Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing Wealth-Related Inequalities in Demand for Family Planning Satisfied in 43 African Countries

Background: Around 80% of the African population lives in urban areas, and a rapid urbanization is observed in almost all countries. Urban poverty has been linked to several sexual and reproductive health risks, including high levels of unintended pregnancies. We aim to investigate wealth inequalities in demand for family planning satisfied with modern methods (mDFPS) among women living in urban areas from African countries. Methods: We used data from 43 national health surveys carried out since 2010 to assess wealth inequalities in mDFPS. mDFPS and the share of modern contraceptive use were stratified by groups of household wealth. We also assessed the ecological relationship between the proportion of urban population living in informal settlements and both mDFPS and inequalities in coverage. Results: mDFPS among urban women ranged from 27% (95% CI: 23–31%) in Chad to 87% (95% CI: 84–89%) in Eswatini. We found significant inequalities in mDFPS with lower coverage among the poorest women in most countries. In North Africa, inequalities in mDFPS were identified only in Sudan, where coverage ranged between 7% (95% CI: 3–15%) among the poorest and 52% (95% CI: 49–56%) among the wealthiest. The largest gap in the Eastern and Southern African was found in Angola; 6% (95% CI: 3–11%) among the poorest and 46% (95% CI: 41–51%) among the wealthiest. In West and Central Africa, large gaps were found for almost all countries, especially in Central African Republic, where mDFPS was 11% (95% CI: 7–18%) among the poorest and 47% (95% CI: 41–53%) among the wealthiest. Inequalities by type of method were also observed for urban poor, with an overall pattern of lower use of long-acting and permanent methods. Our ecological analyses showed that the higher the proportion of the population living in informal settlements, the lower the mDFPS and the higher the inequalities. Conclusion: Our results rise the need for more focus on the urban-poorer women by public policies and programs. Future interventions developed by national governments and international organizations should consider the interconnection between urbanization, poverty, and reproductive health.
Multielemental analysis of pharmaceuticals derived from plant seeds by energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry

ABSTRACT The concentrations of elements in pharmaceuticals derived from plant seeds were determined by energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence. The concentrations of Ca, Si, Cl, K, S, Ti, Cr, Mn, Fe, P, Cu, Zn, Br, Rb, Sr, Hg, and Zr were quantified; only Si (10 ± 1 to 70,000 ± 110 mg kg−1), S (10 ± 2 to 12,4000 ± 243 mg kg−1), K (4,000 ± 58 to 24,000 ± 70 mg kg−1), Ca (2200 ± 35 to 87,000 ± 150 mg kg−1), Mn (21 ± 4 to 1956 ± 17 mg kg−1), and Fe (100 ± 7 to 5150 ± 70 mg kg−1) were present in all samples. These results may validate the use of these pharmaceuticals for the treatment of disease due to high concentrations of essential elements Mn, Ca, Mn, K, Mg, Zn, Cl, Fe, and P. Mercury was present in some products below standard values. The results also have quality control applications because of the widespread use of these pharmaceuticals.
Facile Preparation of P-25 Films Dip-Coated Nickel Foam and High Photocatalytic Activity for the Degradation of Quinoline and Industrial Wastewater

A kind of P-25 TiO2 films coated nickel foam was synthesized by a facile dip-coating/calcination route, and used to fabricate a continuous-flow three-phase photocatalytic reactor. The morphology, crystal phase structure, surface composition and specific surface area of P-25 films coated nickel foam were investigated by field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and nitrogen adsorption-desorption measurements, respectively. The results indicated that the coated/ calcined P-25 films had the porous surface structure fabricated by nano-sized titanium dioxide consisted of two crystal phases and incorporated with a NiO interlayer. The increase of P-25 contents enhanced the specific surface area; however, 20 percent of initial P-25 sol would result in visible large cracks because of too high P-25 content and consequently cause the peeling of films. The photocatalytic activities of nickel foam with different coating amounts of P-25 for the degradation of quinoline aqueous solutions were investigated with a continuous-flow three-phase photocatalytic reactor based on the P-25 films coated nickel foam. The results suggested that nickel foam coated with 10 percent of P-25 sol had an optimal photocatalytic activity for the degradation of quinoline aqueous solutions. The continuous-flow three-phase photocatalytic reactor fabricated with P-25 films coated nickel foam with an optimal P-25 coating amount shows high photocatalytic activity and stability for the degradation of quinoline aqueous solutions and industrial wastewater. The treated industrial wastewater meets the international discharge standard.
A Robust Log Classification Approach Based on Natural Language Processing

