Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Institutional economic integration in East Asia: Evolution, assessment, and prospects

The processes of regional economic integration are one of the most important trends in the contemporary world economy. In the area of East Asia, these kind of activities are also present, but they are essentially bottom-up in nature, based on spontaneously developing economic ties. However, there are also initiatives which increasingly involve East Asian countries at the institutional level. The aim of the article is to present the evolution of East Asian regionalism, evaluate it and indicate the prospects for its development. The author concludes that contemporary East Asian countries are engaged in the development of the process of regionalism, which shows characteristics that distinguish it from the initiatives undertaken in other geographical areas. The author underlines the key importance of China in this process – its involvement will influence the further development of East Asian regionalism. The research methods used in the paper included mainly a critical review of the literature, descriptive method and, to a limited extent, method of statistical analysis.
Fused Bithiophene Imide Dimer-Based n-Type Polymers for High-Performance Organic Electrochemical Transistors.

The development of n-type organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) lags far behind their p-type counterparts. In order to address this dilemma, we report here two new fused bithiophene imide dimer (f-BTI2)-based n-type polymers with a branched methyl end-capped glycol side chain, which exhibit good solubility, low-lying LUMO energy levels, favorable polymer chain orientation, and efficient ion transport property, thus yielding a remarkable OECT electron mobility (µe) of up to ~10-2 cm2 V-1 s-1 and volumetric capacitance (C*) as high as 443 F cm-3, simultaneously. As a result, the f-BTI2TEG-FT-based OECTs deliver a record-high maximum geometry-normalized transconductance of 4.60 S cm-1 and a maximum µC* product of 15.2 F cm-1 V-1 s-1. The µC* figure of merit is more than one order of magnitude higher than that of the state-of-the-art n-type OECTs. The emergence of f-BTI2TEG-FT brings a new paradigm for developing high-performance n-type polymers for low-power OECT applications.
Model-Based Deep Learning: Key Approaches and Design Guidelines

Signal processing, communications, and control have traditionally relied on classical statistical modeling techniques. Such model-based methods tend to be sensitive to inaccuracies and may lead to poor performance when real systems display complex or dynamic behavior. On the other hand, purely data-driven approaches are becoming increasingly popular. Deep neural networks (DNNs) employ a highly flexible function class to learn mappings from data, and demonstrate excellent performance. However, DNNs typically require massive amounts of data and immense computational resources, limiting their applicability for some signal processing scenarios. We consider hybrid techniques that combine principled mathematical models with data-driven systems to benefit from the advantages of both approaches. Such model-based deep learning methods exploit both partial domain knowledge, via mathematical structures designed for specific problems, as well as learning from limited data. Here, we survey leading approaches for studying and designing model-based deep learning systems, along with concrete design guidelines and signal processing oriented examples.
Trends in Meeting the Aerobic Physical Activity Guideline Among Adults With and Without Select Chronic Health Conditions, United States, 1998-2018.

BACKGROUND Physical activity is central to the management and control of many chronic health conditions. The authors examined trends during the past 2 decades in the prevalence of US adults with and without select chronic health conditions who met the minimal aerobic physical activity guideline. METHODS The 1998-2018 National Health Interview Survey data were analyzed. Prevalence of meeting the minimal aerobic physical activity guideline among adults with and without 6 chronic health conditions was estimated across 3-year intervals. Linear and higher-order trends were assessed overall and by age group. RESULTS During the past 2 decades, prevalence of meeting the aerobic guideline increased among adults with diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, and arthritis. However, the absolute increase in prevalence was lower among adults with hypertension, coronary heart disease, and arthritis compared to counterparts without each condition, respectively. Prevalence was persistently lower among those with most chronic health conditions, except cancer, and among older adults compared to their counterparts. CONCLUSIONS Although rising trends in physical activity levels among adults with chronic health conditions are encouraging for improving chronic disease management, current prevalence remains low, particularly among older adults. Increasing physical activity should remain a priority for chronic disease management and control.
Inhibiting Focal Adhesion Kinase Ameliorates Cyst Development in Polycystin-1–Deficient Polycystic Kidney Disease in Animal Model

