The aim of this research is the evaluation and selection of suppliers by applying the fuzzy multi-criteria analysis. The study used fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to choose the optimal supplier for the purchase of materials necessary for the production of pre-insulated pipes. Decision-makers selected among five suppliers based on nine criteria: material cost, pipe length, delivery time, type of payment, transport distance, quality, reliability, flexibility and relationship with customers. Effective execution of procurement, in this case, the procurement of material needed for the production logistics subsystem, influences the overall efficiency of the business. It is vital to make the right decision when selecting a supplier, because the optimal choice ensures lower cost and higher quality of the product itself, and therefore more competitiveness in the market.

Ciliates are globally distributed eukaryotic organisms inhabiting virtually all environments on Earth. Although ciliates range from 10 µm to few mm in cell size, they are repeatedly reported in the pico-sized fraction (smaller than 2-3 µm) of molecular surveys. Here, we used existing datasets (BioMarKs and Tara Oceans) with different size fractions to demonstrate that the ciliate pico-sized signal, likely derived from cell breakage during filtration, is informative and reliable to study marine ciliate biodiversity and biogeography. Then, we used sequences from the picoeukaryotic fraction of two circumnavigation expeditions, Malaspina-2010 and Tara Oceans, to give insights into the taxonomic composition and horizontal and vertical distribution of ciliates in the global ocean. Results suggested a high homogeneity of ciliate communities along the ocean surface from temperate to tropical waters, with ciliate assemblages dominated by a few abundant and widely distributed taxa. Very few taxa were found in a single oceanic region, therefore suggesting a high level of ciliate cosmopolitanism in the global ocean. In vertical profiles, ciliates were detected up to 4000 m depth, and a clear vertical community structuring was observed. Our results provided evidence supporting ciliates as deeply integrated organisms in the deep-sea trophic web, where they may play a relevant role as symbionts of metazoans and grazers of prokaryotes and small eukaryotes in the water column and in aggregates.

ABSTRACT A closer look at the recent Malaysian judicial decisions in Islamic finance cases shows that the power of the courts to adjudicate Islamic finance disputes has been diminished. The main cause of this seems to be the enactment of sections 56 and 57 of the Central Bank of Malaysia Act 2009, which mandated the courts to not only delegate the ascertainment of Shari’ah issues pertaining to Islamic finance to the designated Shari’ah Advisory Council (SAC), but also to accept and apply its rulings. This article examines the constitutionality of both sections with special reference to the recent decision in JRI Resources Sdn Bhd v Kuwait Finance House (Malaysia) Bhd [2019] 5 CLJ 569, in which the Federal Court upheld their validity by a slim majority of 5 to 4. The article offers alternatives that are both constitutional and receptive to the SAC’s role in the resolution of Islamic finance disputes.

Cell-to-cell communication is a fundamental process in every multicellular organism. In addition to membrane-bound and released factors, the sharing of cytosolic components represents a new, poorly explored signaling route. An extraordinary example of this communication channel is the direct transport of mitochondria between cells. In this review, we discuss how intercellular mitochondrial transfer can be used by cancer cells to sustain their high metabolic requirements and promote drug resistance and describe relevant molecular players in the context of current and future cancer therapy.

Abstract Just recently, the literature has established the existence of a dark side with regard to customer orientation (CO) in terms of sales performance. However, no clear position is presented about the possible dark side of CO when it comes to B2B relational outcomes, preventing managers from knowing when to accentuate/suppress CO activities. The aim of this study is to examine the relational consequences of suppliers' CO seen through the customers' lenses, and to investigate the moderating role of perceived emotional value in a professional service relationship context. A conceptual model anchored in value and relationship marketing theories is tested on a sample of 226 professional service firms' business customers, using the PROCESS routine. The study finds that perceived CO is related to satisfaction with the relationship and with relationship performance in an inverted U-shaped form, while satisfaction is positively related to relationship performance. We show that, although preferring to receive CO from their supplier, customers might want a relationship that is not as intense/comprehensive as the one that the supplier aims to achieve. The study unfolds emotional value as a moderating mechanism that can prevent the diminishing effect of CO activities.

The predictive factors of violence between married couples or adolescents are well-known. However, less is known about the factors relating to intimate violence among college students. This study examined sociodemographic variables (age, duration of relationship, and relationship satisfaction), impulsivity, and empathy as predictors of dating violence, using data from 474 female college students from the University of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The sample completed online the Conflict Tactics Scale 2 Short Form, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, and the Short Impulsive Behavior Scale. The results indicated a higher prevalence of victimization than perpetration for psychological aggression. The obtained data showed that younger women and those in longer relationships, as well as those unsatisfied with their relationship, are more prone to experience psychological victimization or perpetration. Relationship satisfaction was also shown to be a predictor of physical perpetration causing injury. Impulsivity facets were found to have a differential weight in explaining dating violence. Empathy was shown to be a significant predictor of dating victimization, specifically “perspective taking” for psychological victimization and empathic concern for sexual victimization. These results suggest the need to develop specific interventions and prevention programs focused on relationship satisfaction, impulsivity, and empathy.