The log data that records the operating state of a computer system is of great significance for understanding the system state. Log classification is crucial for engineers to monitor the system running status and analysis of system failures. To improve the representation quality of the log template and reduce classification model inference time, we propose a new log classification method based on natural language processing techniques. In this paper, three embedding methods are adopted to complete the word vectorization process and improve the digital representation quality of log templates, which can make full use of semantic information, part-of-speech (PoS) information, and location information of words in log templates. This word vectorization process provides the log classification model with more informative inputs and promotes the model to make better results. The classification model consists of TextCNN and a nonlinear classifier. We utilize the knowledge distillation method and transfer the knowledge from BERT to TextCNN to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed classification model. The effectiveness of our approach is tested on five public datasets and one private dataset collected from a global top e-commerce corporation. The experimental results show that, compared with other state-of-the-art log classification methods, the proposed method performs well and achieves a better classification result.
The Occurrence of Aluminum in Drinking Water

A random selection of 186 water utilities was used for this study in which raw and finished water samples were collected from each facility five times throughout a year and analyzed for iron and aluminum by atomic absorption techniques. The water samples were categorized by the supply source (ground, surface, or a combination of both), the type of water (raw, finished, or untreated distribution samples), and the type of coagulation used in the treatment process (aluminum sulfate, ferric chloride, other coagulants such as cationic polymers, or no coagulant). The samples were also categorized according to the 10 US Environmental Protection Agency regions and 4 population categories. The results indicate that aluminum is more likely to exist in surface waters than in groundwaters and that there is a 40-50 percent chance that alum coagulation increases the aluminum concentration of finished water above its original concentration in the raw water. Although aluminum is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust and is found in human biological media, it does not appear to be necessary for sustaining life. The results of studies in which animals were exposed to aluminum under controlled conditions have demonstrated a relationship between certain neuropathological disorders and aluminum exposure. ‘. ’ Recently, evidence has been presented to support the speculation that there is a relationship between aluminum and both Alzheimer’s disease and dialysis encephalopathy in humans? 4 Davison et al5 found that kidney dialysis patients suffered dementia when their dialysis fluid contained an aluminum concentration of 80 pg/L. Removal of the aluminum from the fluid prior to dialysis decreased a patient’s chance of exhibiting the symptoms of dementia. Recent studiese-9 have also shown that the acidification of lakes and streams by acid rain has mobilized aluminum from the soil to the aquatic environment. These elevated levels of aluminum in the water may have serious ramifications for the fish living in these waters as well as for some birds whose diets are made up of insects from the shoreline of the affected streams and lakes.s-9 Because of the increasing concern over the health effects associated with aluminum and the increased bioavailability of aluminum, this study was designed to determine (1) the frequency of the occurrence of aluminum in natural waters that serve as sources of drinking water and (2) whether the source was groundwater or surface water. This study also examined the
Thermophilic anaerobic digestion and pasteurisation. Practical experience from Danish wastewater treatment plants