Visual Abstract Significance Statement Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) has been widely studied and shown to have a crucial effect on tumor progression. Although autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) shares numerous commonalities with tumors, it is undetermined whether FAK is involved in cyst development. Our study demonstrates that inhibiting FAK activity using small molecule FAK inhibitor VS-4718 ameliorates ADPKD progression and improves renal function. Inhibiting FAK and its downstream Src signaling suppresses cAMP-mediated aberrant proliferation of cystic epithelial cells in ADPKD animals. This study highlights the therapeutic potential of small molecule FAK inhibitors in treating patients with ADPKD. Background Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is characterized by numerous cysts originating from renal tubules and is associated with significant tubular epithelial cell proliferation. Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) promotes tumor growth by regulating multiple proliferative pathways. Methods We established the forskolin (FSK)-induced three-dimensional (3D) Madin–Darby Canine Kidney cystogenesis model and 8-bromoadenosine-3`,5`-cyclic monophosphate–stimulated cyst formation in ex vivo embryonic kidney culture. Cultured human renal cyst–lining cells (OX-161) and normal tubular epithelial cells were treated with FAK inhibitors or transfected with green fluorescent protein–tagged FAK mutant plasmids for proliferation study. Furthermore, we examined the role of FAK in two transgenic ADPKD animal models, the kidney-specific Pkd1 knockout and the collecting duct–specific Pkd1 knockout mouse models. Results FAK activity was significantly elevated in OX-161 cells and in two ADPKD mouse models. Inhibiting FAK activity reduced cell proliferation in OX-161 cells and prevented cyst growth in ex vivo and 3D cyst models. In tissue-specific Pkd1 knockout mouse models, FAK inhibitors retarded cyst development and mitigated renal function decline. Mechanically, FSK stimulated FAK activation in tubular epithelial cells, which was blocked by a protein kinase A (PKA) inhibitor. Inhibition of FAK activation by inhibitors or transfected cells with mutant FAK constructs interrupted FSK-mediated Src activation and upregulation of ERK and mTOR pathways. Conclusions Our study demonstrates the critical involvement of FAK in renal cyst development, suggests that FAK is a potential therapeutic target in treating patients with ADPKD, and highlights the role of FAK in cAMP-PKA–regulated proliferation.
Exposure to Sleep, Rest, or Exercise Impacts Skill Memory Consolidation but so Too Can a Challenging Practice Schedule

Abstract When discussing procedural learning, it is now routine to consider both online and offline influences for skill acquisition. This is because it is commonly assumed that the evolution of a novel skill memory continues well after practice is over. Indeed, factors impacting offline contributions to skill memory development such as sleep and exercise have garnered considerable research interest in recent years. This is partly because of their capacity to foster postpractice consolidation, a process that has been identified as critical to moving a skill memory from a labile to more stable or elaborate form. While uncovering the potency of non-practice factors to facilitate consolidation is undoubtedly important, the present opinion is designed to remind the reader that a practice schedule, organized to challenge the learner, can, in and of itself, be effective in supporting consolidation resulting in significant gains in long-term skill retention.
Perturbation graphs, invariant prediction and causal relations in psychology

Networks (graphs) in psychology are often restricted to settings without interventions. Here we consider a framework borrowed from biology that involves multiple interventions from different contexts (observations and experiments) in a single analysis. The method is called perturbation graphs. In gene regulatory networks, the induced change in one gene is measured on all other genes in the analysis, thereby assessing possible causal relations. This is repeated for each gene in the analysis. A perturbation graph leads to the correct set of causes (not necessarily direct causes). Subsequent pruning of paths in the graph (called transitive reduction) should reveal direct causes. We show that transitive reduction will not in general lead to the correct underlying graph. There is however a close relation with another method, called invariant causal prediction. Invariant causal prediction can be considered as a generalisation of the perturbation graph method where including additional variables (and so conditioning on those variables) does reveal direct causes, and thereby replacing transitive reduction. We explain the basic ideas of perturbation graphs, transitive reduction and invariant causal prediction and investigate their connections. We conclude that perturbation graphs provide a promising new tool for experimental designs in psychology, and combined with invariant prediction make it possible to reveal direct causes instead of causal paths. As an illustration we apply the perturbation graphs and invariant causal prediction to a data set about attitudes on meat consumption.
Beartooth Relay Protocol: Supporting Real-Time Application Streams with Dynamically Allocated Data Reservations over LoRa

Convenient solutions that cater to different types of applications always gather more users. LoRa, one of the solutions in the IoT space is quite flexible at the physical layer, but link layer LoRa protocols lack similar flexibility. As a result, their performance remains suitable for the exchange of short messages in sensor networks, but does not extend to real-time and streaming IoT applications. Beartooth Relay Protocol (BRP) aims to address these limitations with a configurable link layer solution without compromising performance to sustain real-time flows over LoRa. We demonstrate that BRP expands the performance envelope of LoRa and makes it a suitable PHY technology for a wide range of IoT applications.
Spectrum-based feature localization: a case study using ArgoUML

Feature localization (FL) is a basic activity in re-engineering legacy systems into software product lines. In this work, we explore the use of the Spectrum-based localization technique for this task. This technique is traditionally used for fault localization but with practical applications in other tasks like the dynamic FL approach that we propose. The ArgoUML SPL benchmark is used as a case study and we compare it with a previous hybrid (static and dynamic) approach from which we reuse the manual and testing execution traces of the features. We conclude that it is feasible and sound to use the Spectrum-based approach providing promising results in the benchmark metrics.
Meeting Patient Expectations or Achieving a Minimum Clinically Important Difference: Predictors of Satisfaction among Lumbar Fusion Patients

