Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cloud detection on satellite imagery using U-Net architecture

Cloud detection holds significant importance when analyzing satellite imagery, notably in the visible domain. A wide variety of detection tools already exists for this type of application, using radiometric information. With the aim of enhancing cloud detection, recent advances in deep learning have made it possible to create tools based on pattern recognition while leveraging radiometric data. This paper aims to present a method focused on machine learning, giving details of its construction process, from the creation of the datasets to overall performance. A sample use case is also presented to demonstrate the promising outcomes obtained. Using over 600,000km2 of ground-labeled satellite imagery and a U-Net based architecture for our machine learning algorithm, we achieved encouraging performances over various land types. Our results showed significant results when evaluated on the three most frequently used metrics for Image Segmentation. Our product gives interesting results in certain areas that present challenging ground types, such as snowy tops, when using Infrared imagery.
Mobility, Notoriety, and Crime: A Study in the Crime Patterns of Urban Nodal Points

Crime has long been known to be spatially patterned at many levels of aggregation. Contemporary explanations of this fact within urban areas assume that it is the result of interactions between the physical distribution of opportunities for crime, transportation flow patterns, and the awareness spaces of potential criminals. Data from a small city in Western Canada are used to conduct a simple test of the plausibility of this theoretical assumption for the crime of commercial burglary. The assumption is generally supported by the data.
Sandstone copper deposits of the Nacimiento region, New Mexico

SUMMARY Copper sulfides and copper-iron sulfides have partly replaced or are closely associated with carbonaceous fossil plant material in sandstones and arkoses ranging in age from Pennsylvanian to Triassic in the Nacimiento region of north-central New Mexico. Primary sulfide minerals, chalcocite, covellite, bornite, chalcopyrite, and pyrite, were probably deposited from ground-water solutions; mineralization occurred where there was a favorable reducing environment provided by fer-mentation of carbonaceous material. Small amounts of native silver occur with the sulfides. The sulfide minerals were partly oxidized later, and copper in the form of malachite, chrysocolla, and azurite was dissem-inated in the adjacent host rock, forming irregular halos around the mineralized fossil plant material. Deposition of the sulfides probably occurred principally during Triassic time. Major faults post-date deposition of the sulfide minerals and can be expected to offset some of the mineralized bodies. Large-scale deposition of the sulfide minerals occurred at fossil logjams within paleochannels. Orientations of cross-bedding and fossil logs can be used to determine the trends of the paleochannels. These trends should be followed in subsur-face exploration.
Calcareous Compacted Mine Soil in Southeast Ohio: A Prairie Grass Habitat

ii Dedication . iv Acknowledgments . v Vita . vi List of Tables. xi List of Figures . xv Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 Chapter 2: Prairie Grass Establishment on Calcareous Reclaimed Mine Soil . 4 Chapter 3: Productivity of Native Prairie Grasses on Reclaimed Calcareous Mine Soil . 44 Chapter 4: Safe-sites Control Warm-season Prairie Grass Establishment on Calcareous Compacted Mine Soil . 70 Chapter 5: Effectivity of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi of Reclaimed Calcareous Surface Mine Soil and Native Tallgrass Prairie Soil on Growth of Prairie Grasses . 87
Cell Cultures as a Versatile Tool in the Research and Treatment of Autoimmune Connective Tissue Diseases

Cell cultures are an important part of the research and treatment of autoimmune connective tissue diseases. By culturing the various cell types involved in ACTDs, researchers are able to broaden the knowledge about these diseases that, in the near future, may lead to finding cures. Fibroblast cultures and chondrocyte cultures allow scientists to study the behavior, physiology and intracellular interactions of these cells. This helps in understanding the underlying mechanisms of ACTDs, including inflammation, immune dysregulation and tissue damage. Through the analysis of gene expression patterns, surface proteins and cytokine profiles in peripheral blood mononuclear cell cultures and endothelial cell cultures researchers can identify potential biomarkers that can help in diagnosing, monitoring disease activity and predicting patient’s response to treatment. Moreover, cell culturing of mesenchymal stem cells and skin modelling in ACTD research and treatment help to evaluate the effects of potential drugs or therapeutics on specific cell types relevant to the disease. Culturing cells in 3D allows us to assess safety, efficacy and the mechanisms of action, thereby aiding in the screening of potential drug candidates and the development of novel therapies. Nowadays, personalized medicine is increasingly mentioned as a future way of dealing with complex diseases such as ACTD. By culturing cells from individual patients and studying patient-specific cells, researchers can gain insights into the unique characteristics of the patient’s disease, identify personalized treatment targets, and develop tailored therapeutic strategies for better outcomes. Cell culturing can help in the evaluation of the effects of these therapies on patient-specific cell populations, as well as in predicting overall treatment response. By analyzing changes in response or behavior of patient-derived cells to a treatment, researchers can assess the response effectiveness to specific therapies, thus enabling more informed treatment decisions. This literature review was created as a form of guidance for researchers and clinicians, and it was written with the use of the NCBI database.
Full Length Research Article GLOBAL CRISIS AND INVESTMENT ACTIVITY IN THE REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN

