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Silver incorporated into the Y zeolite framework was prepared and characterized. Low temperature luminescence analysis indicates the formation of silver-silver excimers (excited state dimers) and exciplexes (excited state trimers) that were found to be activated at 250 nm and 300 nm, respectively. The catalytic activity of the modified material was tested toward the photodecomposition of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). The site selective activity was evaluated using two sources of UV irradiation at 254 and 302 nm. The catalyst was found to effectively decompose TCDD in a methanol/tetrahydrofuran solution to reach 86% after 5 h. In the presence of the catalyst, a hydroxyl derivative was identified as an intermediate for the 302 nm catalytic pathway. This was not observed for the 254 nm process. Furthermore, irradiating of TCDD under 254 nm UV source for 6 h resulted in the formation of three products with molecular ion peaks of 113, 128, and 158 amu. On the other hand, the 302 nm gives two major products with molecular ion peaks of 220 and 252 amu. The study also indicates that the hydroxyl derivative could be potentially more toxic than the parent TCDD while all other isolated products were found to be less toxic than TCDD. Keywords: Silver, Zeolite, Catalyst, Photodegradation, UV light, TCDD

Indoleamine 2, 3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) is commonly expressed by cancers as a mechanism for evading the immune system. Preclinical and clinical studies have indicated the potential of combining IDO1 inhibitors with immune therapies for the treatment of cancer, strengthening an interest in the discovery of novel dioxygenase inhibitors for reversing tumour-mediated immune suppression. To facilitate the discovery, development and investigation of novel small molecule inhibitors of IDO1 and its hepatic isozyme tryptophan dioxygenase (TDO2), murine tumour cells were engineered to selectively express either murine or human IDO1 and TDO2 for use as tools to dissect both the species specificity and isoenzyme selectivity of newly discovered inhibitors. Lewis lung carcinoma (LLTC) lines were engineered to express either murine or human IDO1 for use to test species selectivity of the novel inhibitors; in addition, GL261 glioma lines were engineered to express either human IDO1 or human TDO2 and used to test the isoenzyme selectivity of individual inhibitors in cell-based assays. The 20 most potent inhibitors against recombinant human IDO1 enzyme, discovered from a commissioned screening of 40,000 compounds in the Australian WEHI compound library, returned comparable IC50 values against murine or human IDO1 in cell-based assays using the LLTC-mIDO1 and LLTC-hIDO1 line, respectively. To test the in vivo activity of the hits, transfected lines were inoculated into syngeneic C57Bl/6 mice. Individual LLTC-hIDO1 tumours showed variable expression of human IDO1 in contrast to GL261-hIDO1 tumours which were homogenous in their IDO1 expression and were subsequently used for in vivo studies. W-0019482, the most potent IDO1 inhibitor identified from cell-based assays, reduced plasma and intratumoural ratios of kynurenine to tryptophan (K:T) and delayed the growth of subcutaneous GL261-hIDO1 tumours in mice. Synthetic modification of W-0019482 generated analogues with dual IDO1/TDO2 inhibitory activity, as well as inhibitors that were selective for either TDO2 or IDO1. These results demonstrate the versatility of W-0019482 as a lead in generating all three subclasses of tryptophan dioxygenase inhibitors which can be applied for investigating the individual roles and interactions between IDO1 and TDO2 in driving cancer-mediated immune suppression.

The signaling pathway(s) and molecular target(s) for 5,6-dimethylxanthenone-4-acetic acid (DMXAA), a tumor vascular disrupting agent in late stages of clinical development, are still undefined. As an approach toward identifying potential targets for DMXAA, a tritiated azido-analog of DMXAA was used to probe for cellular binding proteins. More than 20 cytosolic proteins from murine splenocytes, RAW 264.7 cells, and the HECPP immortalized endothelial cells were photoaffinity-labeled. Although no protein domain, fold, or binding site for a specific ligand was found to be shared by all the candidate proteins, essentially all were noted to be oxidizable proteins, implicating a role for redox signaling in the action of DMXAA. Consistent with this hypothesis, DMXAA caused an increase in concentrations of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in RAW264.7 cells during the first 2 hours. This increase in ROS was suppressed in the presence of the antioxidant, N-acetyl-L-cysteine, which also suppressed DMXAA-induced cytokine production in the RAW 264.7 cells with no effects on cell viability. Short interfering RNA (siRNA)-mediated knockdown of one of the photoaffinity-labeled proteins, superoxide dismutase 1, an ROS scavenger, resulted in an increase in tumor necrosis factor-α production by RAW 264.7 cells in response to DMXAA compared with negative or positive controls transfected with nontargeting or lamin A/C-targeting siRNA molecules, respectively. The results from these lines of study all suggest that redox signaling plays a central role in cytokine induction by DMXAA.