Study Design Retrospective cohort. Purpose To investigate the impact of meeting a patient’s preoperative expectations for back or leg pain or the achievement of minimum clinically important difference (MCID) on patient satisfaction following lumbar fusion. Overview of Literature Few studies have compared if MCID achievement or meeting preoperative expectations for pain reduction affects patient satisfaction. Methods A surgical database was reviewed for eligible patients who underwent lumbar fusion. Patient satisfaction and Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for back and leg pain were the outcomes of interest. Meeting expectations was calculated as a difference of ≤0 between preoperative expectations and postoperative VAS scores. MCID achievement was calculated by comparing changes in VAS scores with established values. Meeting preoperative expectations or MCID achievement as predictors of patient satisfaction was evaluated using regression analysis. Results A total of 134 patients were included in this study. Patients demonstrated significant improvements in VAS back and VAS leg (p<0.001). At 1 year, 56.4% of patients had their VAS back expectations met compared with 59.5% for VAS leg. Similarly, at 1 year, 77.3% and 71.3% of patients achieved MCID for VAS back and leg, respectively. Meeting expectations for VAS back was significantly associated with patient satisfaction at all postoperative timepoints; however, MCID achievement only demonstrated a significant association with patient satisfaction at 6 and 12 weeks (all, p≤0.024). Meeting VAS leg expectations and MCID achievement both demonstrated a significant association with patient satisfaction at all postoperative timepoints (all, p≤0.02). No differences between MCID achievement and meeting expectations as predictors of satisfaction were noted. Conclusions The majority of patients achieved MCID and had their back and leg pain expectations met by 1 year. Both measures were significant predictors of patient satisfaction and suggest that MCID achievement may act as a suitable substitute for patient satisfaction.
Multi-Attention Audio-Visual Fusion Network for Audio Spatialization

In our daily life, we are exposed to a large number of video files. Compared with video containing only mono audio, video with stereo can provide us with better audio-visual experience. However, a large number of ordinary users do not have professional equipment to record videos with high-quality stereo. In order to make it more convenient for users to obtain videos with stereo, we propose an effective method to convert mono audio in the video into stereo. One of the keys to this task is how to effectively inject visual information extracted from video frames into the audio signal. We design a novel multi-attention fusion network (MAFNet) based on the self-attention mechanism to extract the spatial features related to the sound source in the video frames and fuse them into audio features well. Furthermore, in order to obtain stereo with higher quality, we design an additional iterative structure which can refine and optimize the generated stereo sound by several iterations. Our proposed approach is validated on two challenging video datasets (FAIR-Play and YT-MUSIC), and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles Improve Oral Delivery of Antitubercular Bicyclic Nitroimidazoles

Pretomanid and MCC7433, a novel nitroimidazopyrazinone analog, are promising antitubercular agents that belong to the bicyclic nitroimidazole family. Despite possessing high cell permeability, they suffer from poor aqueous solubility and require specialized formulations in order to be orally bioavailable. To address this limitation, we investigated the use of mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MCM-41) as drug carriers. MCM-41 nanoparticles were synthesized using a sol–gel method, and their surface was further modified with amine and phosphonate groups. A simple rotary evaporation method was used to incorporate the compounds of interest into the nanoparticles, leading to a high encapsulation efficiency of ≥86% with ∼10% loading (w/w). An overall significant improvement of solubility was also observed, and the pharmacological activity of pretomanid and MCC7433 was fully retained when tested in vitro against Mycobacterium tuberculosis using these nanocarriers. Amino-functionalized MCM-41 nanoparticles were found to enhance the systemic exposure of MCC7433 in mice (1.3-fold higher Cmax) compared to MCC7433 alone. The current work highlights the potential of using nanoparticles such as mesoporous silica as a carrier for oral delivery of poorly soluble antibacterial agents against tuberculosis.
Design and optimization of modular multilevel DC transformer