Reasons and pre - conditions of native change of terms of investment activity are considered in the modern world. System imperfection of existent scientific bases of investment activity is shown in the conditions of global crisis. The analysis of specific terms and basic problems of investment activity is conducted in Republic of Kazakhstan. Imperfection taken approach is shown and their basic defects are reduced . Suggestions are set forth on perfection of strategy and methods of investment activity in Repu blic of Kazakhstan.
Comparison of a Free-Field and a Closed-Field Sound Source Identification Paradigms in Assessing Spatial Acuity in Adults With Normal Hearing Sensitivity

Background and Objectives Traditional sound field localization setups in a free-field environment closely represent real-world situations. However, they are costly and sophisticated, and it is difficult to replicate similar setups in every clinic. Hence, a cost-effective, portable, and less sophisticated virtual setup will be more feasible for assessing spatial acuity in the clinical setting. The virtual auditory space identification (VASI) test was developed to assess spatial acuity using virtual sources in a closed field. The present study compares the legitimacy of these two methods. Subjects and Methods Fifty-five individuals with normal hearing (mean age±SD: 21± 3.26 years) underwent spatial acuity assessment using two paradigms: 1) the sound field paradigm (localization test) and 2) the virtual paradigm (VASI test). Location-specific and overall accuracy scores and error rates were calculated using confusion matrices for each participant in both paradigms. Results The results of Wilcoxon signed-rank tests showed that the locationspecific and overall accuracy scores for both paradigms were not significantly different. Further, both paradigms did not yield significantly different localization error rates like right and left intra-hemifield errors, inter-hemifield errors, and front-back errors. Spearman’s correlation analysis showed that all the measures of the two paradigms had mild to moderate correlation. Conclusions These results demonstrate that both VASI and the sound field paradigm localization test performed equally well in assessing spatial acuity.
Patterns of bladder management and associated factors among community-dwelling persons with spinal cord injury: a latent class analysis

Background People with spinal cord injury are vulnerable to neuropathic lower urinary tract dysfunction. Active bladder management is crucial to manage the neuropathic lower urinary tract dysfunction. Understanding the type of bladder management patterns will assist with targeted intervention for people with spinal cord injury. Thus, this study aimed to identify different patterns of bladder management among community-dwelling persons with spinal cord injury and explore the factors associated with latent classes.
Investigating User Photo Privacy Settings on Instagram

Photo sharing has become increasingly easy with the rise of social media. Social networking sites (SNSs), such as Instagram and Facebook, are well known for their image-sharing capabilities. However, this brings the concern of photo privacy, such as who may see the images of a user who is included in a post. Photo privacy settings offer detailed and more secure ways to share a user’s photos, however, this would require SNS users to understand these settings. To better grasp users’ understanding of photo privacy settings, we conducted a structured interview with Instagram users. We found that users were aware of the majority of the privacy settings asked about and that they accurately perceived their photo privacy safety based on their knowledge of photo privacy settings.
The Cop21 Agreement and Asian Economies

The global agreement on climate change – COP21 – will have immediate consequences upon the large emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG) in Asia. From 2018 there can be no increases of GHG:s and preferable some decreases. The unique global agreement speaks little about the economic consequences, but emissions and GDP are strongly linked through energy consumption. This article shows the situation for major economies in Asia with regard to the connection between GDP and GHG:s. It remains to be seen how the implementation of this global treaty will play out. Whether it has the force of public international law remains to be tested as well as whether all countries will ratify the treaty and abide by it. Several Asian countries have only 2 years to make major changes.
LifeCycle Transparency: Why, and How, Transparency Information Exchange Should be Distributed throughout the Life of Technology Usage

Transparency in automation and AI systems is the ability for the operator to know or see the agent’s working processes to be able to more accurately trust them. The problem is that automation frequently exists to offload an otherwise overly busy human operator. Requiring that operator to process, understand, and evaluate “transparency information” on the automation’s processing in the moment of execution is likely to be too big a task. This panel will explore the need, opportunity, methods and benefits stemming from spreading the transfer of “transparency information exchange” throughout the lifecycle of human–autonomy interaction, thereby taking advantage of best practices in training, pre-mission planning, explanation, and post-mission debriefing, after action reviews and even learning and initial design across organizational stakeholders to reduce the need and resources required to transfer transparency information “in the moment” in frequently high tempo periods of execution.
DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF DOXORUBICIN ANCHORED PLGA NANOPARTICLES AGAINST BREAST CANCER

