owing to the effect of illumination, some parts of a leaf surface are brighter than others and it may further harm the subsequent label propagation. To address this problem, they learn a common subspace by taking into account the illumination of local and non-local pixels. By doing so, it has good adaptability to process noise interfering and non-uniform illumination. In addition, since RW only considers the pairwise relationship of pixels, it will be sensitive to the specified and connected pixels. Thus, they further employ a log-likelihood ratio to predict the probability of a pixel belonging to the background and use it to guide the label propagation. Based on the proposed method, they can obtain a smoothed and robust leaf segmentation. Experimental results on unconstrained leaf images demonstrate the efficiency of their algorithm.
The Drosophila TART transposon manipulates the piRNA pathway as a counter-defense strategy to limit host silencing

Co-evolution between transposable elements (TEs) and their hosts can be antagonistic, where TEs evolve to avoid silencing and the host responds by reestablishing TE suppression, or mutualistic, where TEs are co-opted to benefit their host. The TART-A TE functions as an important component of Drosophila telomeres, but has also reportedly inserted into the D. melanogaster nuclear export factor gene nxf2. We find that, rather than inserting into nxf2, TART-A has actually captured a portion of nxf2 sequence. We show that Nxf2 is involved in suppressing TART-A activity via the piRNA pathway and that TART-A produces abundant piRNAs, some of which are antisense to the nxf2 transcript. We propose that capturing nxf2 sequence allowed TART-A to target the nxf2 gene for piRNA-mediated repression and that these two elements are engaged in antagonistic co-evolution despite the fact that TART-A is serving a critical role for its host genome.
Cartridge based nucleic acid amplification test negative in highly suspected case of tuberculosis: a case report

Diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis is challenging till today. Smear microscopy is the easiest, commonest and widely employed tool for confirmatory diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, but it has low sensitivity and specificity. Sputum culture can increase the diagnostic yield by 20-40%, but it takes long duration of 2-8 weeks to give result. The role of newly introduced cartridge based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT) in the revised national TB control program (RNTCP) is highly promising with a higher yield of bacteriological diagnosis in sputum negative pulmonary tuberculosis patients with detection of rifampicin resistance rapidly. However, it also has some limitations which may result in false negative results. Case of a 50year-old-male was reported who was initially managed for community-acquired pneumonia in view of negative sputum and CBNAAT but was later confirmed to have TB but by then he had developed cavities in lung and had transmitted the infection to his son.
Teknologi dan Media Sosial dalam Komunikasi Ibubapa dan Anak-anak (Tecnhology and Social Media in Communication between Parents and Children)

Media sosial dan teknologi yang berkembang pada hari ini memberikan pengaruh yang besar kepada pembangunan diri golongan kanak-kanak mahupun golongan remaja. Golongan remaja lebih gemar menghabiskan masa dengan mengakses internet, bermain permainan video dan telefon pintar berbanding berinteraksi dengan keluarga terutamanya ibu dan bapa. Hal yang demikian boleh menyebabkan kualiti komunikasi golongan remaja dengan ibu bapa mereka menjadi semakin rendah. Isu ini turut diakui oleh kebanyakan kajian lepas yang bersetuju bahawa penggunaan teknologi secara berlebihan akan menyebabkan komunikasi anak-anak dengan ibu bapa menjadi kurang berkesan sehingga wujudnya jurang komunikasi dalam keluarga dan hal ini turut membantutkan perkembangan sosial mereka. Kertas kerja ini bertujuan menjelaskan konsep media dan teknologi, komunikasi ibu bapa dan anak-anak serta menghuraikan kesan media dan teknologi terhadap komunikasi keluarga dalam masyarakat Melayu agar tidak menghakis hubungan kekeluargaan yang selama ini terjalin erat tanpa adanya media dan teknologi. Teori Sistem Keluarga digunakan dalam membincangkan pembangunan diri anak-anak dari sudut interaksi dan komunikasi dengan orang lain hasil daripada kehadiran media dan teknologi. Di samping itu juga, cadangan berkaitan strategi praktikal kepada ibu bapa turut dikemukakan agar ibu bapa lebih memahami cara penggunaan media dan teknologi dalam menangani cabaran budaya moden ini. Strategi serta cadangan yang dikemukakan diharap dapat memberikan lebih kefahaman kepada ibu bapa berkaitan media dan teknologi agar perkara ini tidak memberikan kesan negatif dalam komunikasi mereka dengan anak-anak. Sehubungan itu, kertas kerja ini diharap dapat digunakan sebagai model rujukan remaja dan ibu bapa untuk mengatasi ancaman media dan teknologi yang kian berkembang dalam kehidupan hari ini.
Development of methods for the detection Staphylococcal Protein A in ICU patient urine