Increasing sludge disposal costs have highly intensified the interest in reducing the sludge quantities from Danish wastewater treatment plants. By upgrading existing mesophilic digesters to the thermophilic temperature range, the retention time can be halved and many digesters designed only for primary sludge will have sufficient capacity to treat also the biological excess sludge. At the moment, eight full-scale thermophilic digesters are in operation in Denmark and five are under construction. This paper describes the full-scale experience gained from digestion of biological excess sludge as well as a mixture of primary and biological sludge. Thermophilic digestion has proven to be a good and stable process for solids reduction and pathogen removal. The digested sludge can be dewatered to a high solids content and thereby the sludge quantity for disposal can be reduced by 30-40% depending on the type of wastewater treatment plant. A drawback of the process is that the polymer costs for sludge dewatering may be increased depending on the sludge type.
Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Phishing Email Classification using One-Hot Encoding

: Representation of text is a significant task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and in recent years Deep Learning (DL) and Machine Learning (ML) have been widely used in various NLP tasks like topic classification, sentiment analysis and language translation. Until very recently, little work has been devoted to semantic analysis in phishing detection or phishing email detection. The novelty of this study is in using deep semantic analysis to capture inherent characteristics of the text body. One-hot encoding was used with DL and ML techniques to classify emails as phishing or non-phishing. A comparison of various parameters and hyperparameters was performed for DL. The results of various ML models, Naïve Bayes, SVM, Decision Tree, as well as DL models, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), were presented. The DL models performed better than the ML models in terms of accuracy, but the ML models performed better than the DL models in terms of computation time. CNN with Word Embedding performed the best in terms of accuracy (96.34%), demonstrating the effectiveness of semantic analysis in phishing email detection.
Retiming DAGs

The increasing complexity of digital circuitry makes global design optimization no longer possible(cid:0) a designer will only consider the critical parts of his circuit(cid:1) This paper dis(cid:2) cusses timing optimization problems when these critical parts can be represented by Direct Acyclic Graphs (cid:3)DAGs(cid:4)(cid:1) We deal with di(cid:5)erent (cid:3)though related(cid:4) clock period problems(cid:6) under various external constraints(cid:1) The main algorithm concerns the deter(cid:2) mination of the optimal clock period of a given circuit(cid:1) We propose an e(cid:7)cient solution(cid:6) based on the retiming technique(cid:6) which improves current results in the literature(cid:1) We give three di(cid:5)erent formulations depending on which combinational gates delay model is used(cid:0) same delay for every gate(cid:6) di(cid:5)erent delays or non(cid:2)uniform delays(cid:1) La grandissante circuits num(cid:8)eriques optimisation globale que les parties cri(cid:2) tiques leur probl(cid:10)emes
Estimation of Bam Earthquake Coseismic Displacement Using Envisat Asar Interferometric Data

On the 26 th December 2003 an earthquake, that measured 6.6 on the Richter scale, struck the town of Bam in Southern Iran. The European Space Agency (ESA) through its orbiting ENVISAT ASAR sensor managed to acquire 3 ascending and 3 descending image sets of the earthquake area, which were distributed, on request, free of charge to the research community world wide. A radar line-of-sight displacement map of the area was generated from the descending orbit image sets. The coseismic displacement estimated were in a region of subsidence,-34 cm, on the northeast end of the fault, a region of uplift, 28 cm, located to the southeast of the fault, and the main rupture having a length of about 6 km and runs along the Bam fault.
Project Advisor

Research & training experience Graduate Student Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Northwestern University, Evanston, USA September 2002 Present Advanced issues in VLSI CAD Research Advisor Prof. Hai Zhou -Development of gate-size optimization algorithms for crosstalk noise reduction with timing constraints under variability in deep sub-micron VLSI circuits Relevant papers – Journal [1], Conference [2, 3, 4]
Pulp delignification with oxygen and copper(II)-polyimine complexes