The objective of this work was to design and develop Poly (D, L-Lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) nanoparticles (NPs) of Doxorubicin for the effective treatment of breast cancer. The nanoparticles (NPs) were optimized by applying a Box-Behnken design (BBD) using Design-Expert® Software and prepared using the double emulsification and precipitation method. Three independent factors such as PLGA 50:50 (A), PVA (B), stirring speed (C) were considered. Three dependent responses included entrapment efficiency (Response 1), particle size (Response 2) and Doxorubicin release at 10th hour (Response 3). ATR and DSC studies indicated compatibility between the drug and polymer. The morphological studies performed by SEM showed uniform and spherical shaped discrete particles with smooth surface and in a size range of 282.6 nm. X-ray diffraction was performed to confirm the crystalline nature of the drug after encapsulation. The NPs exhibited a zeta potential of 21.6 mV. In vitro release studies showed a drug release up to 10 hrs. The release kinetics study indicated first order kinetics while the release mechanism followed Higuchi model. The cell viability was found to be more than 80% after incubation with the DOX NPs for 24 h up to a concentration of 80 μg/ml. The DOX NPs treated MCF-7 displayed intrinsic cell damage and cell shrinkage as compared to the control group. It may be concluded from the present investigation that PLGA NPs bearing doxorubicin can effectively treat the breast cancer
Liquid Biopsy as a Method for Minimally Invasive Diagnosis of Thyroid Cancer

Thyroid cancer is the 9th most common cancer in the world. The five-year survival rate for this disease is over 98%. However, in some patients there are cases of rapidly progressive treatment-resistant cancer that cannot be differed from poor-invasive cancer by routine methods. Liquid biopsy could be one of the methods to solve this problem. This procedure consists in the analysis of tumor derivatives (in particular, circulating DNA) in body fluids. The analysis of hotspot mutations and patterns of epigenetic regulation, which are usual for neoplasms with a certain genotype, is used to identify the tumor component in the total mass of circulating DNA. The increase of circulating tumor DNA in the plasma is observed several months ahead of the characteristic signs at MR images of patients, and also surpasses conventional biomarkers such as calcitonin in medullary thyroid carcinoma. In addition, a possibility of minimally invasive determination of the tumor genotype by analyzing circulating DNA is important to select the optimal chemotherapy. This review discusses the current advances in the analysis of circulating tumor DNA in thyroid cancers such as papillary, follicular, medullary, and anaplastic carcinomas.
Azimuth sidelobe suppression technique for near-field MIMO radar imaging

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is getting more and more applications over the last decade. In near field imaging using a linear MIMO array, the azimuth sampling is non-uniform, resulting in spatially variant point spread function (PSF) over a large imaging zone. In this work, an azimuth sidelobe suppression technique is proposed where apodization or complex amplitude weighting is applied to the multiple channel data prior to image reconstruction. For best sidelobe suppression, the optimal channel weights wopt are obtained through mathematical optimization. The overall process mainly includes three steps. Firstly, the expression of PSF in azimuth is acquired by the azimuth focusing process; Secondly, based on the fact that, for an ideal PSF the maximum value of the mainlobe should be one and the values of sidelobes should be zeros, the problem of finding wopt is mathematically fomulated as an optimization problem; Lastly, by setting proper mainlobe width and sidelobe level, the optimal weights can be solved through convex optimization algorithm. Simulations of a MIMO radar system where channel amplitude-phase error and antenna elements position deviation exist are presented and the performance of the proposed technique is studied.
Real-Time Pattern Synthesis for Large-Scale Conformal Arrays Based on Interpolation and Artificial Neural Network Method

Real-time pattern synthesis for large-scale conformal arrays has long been a challenging task. Two efficient methods for large-scale conformal arrays pattern synthesis in a real-time way are, respectively, proposed in this article, including the cubic spline interpolation (CSI)-based method and generalized regression neural network (GRNN)-based method. The purpose of the synthesis is to find a set of amplitude excitations that yields a pattern to maximize directivity at a given scanning angle with desired low sidelobe level (SLL). The synthesis problem is first transformed into a convex problem (CVX), and then, the solution to the problem is obtained by convex optimization algorithm to generate sample dataset. The CSI-based method sets the data in the sample set as interpolation points to construct interpolation functions, while the GRNN-based method uses the input–output pairs in the sample dataset to train the model offline, learning the laws of the problem. Then, the desired amplitude excitations can be potentially obtained in a real-time way, either by the well-constructed interpolation function or the well-trained GRNN model. Finally, the representative numerical validations of a 514-element conformal array are presented to assess the effectiveness of the proposed two methods. Comparison with other advanced methods in open literatures is also provided.
Regularity of cervical cancer screening in Korea: analysis using national public data for 12 years