Hospital acquired Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia presents a serious health risk to inpatients, due to the high risk of transmission and high mortality rates, which is in part is due to the emergence of multiple drug resistant strains of S. aureus. Therefore, the prompt diagnosis and treatment of S. aureus bacteraemia is of paramount importance in the Intensive Care department. Staphylococcal Protein A (SpA) is an immunoglobulin-binding surface protein, expressed by more than 98.9% of S. aureus strains, with a primary function of aiding S. aureus in the colonisation of the host. While many Staphylococcal toxins are excreted by the kidneys, the method of SpA processing and removal by the body has not been confirmed. If SpA is present in urine, it could provide a key marker of S. aureus infection. The aim of this research was to develop techniques for the detection of SpA in samples, and evaluate the surface protein as a target for S. aureus urinary antigen testing. This was to be assessed in a sample population of 45 Intensive Care patients, each providing up to 8 samples over a 48 hour inpatient stay. An effective and specific Western Blot was developed for the detection of commercial SpA in both buffer and control urine; however, this method failed to detect any SpA bands in patient urine samples. Subsequently, an optimised ELISA displayed increased sensitivity, being able to detect lower levels of SpA down to 0.78ng/ml. Using this technique, we detected an increased absorbance in 25% of patient samples tested, implying the presence of SpA. However, these samples did not display the same characteristics as commercial SpA, lacking the heat-resistance of the purified protein when ELISA samples were subject to boiling. Additionally, the application of mass spectrometry to analysing the SpA ELISA positive samples did not identify SpA. Furthermore, positive ELISA results were significantly associated with renal failure, but not with markers of infection. This research represents a comprehensive analysis of immunoblotting and immunoassay methods for detecting SpA in urine samples. Further work is required to fully assess the route of excretion of SpA, and the techniques developed could prove useful in the testing of other clinical samples, such as serum, for SpA.
Deep anterior lamellar keratoplasty in various indications and its comparison with penetrating keratoplasty

Introduction Diseases affecting the cornea are a major cause of blindness all over the world, second only to cataract in overall importance. The prevalence of corneal diseases varies from country to country and even from one population to another, depending on many factors such as the availability and general standards of eye care. In India, there are approximately 6.8 million people who have corneal blindness with vision less than 6/60 in at least one eye, and of these, about 1 million have bilateral corneal blindness Of all the organ transplants, cornel transplantation is unique as it is easy to harvest from the donor, can be done anywhere and does not require specialized facilities such as sterile theatre and equipment needed is minimal. Advances in ophthalmology as improved surgical techniques, operating with microscopes, improved sutures and advances in eye banking have increased. The success rate of corneal transplants making it amongst the most successful organ transplants. In India, nearly 3.5 million good-quality donor corneas are required to restore vision in all the eyes that can be treated with keratoplasty. However, only approximately 20,000 corneas or eyes are collected annually, while every year, approximately 40,000 new cases of corneal blindness are added to the existing backlog, creating a huge disparity between demand and supply. Thus, attempts to reduce the load of corneal blindness by corneal transplantation surgery are not optimal. This study was done to see the visual outcome and graft failure of two different techniques (DALK, PK) of keratoplasty in clinical practice, so that we can acquire a technique with a better visual outcome and a lesser graft failure rate for selected cases. However various studies shows the below mentioned advantages and disadvantages of DALK over PK.
Experience Quality, Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intention among the Visitors of Taman Tamadun Islam (TTI), Terengganu

Objective – Islamic Heritage Park is one of the major exertions of tourism development and experiences as a central concept in tourism research. This study investigates the experience quality associated with Taman Tamadun Islam (TTI) in Terengganu, Malaysia which offers a combination of tourism activities. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of experience quality, satisfaction, and behavioral intention among the visitors of TTI. Design/methodology – A descriptive research was designed for this study to obtain appropriate data using the quantitative approach towards the visitors of TTI. A total of 368 usable questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS to examine the relationship between the variables. Results – Based on the five dimensions of experience quality (architectural, information and education, facilities, quality of services, and activities), four of them except for the facilities were found to have positive effects on visitor satisfaction and behavioral intention. The results also revealed that satisfaction mediates the relationship between experience quality and behavioral intention in the heritage tourism with P value <0.005. Originality/Value – This study discussed the theoretical and management implications of the findings. The suggested strategies in this study would diversify and boost the Terengganu tourism industry by targeting different groups of tourists. The findings of this study have also provided some practical information on the relationship of these variables and recommendations for the improvement of TTI to meet the needs of their visitors in the future.
Assessment of feature engineering and long short-term memory for structure loss identification from process data in monocrystalline silicon growth by the Czochralski method