Modern science and technology are developing rapidly, the power industry is also developing at a high speed, the traditional transformer is more and more difficult to content the requirement of the power system. Power electronic transformer (PET) is a kind of composite installation composed of power electronic converter and high frequency transformer. It can realize voltage conversion, electrical isolation and energy transmission functions of traditional transformer, and can also control voltage and current in power system and intelligent management. It is the best choice to realize voltage transformation function in modern power system. Compared with the traditional power electronic transformer, a power electronic transformer with lower device failure loss and better output waveform is proposed, the modular multilevel converter (MMC), which has a highly modular architecture. This essay revolves about the new type of MMC based power electronic transformer in the medium voltage distribution network, which adopts a three stage topology made up of the high voltage input stage, the intermediate isolation stage and the low voltage output stage. The input stage uses the MMC structure, the isolation stage is composed of several input series output parallel (ISOP) double active bridge DC/DC converters, and the output stage uses the traditional three-phase four leg inverter topology. This paper introduces the development process and the development direction of the power electronic transformer in recent years, analyzes and discusses the principle of three parts of power electronic transformer, and expounds the expected experimental results at the end of the paper.
A Novel Compact Uwb Monopole Antenna With Reconfigurable Dual Band-Notch Characteristics For Wimax And Wifi 6e Bands

A compact ultra-wideband (UWB) monopole antenna with reconfigurable dual band-notch characteristics is exhibited in this paper. It is consisting of a reshaped rectangular patch with a partial ground plane including a rectangular slot. The dual band-notch property at WiMAX [3.3-3.6] GHz and WIFI 6E [5.925-7.125] GHz bands, are achieved by associating three open-ended slots on the radiating patch. for the purpose of achieving the reconfigurable dual band-notch performance, three metallic switches are inserted in the open-ended slots. Switching on or off the metallic strips enable or disable the bands notched and thus the reconfigurability is introduced. The antenna has a tiny size of 16*20mm. The simulated results indicate that the proposed antenna can provide a UWB mode ranging from [3-17.7] GHz, two single band-notch modes, and a dual band-notch mode. The software that was used for this simulation is the CST Microwave Studio (CST MWS). The antenna's current distribution and gain characteristics are also reviewed.
Quality of service and commitment to tobacco dependence treatment for individuals living with mental disorders in France: A pilot study

Background: There are remarkably high smoking rates in patients living with mental disorders (PLWMD), and the absence of a specific treatment policy for smoking cessation for these patients worldwide. The present study aimed to (i) investigate the quality of service and commitment to tobacco dependence treatment, and (ii) produce high-quality French versions of the Index of Tobacco Treatment Quality (ITTQ) and Tobacco Treatment Commitment Scale (TTCS). Methods: ITTQ and TTCS were used to assess French mental health professionals (n = 80). Both scales were translated from their original language following standard procedures (i.e. forward translation). Descriptive analysis for total score, each factor and item were calculated for the entire sample, followed by subgroup analysis by gender, and role of the practitioner. Results: Nurses presented higher levels of both treatment commitment and treatment quality in their mental health care units, compared to psychiatrists, and residents. Overall, counseling offering was low and there was a perception that it is unfair to take tobacco away from PLWMD. In the other hand, there were high levels of smoking assessment and perceptions that nicotine dependence should be included in drug treatment programs. Conclusions: There is a gap in tobacco treatment implementation for French PLWMD. The present pilot study alerts about the problem, and should stimulate larger studies validating such measures for wide use with French-speaking mental health professionals. French nurses presented higher levels of both treatment commitment and quality, and could be in a leadership position for such implementation. Encouraging the implementation of tobacco counseling within conventional mental health treatment is critical to improve cessation rates among this population. There is a potential for the sustainability of tobacco treatment interventions since the levels of commitment observed here were higher than in previous studies conducted abroad.
Prognostic significance of viable tumor size measurement in hepatocellular carcinomas after preoperative locoregional treatment

Background Preoperative locoregional treatment (LRT) for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) often induces intratumoral necrosis without affecting the overall tumor size, and residual viable tumor size (VTS) on imaging is an important clinical parameter for assessing post-treatment response. However, for surgical specimens, it is unclear whether the VTS would be more relevant to prognosis compared to total tumor size (TTS). Methods A total of 142 surgically resected solitary HCC cases were retrospectively reviewed. The TTS and VTS were assessed by applying the modified Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors method to the resected specimens, and correlated with the clinicopathological features and survival. Results As applying VTS, 13/142 cases (9.2%) were down-staged to ypT1a. Although the survival analysis results for overall survival according to TTS or VTS were similar, VTS was superior to predict disease-free survival (DFS; p = .023) compared to TTS (p = .08). In addition, multivariate analysis demonstrated VTS > 2 cm to be an independent predictive factor for decreased DFS (p = .001). In the subpopulation of patients with LRT (n = 54), DFS in HCCs with TTS or VTS > 2 cm were significantly shorter than those with TTS or VTS ≤ 2 cm (p = .047 and p = .001, respectively). Interestingly, HCCs with TTS > 2 cm but down-staged to VTS ≤ 2 cm after preoperative LRT had similar survival to those with TTS ≤ 2 cm. Conclusions Although the prognostic impact of tumor size was similar regardless of whether TTS or VTS was applied, reporting VTS may help to increase the number of candidates for surgery in HCC patients with preoperative LRT.