Objective To assess the frequency of regular uptake of national cervical cancer screening (CCS) program and identify associated factors among Korean women. Methods This study is a fundamental investigation that employs openly accessible public data of Korea through secondary data analysis. A cohort of 4,663 women from the 2007–2012 Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, was followed up for up to 12 years (2007–2018) to obtain the frequency of national CCS. Compliance level with CCS was categorized, and an ordinal logistic regression model was employed to investigate the contributing factors. Results The regular uptake of CCS in South Korea was low at 18.9%. The trend of regular screening showed significant association with various factors, including age (40–59 years), household income (100%–150% bracket), occupation (service workers), place of residence (small to medium sized cities), education level (middle school graduates), marital status (married), and possession of private insurance. Moreover, individuals with a history of non-cervical cancer or carcinoma in situ of the cervix, a family history of cervical cancer, or a higher frequency of general check-ups demonstrated a stronger adherence to regular CCS uptake. Conclusion Our findings revealed that regular participation in CCS in Korea was lower than anticipated, with factors such as socioeconomic status, personal history of gynecologic issue, and frequency of general health check-ups playing influential roles. However, further research, including an exploration of unexamined psychological barriers to screening, is necessary to gain a better understanding the reasons behind the reduced rates of regular CCS among Korean women.
Determination of double-K fracture parameters of concrete using split-tension cubes

Comparing to three point beams and wedge-splitting specimens, the centre-notched split-tension cubes have the advantages of compactness, lightness and easy operation and the influence of self weight can be ignored. In this paper, the centre-notched split-tension cubes are used to carry out fracture tests. The tested parameters are three different ratios of initial notch length-depth (α0=0.1、0.3、0.5) and four different relative widths of compression load-distribution (β=0.05、0.10、0.15、0.20). Also, the double-K fracture toughness, initial fracture toughness and unstable fracture toughness are calculated. Results show that the ratio of initial load to maximum load and the ratio of initial fracture toughness to unstable fracture toughness are in the same range when the specimens have the same α0. Subsequently, it can be observed when the relative width of the load-distribution increases, the double-K fracture toughness have a trend of liner increasing, and the increasing in unstable fracture toughness is larger than initial fracture toughness. Moreover, the results also indicate that the measured unstable fracture toughness are independent of initial crack length, while the measured initial fracture toughness decrease as the increasing in initial crack length.
Insights into vibrational and electronic properties of (6,6)-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) chemical bonding with (CuO)n clusters: a DFT study

Density functional theory (DFT) was used to study the electronic and vibrational properties of the chemical bond between the [6,6]-phenyl-C61-Butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) and (CuO)n clusters. After chemical adsorption, the HOMO orbitals of PCBM primarily shifted towards (CuO)n, leading to a noticeable reduction in the band gap. Similarly, the bond established is responsible for the spatial redistribution of boundary orbitals, mainly towards the clusters. In addition, the orbital analysis revealed that the primary contributions to the chemical bond originated from the Cu atoms. The PCBM Raman intensity shows a meaningful enhancement consequence of the chemical bond established with the clusters. In addition, new normal modes of PCBM are observed in the Raman activity spectrum after the chemical adsorption.
Sufentanil Sublingual Tablet System vs. Intravenous Patient-Controlled Analgesia with Morphine: Postoperative Pain Control and Its Impact in Quality of Recovery

Context: Patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) is commonly used for postoperative pain control. Although widely used, intravenous (IV) morphine PCA may not be suitable for all patients. Sufentanil sublingual tablet system (SSTS) PCA is a recent technique that has had success as a safe and effective alternative for acute pain management. Aims: This study aims to compare both the efficacy and safety of SSTS PCA versus IV morphine PCA in postoperative pain control and the quality of recovery in adult patients following scheduled gynecological or orthopedic surgery. Settings and design: Open-label, parallel-group, randomized controlled trial with 54 patients. The primary outcome was postoperative pain control, while the secondary outcomes included adverse effects associated with two analgesic modalities, total opioid dose required, patient satisfaction, and impact on the quality of postoperative recovery. Methods and material: Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 26.0 (Released 2019; IBM Corp., Armonk, New York, United States). The chi-squared test was used in categorical variables. When distribution was normal, T-student (mean ± standard deviation) was used in continuous variables. In contrast, when distribution was not normal, the Mann-Whitney test (median (minimal-maximal)) was used. Results: The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the total dose of opioid used by patients at 24 hours postoperatively, with patients receiving SSTS PCA requiring a higher total dose when compared to those receiving IV morphine PCA. However, there were no statistically significant differences in pain scores, adverse events, or patient satisfaction. Conclusions: The study suggests that both IV morphine and sublingual sufentanil are safe and effective for postoperative pain management.