Abstract Ten Cu(II)-polyimine complexes were tested as potential catalysts in oxygen delignification of softwood kraft pulps. The ligands were chosen from the terpyridine and the phenanthroline families, including several neocuproines. One diamine-phenanthrene (daphen) was also investigated. The main purpose was to examine whether the presence of methyl or phenyl substituents would direct the oxidation toward lignin. As a catalyst for comparison, unsubstituted 1,10-phenanthroline was selected, which is known to activate both delignification and carbohydrate degradation during oxygen bleaching of kraft pulp. The variation of ligands was aiming at the complex solubility and redox potential of the parameters. The experiments were performed on a mixture of mechanical pulp and fully bleached kraft pulps, a fully bleached pulp alone, and an industrial unbleached pulp. Concerning the oxygen activation in delignification of kraft pulp, 4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline was as good as 1,10-phenanthroline, but appeared to be more selective, which resulted in a higher DPv of cellulose after treatment. This was interpreted by the structural similarities between the ligand and the kraft lignin and by a better stability of the intermediate complex with lignin. Two Cu(II)-phenanthroline derivatives complexes (4,7- and 5,6-dimethyl-1,10-phenanthroline) were also identified as effective oxygen activators for the removal of native lignin.
Review on Extraction and Fractionation of Humic Substances from Soils

Extraction and fractionation of different humic substances from soil samples are key processes in the comprehensive study of soil humic substances.This paper carefully reviewed worldwide advance in extraction and fractionation of soil humic substances.Under guidance of the reference method recommended by the International Humic Substance Society(IHSS),this paper discussed the experiment conditions,for example,extractant,dosage,and extracting cycles,and evaluated two fractionation techniques we set up in the experiments.It is suggested that high performance size exclusive chromatography(HPSEC) and ultrafiltration are two of the state-of-art analytical methods in fractionating and characterizing humic substances in natural soils,and that,once being combined,they can provide profound information to better understand the chemical attributes and the molecular structures of soil humic substances.
A contract-based event-driven model for cooperative environments : the case of collaborative security

Assistant Supervisor: Dott.ssa Giorgia Lodi ii iii to my family and my long-time and more recent friends iv Acknowledgements I believe that one's results heavily depend on the context he lives daily. Looking back to my life and to the goals I've accomplished, I consider myself very lucky to have been surrounded by persons that have always given me the required serenity and the right boost to go ahead with my aspirations despite the usual big and small troubles that one has often to face. At this regard, I'd like to thank with all my heart my mother and my father for having supported me in all these years, in spite of the several changes I've made about my future directions. And I can't forget to thank all my friends in Terni and surroundings, from the high school ones to the others that I've met over time, for their loud company and strong understanding. A special thank goes to Roberto Baldoni and Giorgia Lodi for having introduced and guided me through the nice experience of getting involved in a European project and for the help they've given me in the writing of my thesis. I'd like also to thank Stefano, Luca and Silvia for their contribution to my work.
HS-SPME-GC-MS analysis of different Osmanthus fragrans cultivars from Guilin Garden in Shanghai

A headspace solid-phase microextraction(HS-SPME) method was used to extract the essential oil of 8 Osmanthus fragrans cultivars from the 4 groups,which were then analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry(GC-MS) at full flowering stage.In this study,39 volatile compounds were identified in each cultivar of asiaticus group,aurantiacus group and luteus group and 38 volatile compounds were identified in each one of albus group.Nine same components of the essential oil extracted from the 8 cultivars were ocimene,3-carene,cis-linalool oxide,trans-linalool oxide,linalool,nonanal,β-ionone,α-ionone and γ-decalactone.The results suggested that the differences of volatile compounds among O.fragrans cultivars were not obvious.
NEB Monarch HMW DNA Extraction Kit improves sample preparation for Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencing of malaria parasites