OBJECTIVE Sensing the effects of alcohol consumption in real time could offer numerous opportunities to reduce related harms. This study sought to explore accuracy of gait-related features measured by smartphone accelerometer sensors on detecting alcohol intoxication (breath alcohol concentration [BrAC] > .08%). METHOD In a controlled laboratory study, participants (N = 17; 12 male) were asked to walk 10 steps in a straight line, turn, and walk 10 steps back before drinking and each hour, for up to 7 hours after drinking a weight-based dose of alcohol to reach a BrAC of .20%. Smartphones were placed on the lumbar region and 3-axis accelerometer data was recorded at a rate of 100 Hz. Accelerometer data were segmented into task segments (i.e., walk forward, walk backward). Features were generated for each overlapping 1-second windows, and the data set was split into training and testing data sets. Logistic regression models were used to estimate accuracy for classifying BrAC ≤ .08% from BrAC > .08% for each subject. RESULTS Across participants, BrAC > .08% was predicted with a mean accuracy of 92.5% using logistic regression, an improvement from a naive model accuracy of 88.2% (mean sensitivity = .89; specificity = .92; positive predictive value = .77; and negative predictive value = .97). The two most informative accelerometer features were mean signal amplitude and variance of the signal in the x-axis (i.e., gait sway). CONCLUSIONS We found preliminary evidence supporting use of gait-related features measured by smartphone accelerometer sensors to detect alcohol intoxication. Future research should determine whether these findings replicate in situ.

Tracking a liquid or food bolus in videofluoroscopic images during X-ray based diagnostic swallowing examinations is a dominant clinical approach to assess human swallowing function during oral, pharyngeal and esophageal stages of swallowing. This tracking represents a highly challenging problem for clinicians as swallowing is a rapid action. Therefore, we developed a computer-aided method to automate bolus detection and tracking in order to alleviate issues associated with human factors. Specifically, we applied a stateof-the-art deep learning model called Mask-RCNN to detect and segment the bolus in videofluoroscopic image sequences. We trained the algorithm with 450 swallow videos and evaluated with an independent dataset of 50 videos. The algorithm was able to detect and segment the bolus with a mean average precision of 0.49 and an intersection of union of 0.71. The proposed method indicated robust detection results that can help to improve the speed and accuracy of a clinical decisionmaking process.

In this study we investigated whether combining external visualizations with extreme case reasoning may facilitate developing of conceptual understanding about wave optics. For purposes of answering our research question we conducted a pretest-posttest quasi-experiment which included 179 students from a first year introductory physics course at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Students who were guided through extreme case reasoning in their wave optics seminars significantly outperformed their peers who received conventional teaching treatment. Findings from our study suggest that combining external visualizations with extreme case reasoning facilitates development of visually rich internal representations which are a good basis for performing mental simulations about wave optics phenomena. In addition, it has been also found that many students use the “ closer to the source implicates greater effect ” p-prim when reasoning about certain relationships, such as the relationship between fringes’ dimension and slits-screen separation.

The aim of the study is to present a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based system for the automatic segmentation of the colorectal cancer. The algorithm implemented consists of several steps: a pre-processing to normalize and highlights the tumoral area, the classification based on CNNs, and a post-processing aimed at reducing false positive elements. The classification is performed using three CNNs: each of them classifies the same regions of interest acquired from three different MR sequences. The final segmentation mask is obtained by a majority voting. Performances were evaluated using a semi-automatic segmentation revised by an experienced radiologist as reference standard. The system obtained Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.60, Precision (Pr) of 0.76 and Recall (Re) of 0.55 on the testing set. After applying the leave-one-out validation, we obtained a median DSC=0.58, Pr=0.74, Re=0.54. The promising results obtained by this system, if validated on a larger dataset, could strongly improve personalized medicine.

Liver metastases (mts) from colorectal cancer (CRC) can have different responses to chemotherapy in the same patient. The aim of this study is to develop and validate a machine learning algorithm to predict response of individual liver mts. 22 radiomic features (RF) were computed on pretreatment portal CT scans following a manual segmentation of mts. RFs were extracted from 7x7 Region of Interests (ROIs) that moved across the image by step of 2 pixels. Liver mts were classified as non-responder (R-) if their largest diameter increased more than 3 mm after 3 months of treatment and responder (R+), otherwise. Features selection (FS) was performed by a genetic algorithm and classification by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Sensitivity, specificity, negative (NPV) and positive (PPV) predictive values were evaluated for all lesions in the training and validation sets, separately. On the training set, we obtained sensitivity of 86%, specificity of 67%, PPV of 89% and NPV of 61%, while, on the validation set, we reached a sensitivity of 73%, specificity of 47%, PPV of 64% and NPV of 57%. Specificity was biased by the low number of R- lesions on the validation set. The promising results obtained in the validation dataset should be extended to a larger cohort of patient to further validate our method.Clinical Relevance— to personalize treatment of patients with metastastic colorectal cancer, based on the likelihood of response to chemotherapy of each liver metastasis.

Abstract In this article, we describe the Cayley graphs of pseudo-unitary homogeneous semigroups with zero 0, which are 0-disjoint unions of their subsets indexed by a groupoid.

Hercegovački pršut as a traditional dry-cured smoked ham (prosciutto) produced by using an open fire that can be potentially contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and can pose a health risk for consumers. The aim of this research was to identify the types and concentrations of 16 PAHs in 34 samples of traditionally smoked prosciutto. Out of 16 investigated PAHs, identified in the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) list of priority pollutants, 14 compounds were detected. Average levels of cancerogenic benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) and PAH4 (benzo[a]anthracene (BaA), benzo[b]fluoranthene (BbF), chrysene (Chry), and benzo[a]pyrene (BaP)) ranged from <LOQ (level of quantification) to 5.08 μg/kg and 0.45 μg/kg to 22.67 μg/kg. Two analyzed samples exceeded currently prescribed values according to the Bosnia and Herzegovina legislation for BaP concentrations and one sample for PAH4 content. PAH16 concentrations were on average between 2.92 μg/kg and 87.6 μg/kg. The highest PAH concentrations were found in samples from the Herzegovina-Neretva canton. The results of the research highlight the importance of standardizing smoking procedures and manufacturing practice, in the production of Hercegovački pršut, in order to reduce the PAH content.