A review of some papers published in the last fifty years that focus on the semiconducting metal oxide (SMO) based sensors for the selective and sensitive detection of various environmental pollutants is presented.

5,6-Dimethylxanthenone-4-acetic acid (DMXAA) acts through tumor vascular disruption and cytokine production and is the first of its class to enter phase 3 trials. We characterized leukocytes and cytokines in murine Colon 38 tumors before and after DMXAA treatment. Tumor mass declined 50% 24 hours after DMXAA administration, but the leukocyte count per gram of tumor increased threefold owing to a large influx of Ly6G+CD11b+F4/80−. cells with the morphology of neutrophils. However, B and T lymphocytes, natural killer cells, and macrophages in the tumor all decreased in numbers. Seven chemokines were substantially induced in the tumor, spleen, and serum 4 hours after DMXAA administration. Using cultured spleen cell subpopulations, CD11b+ cells (largely monocytes and macrophages) were shown to be the primary producers of tumor necrosis factor á, interleukin 6 (IL-6), and macrophage inflammatory 1α (MIP-1α). CD49b+ natural killer cells produced IP-10, whereas CD45R+ B lymphocytes produced regulated upon activation normal T cell express sequence. T lymphocytes were not major producers of cytokines in the response to DMXAA. Murine peripheral blood leukocytes (PBLs) produced a similar panel of cytokines in culture to that detected in mouse serum after DMXAA treatment. Cytokines in human PBL cultures were subsequently measured with the aim of identifying potential serum markers of the human response to DMXAA. IP-10 (P < .001), monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 (P < .001), and sCD40L (P < .01) were decreased, whereas IL-8 (P < .001) and MIP-1α (P = .03) were increased in DMXAA-treated compared with untreated PBL cultures from a group of 12 donors.

Bush bean, long bean, mung bean, and winged bean plants were grown with N fertilizer at rates of 0, 2, 4, and 6 g N m−2 preceding rice planting. Concurrently, rice was grown with N fertilizer at rates of 0, 4, 8, and 12 g N m−2. No chemical fertilizer was used in the 2nd year of crop to estimate the nitrogen agronomic efficiency (NAE), nitrogen recovery efficiency (NRE), N uptake, and rice yield when legume crops were grown in rotation with rice. Rice after winged bean grown with N at the rate of 4 g N m−2 achieved significantly higher NRE, NAE, and N uptake in both years. Rice after winged bean grown without N fertilizer produced 13–23% higher grain yield than rice after fallow rotation with 8 g N m−2. The results revealed that rice after winged bean without fertilizer and rice after long bean with N fertilizer at the rate of 4 g N m−2 can produce rice yield equivalent to that of rice after fallow with N fertilizer at rates of 8 g N m−2. The NAE, NRE, and harvest index values for rice after winged bean or other legume crop rotation indicated a positive response for rice production without deteriorating soil fertility.

BACKGROUND: Soil contamination by copper (Cu) and lead (Pb) is a widespread environmental problem. For phytoextraction to be successful and viable in environmental remediation, strategies that can improve plant uptake must be identified. In the present study we investigated the use of nitrogen (N) fertilizer as an efficient way to enhance accumulation of Cu and Pb from contaminated industrial soils into amaranth, Indian mustard and sunflower. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Plants were grown in a greenhouse and fertilized with N fertilizer at rates of 0, 190 and 380 mg kg⁻¹ soil. Shoots, roots and total accumulation of Cu and Pb, transfer factor (TF), translocation index were assessed to evaluate the transport and translocation ability of tested plants. Addition of N fertilizer acidified the industrial soil and caused the pH to decrease to 5.5 from an initial pH of 6.9. Industrial soil amended with N fertilizer resulted in the highest accumulation of Pb and Cu (for Pb 10.1-15.5 mg kg⁻¹, for Cu 11.6-16.8 mg kg⁻¹) in the shoots, which was two to four folds higher relative to the concentration in roots in all the three plants used. Sunflower removed significantly higher Pb (50-54%) and Cu (34-38%) followed by amaranth and Indian mustard from industrial soils with the application of N fertilizer. The TF was