Advancements in long-read DNA sequencing by Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and Oxford Nanopore Technologies have led to major breakthroughs in de novo assembly. An advantage of both PacBio and Oxford Nanopore sequencing is that they provide exceptionally long sequence reads, but in order to achieve those, the use of high quality, high molecular weight (HMW) DNA fragments as an input material is required. With many existing genomic DNA (gDNA) extraction kits, this prerequisite for optimal Oxford Nanopore sequencing is not met, resulting in less than ideal read and contig lengths and a greater number of contigs overall, contributing to suboptimal de novo assemblies. These issues have led to a return to classic molecular biology methods (e.g., phenol/chloroform extractions, gel plug extractions (1,2)), and have increased demand for new, streamlined methods of isolating and purifying HMW gDNA.
Diazoxide Mitochondria-Derived Reactive Oxygen Species and Vascular MAP Kinases : Comparison

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are key mediators in signal transduction of angiotensin II (Ang II). However, roles of vascular mitochondria, a major intracellular ROS source, in response to Ang II stimuli have not been elucidated. This study aimed to examine the involvement of mitochondria-derived ROS in the signaling pathway and the vasoconstrictor mechanism of Ang II. Using 5-hydroxydecanoate (5-HD; a specific inhibitor of mitochondrial ATP-sensitive potassium [mitoKATP] channels) and tempol (a superoxide dismutase mimetic), the effects of Ang II and diazoxide (a mitoKATP channel opener) were compared on redox-sensitive mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase activation in rat vascular smooth muscle cells (RVSMCs) in vitro and in rat aorta in vivo. Stimulation of RVSMCs by Ang II or diazoxide increased phosphorylated MAP kinases (ERK1/2, p38, and JNK), as well as superoxide production, which were then suppressed by 5-HD pretreatment in a dose-dependent manner, except for ERK1/2 activation by Ang II. The same events were reproduced in rat aorta in vivo. Ang II-like diazoxide depolarized the mitochondrial membrane potential ( M) of RVSMCs determined by JC-1 fluorescence, which was inhibited by 5-HD. 5-HD did not modulate Ang II–induced calcium mobilization in RVSMCs and did not affect on the vasoconstrictor effect in either acute or chronic phases of Ang II–induced hypertension. These results reveal that Ang II stimulates mitochondrial ROS production through the opening of mitoKATP channels in the vasculature-like diazoxide, leading to reduction of M and redox-sensitive activation of MAP kinase; however, generated ROS from mitochondria do not contribute to Ang II–induced vasoconstriction. (Hypertension. 2005;45:438-444.)
Recreation effects on wildlife: a review of potential quantitative thresholds

Outdoor recreation is increasingly recognised for its deleterious effects on wildlife individuals and populations. However, planners and natural resource managers lack robust scientific recommendations for the design of recreation infrastructure and management of recreation activities. We reviewed 38 years of research on the effect of non-consumptive recreation on wildlife to attempt to identify effect thresholds or the point at which recreation begins to exhibit behavioural or physiological change to wildlife. We found that 53 of 330 articles identified a quantitative threshold. The majority of threshold articles focused on bird or mammal species and measured the distance to people or to a trail. Threshold distances varied substantially within and amongst taxonomic groups. Threshold distances for wading and passerine birds were generally less than 100 m, whereas they were greater than 400 m for hawks and eagles. Mammal threshold distances varied widely from 50 m for small rodents to 1,000 m for large ungulates. We did not find a significant difference between threshold distances of different recreation activity groups, likely based in part on low sample size. There were large gaps in scientific literature regarding several recreation variables and taxonomic groups including amphibians, invertebrates and reptiles. Our findings exhibit the need for studies to measure continuous variables of recreation extent and magnitude, not only to detect effects of recreation on wildlife, but also to identify effect thresholds when and where recreation begins or ceases to affect wildlife. Such considerations in studies of recreation ecology could provide robust scientific recommendations for planners and natural resource managers for the design of recreation infrastructure and management of recreation activities. Nature Conservation 44: 51–68 (2021) doi: 10.3897/natureconservation.44. 63270 https://natureconservation.pensoft. net Copyright Jeremy S. Dertien et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. REVIEW ARTICLE Launched to accelerate biodiversity conservation A peer-reviewed open-access journal