Structure loss impairs the quality of monocrystalline ingots and represents a major productivity loss for crystal growers. If structure loss could be predicted in advance it could help reduce the lost production time or preventive measures could be initiated. For this reason, feature engineering and machine learning by long short-term memory (LSTM) is used to assess if structure loss could be predicted from sensor data collected during growth of ingots. The method is not able to predict structure loss in advance, and the predictions may likely be based on the length of the signal, which is shortened for structure loss ingots as their growth is interrupted, and not actual features in the sensor readings. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Øyvind S. Sortland
IgG 4 Related Sclerosing Cholangitis

IgG4 related disease (IgG4-RD) is a multisystemic disorder which has only recently been recognized. IgG4 related sclerosing cholangitis (IgG4-SC) is the biliary manifestation of the disease, often in association with autoimmune pancreatitis (AIP). In this review, we provide an overview of IgG4-RD, with a focus on the biliary manifestations. In particular, we describe the important differential diagnoses of IgG4-SC that need to be considered, namely, primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) and cholangiocarcinoma, and provide amanagement algorithm. Finally, we highlight future directions and unanswered questionswhich will provide new insights into this exciting and evolving disease entity.
Phenolic Derivatives with Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Activities: An in Silico, in vitro and in vivo Study

Received: Revised: Accepted: Published online: January 10, 2019 January 29, 2019 January 30, 2019 April 06, 2019 Polyphenols are widely distributed in nature having broad spectrum of biological activities. Most of the biological effects produced by polyphenols are largely attributed to their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potential. The current research work describes the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potential of newly synthesized phenolic derivatives (T2, T5, T6, T7 & T8) through in silico, in vitro and in vivo approach. The docking studies were performed against NADPH oxidase (PDB ID 3A1F-) and cyclooxygenase (COX-2 with PDB ID 5KIR Homosapien) using in silico techniques. Amongst phenolic derivatives (T2, T5, T6, T7 &T8) T2 and T6 exhibited maximum binding affinity with target protein NADPH oxidase (6.2 and -6.3 Kcal/mol respectively). However, in case of COX-2 as target protein, all the five newly synthesized phenolic derivatives showed encouraging results. In particular, T2 and T8 with binding affinity values -7.9 Kcal/mol and -8.0 Kcal/mol respectively which are promising than Ibuprofen with binding affinity -6.6 Kcal/mol. Then in vitro antioxidant potential of phenolic derivatives was analyzed through total reducing power, total antioxidant capacity and DPPH (1, 1-diphenyl2picryl-hydrazyl) assay. T2 and T6 showed antioxidant potential with IC50 values of 25. 03μg/ml and 37.21 μg/ml respectively as compared to 15.14 μg/ml with respect to ascorbic acid. In vivo anti-inflammatory potential was determined through carrageenan induced paw edema which resulted in T2 with promising percentage edema inhibition (68.64±3.34) as compare to standard piroxicam (83.84±3.87). Amongst all phenolic derivatives T2 has promising results in in silico, in vitro and in vivo studies. ©2019 PVJ. All rights reserved
Design of multipath error correction algorithm of coarse and fine sparse decomposition based on compressed sensing in time-of-flight cameras

ABSTRACT A single pixel in time of flight cameras receives multiple reflected light from different scene points, resulting in erroneous depth information. In this paper, based on the proposed sparse decomposition, a coarse and fine sparse decomposition based on compressed sensing is applied to multipath separation. The applied method uses a linear combination of multiple frequency signals to modulate the source. The measured vector obtained through finite random measurements is subjected to two sparse decompositions – rough separation and detailed positioning, and finally the minimum direct path depth is accurately recovered. Under the premise of the same number of measurements, calculation amount, and storage space, the accuracy of the coarse and fine sparse decomposition based on compressed sensing is improved by nearly an order of magnitude compared to the sparse decomposition without compressed sensing. Moreover, our method can basically achieve multi-path separation accuracy to the sub-millimeter level.