Following the stimulating discussions in the workshops held during the 9th International Conference on Model and Data Engineering (MEDI 2019), we proposed to edit a special issue compiling the fruitful research resulting from those discussions. This special issue on current research in model and data engineering of the Journal of Universal Computer Science is the outcome of that proposal. As such, it contains thoroughly revised and significantly extended versions of key papers discussed at MEDI 2019 workshops.The main objective of MEDI is to provide a forum for the dissemination of research accomplishments and to promote the interaction and collaboration between the models and data research communities. MEDI provides an international platform for the pre- sentation of research on models and data theory, development of advanced technologies related to models and data and their advanced applications. This international scientific event, initiated by researchers from Euro-Mediterranean countries in 2011, aims also at promoting the creation of north-south scientific networks, projects and faculty/student exchanges.The following seven accepted papers nicely reflect the wide range of topics covered by MEDI conferences.In their paper “Enhancing GDPR Compliance Through Data Sensitivity and Data Hiding Tools”, Xabier Larrucea, Micha Moffie and Dan Mor consider the problem of fulfilling the rules set by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU within the framework of the reference architectural model industry 4.0 for the healthcare sector. This is challenging due to the highly sensitive data managed by this sector and the need to share this data between different national healthcare providers within the EU. The authors propose and implement a series of valuable tools to enhance security and privacy in this context as well as compliance with the GDPR. They also illustrate through a case study the use of the proposed tools for sharing health records and their integration within the reference framework.In their paper “BSO-MV: An Optimized Multiview Clustering Approach for Items Recommendation in Social Networks”, Lamia Berkani, Lylia Betit and Louiza Belarif present a new approach to improve accuracy and coverage of clustering based recommendations systems for social networks. The approach is based on improving the results of multiview clustering by combining it with a bees swarm optimization algorithm. Through extensive experimentation with two real-world datasets, they are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to significantly improve accuracy, outperforming others clustering-based approaches.In their paper “A Formal Model for Configurable Business Process with Optimal Cloud Resource Allocation”, Abderrahim Ait Wakrime, Souha Boubaker, Slim Kallel, Emna Guermazi and Walid Gaaloul propose a formal approach to analyse and verify con- figurable business process models as well as to optimize the cost of their implementation in the Cloud. The mechanism consists on transforming the problem into an equivalent Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) which is then feed to a solver. This transformation is done by means of translation rules from configurable business processes to SAT. This model formalizes the different configurable process behaviors including control-flow and cloud resource allocations, enabling the derivation of correct configuration variants. Weighted partial SAT formulae are integrated in the model in order to optimize the global cloud resource allocation cost.In their paper “Towards a Semantic Graph-based Recommender System: A Case Study of Cultural Heritage”, Sara Qassimi and El Hassan Abdelwahed present a semantic graph-based recommender system of cultural heritage places. Their approach consists on first constructing an emergent description that semantically augments the information about the places of interest and then model through graphs the semantic relationships between similar cultural heritage places and their associated tags. Note that the unsuper- vised nature of folksonomy’s tags semantically weakens the description of resources, which in turn hinders their indexing and decreases the quality of their classification and clustering. The semantic augmentation produced by the proposed method in the case study of cultural heritage places in Marrakesh city shows to be an effective tool to fight information overload and to produce better recommendations in this context. As such, the paper presents a valuable contribution that can be used to improve the quality of recommender systems in general.In their paper “Assembling the Web of Things and Microservices for the Management of Cyber-Physical Systems”, Manel Mena, Javier Criado, Luis Iribarne and Antonio Corral face the challenge of facilitating communication between the diverse devices and protocols used by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). They propose an approach based on the concept of digital dice (an abstraction of various objects). The digital dice builds on the web of things standard. It is based on microservices and capable of handling the interaction and virtualization of IoT devices. This work introduces a technique to build, transform and compose digital dices from descriptions of “things”. A full transformation flow is presented and a case study is used to illustrate its implementation. The proposal is shown to be effective and flexible, improving the state of the art.In their paper “Model-Driven Engineering for End-Users in the Loop in Smart Ambient Systems”, Sylvie Trouilhet, Jean-Paul Arcangeli, Jean-Michel Bruel and Maroun Koussaifi present a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to involve the user in the process of constructing at run time component based applications, adapted to a situation and user needs, in the context of ambient systems. The proposed solution relies on several domain-specific languages and a transformation process, based on established MDE tools (Gemoc Studio, Eclipse Modeling Framework, EcoreTools, Sirius and Acceleo). In this context, the authors describe an innovative way of reinforcing the place of the user in the engineering loop. The authors propose an editor that allows the end user to be aware of the emerging applications resulting of this process, to understand their function and use, and to modify them if desired. From these actions, feedback data are extracted to improve the process.In their paper “An Approach for Testing False Data Injection Attack on Data Depen- dent Industrial Devices”, Mathieu Briland and Fabrice Bouquet present a domain specific language (DSL) for generating test data for IoT devices/environments. The DSL is proposed for testing and simulating false data injection attacks (FDIA). First, the paper outlines a generic approach for FDIA and presents a list of possible sensor types and a categorization schema for data obtained from sensors. Then, the application of the DSL is illustrated using two examples; a simple one altering the data obtained from a temperature sensor and a more complex one concurrently altering the data obtained from three particle sensors. The authors show that their approach works well in the case study of the Flowbird parking meter system and discuss how it can be adapted to different application domains.We are grateful to all authors of journal articles in this issue, who contributed to a fine collection of research in model and data engineering. We would like to express our greatest thanks to all reviewers, who put in a lot of time reading the articles and making substantial suggestions for improvement, which at the end led to the high quality. We also would like to thank J.UCS evaluation committee for the opportunity to publish this collection of research articles as a special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science and in particular to the publishing managers Dana Kaiser and Johanna Zeisberg for their timeless assistance during the whole process. Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge to our host institutions, the University of Nantes and the Software Competence Center Hagenberg (SCCH) for their support and sponsoring of this special issue. In particular, Prof. Yamine Ait-Ameur and its host institute IRIT/INP-ENSEEIHT have significantly collaborated with this special issue in the framework of the COMET scientific partnership agreement with SCCH, and have also supported the MEDI confer- ence from which it originated.Christian Attiogbé, Flavio Ferrarotti and Sofian Maabout (July, 2021)

This study aims to determine the effect of marketing strategies with the AIDA concept on the response of customers floating on Islamic banks. The research method uses a quantitative approach with Logistic Regression analysis techniques. The technique of collecting data uses a questionnaire technique distributed to sharia bank customers in the Cibadak area that has accounts with conventional banks, the number of respondents taken as many as 60 respondents using non probability sampling method that is by convenience sampling. The results of this study indicate that there is no partial significant influence between the variables of attention, interest, desire, action on the variable response of floating customers

This study examines Joko Widodo's rhetoric on Instagram during the pandemic. This study is significant for several reasons; social media has become an indispensable channel for political leaders to communicate with their constituents, particularly during crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. By analyzing the language, tone, and themes of President Widodo's Instagram posts from January to December 2021, researchers can gain insight into his communication strategy and the extent to which it may have influenced public opinion and behavior. In addition, by analyzing President Widodo's Instagram posts, we can better understand populism's role in political communication during the pandemic. Populist rhetoric frequently makes emotional appeals and aims to create a sense of “us versus them,” which can effectively mobilize support but can also lead to polarization and division. President Jokowi consciously refrained from portraying himself as a hero or savior, contrary to what is commonly observed in the communication patterns of some leaders during crises. Instead, Jokowi emphasized the importance of unity, community cohesion, and adherence to public health regulations. By doing so, President Jokowi intended to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility and encourage individuals to participate in the fight against the pandemic.

The present paper aims to study the possibility of dispensing an auxiliary power unit (APU) in an aircraft powered by fossil fuels to reduce air pollution. It particularly seeks to evaluate the amount of power generated by the ram air turbine (RAT) using the novel counter-rotating technique while characterizing its optimum axial distance. The ram air turbine (RAT), which is already equipped in aircrafts, was enhanced to generate the amount of energy produced by the APU. The approach was implemented by a CRRAT system. Six airfoil profiles were tested based on 2D models and the best airfoil was chosen for implantation on the RAT and CRRAT systems. The performance of the conventional single-rotor RAT and CRRAT were analyzed using FLUENT software based on 3D models. The adopted numerical scheme was the Navier–Stokes equation with k–ω SST turbulence modeling. The dynamic mesh and user-defined function (UDF) were used to revolve the rotor turbine via wind. The results indicated that the FX63-137 airfoil profile showed a higher performance in terms of the lift-to-drag ratio compared to the other airfoils. The optimum axial distance between the two rotors was 0.087 m of the rotor diameter and the efficiency of the new CRRAT increased to almost 45% compared to the single-rotor RAT.

Malaysia has always been concerned about harmony given that the population is comprised of various races and religions. However, there have also been a huge number of individuals who perceive that they are often marginalized and subjected to excessive action by the Malaysian government. The majority of Malaysian population practice Islamic Sunni and reject any other Islamic teachings including Shia as stated by the Malaysian government. In this context, Shia Muslims in Malaysia have been faced with numerous challenges, including being widely tracked by Malaysian religious authorities for the purpose of minimizing the spread of Shia teachings throughout Malaysia. Nevertheless, the actions taken by the religious authorities have been criticized by several parties, especially the international media and human rights activists. Therefore, this study aims to examine the depiction of Shia Muslims in Malaysia that is reported in the Malaysian media, specifically by a daily Malay newspaper popularly known as Sinar Harian which is owned and linked to the current government’s party. Finally, another purpose of this study is to look at the role played by the newspaper in reporting the minorities in Malaysia, in which in this context refers to the Shia Muslims in Malaysia.