Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Corticosterone, fear behaviour and plasma corticosterone responses to stressors in Japanese quail : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Physiology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Stress responses involve activation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the secretion of glucocorticoid hormones, and can help animals cope with changes in their environments. Corticosterone is the primary glucocorticoid in birds and has metabolic actions, and can affect behaviour and reproduction. Stimuli that activate the HPA axis are called stressors, and stressors can be classified as either physical or emotional. When animals respond to emotional stressors they also experience fear, and the magnitude of a corticosterone response to an emotional stressor is thought to be related to the degree of fearfulness that is experienced by a bird. The great majority of studies have measured plasma corticosterone responses of birds to emotional rather than physical stressors, and corticosterone responses to emotional stressors are assumed to reflect the responsiveness of the HPA axis of birds to stressors in general. The aims of the research described in this thesis were to determine the effects of corticosterone on fear behaviour, reproductive function, and plasma corticosterone responses to stressors in Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), both during and after treatment, and to examine if plasma corticosterone responses to similar emotional stressors, and to different types of emotional and physical stressors are related in individual quail. Plasma corticosterone concentrations were significantly higher in quail treated with corticosterone in their drinking water compared with controls during a 21 day treatment period, and concentrations remained elevated eight days after treatment ended. Corticosterone had little or no effect on the fearfulness of quail in tonic immobility, novel object or open field tests of fear behaviour. Body weight, food intake, egg production and egg weight were significantly lower in some corticosterone treatment groups than in controls during treatment and for up to 22 days after treatment ended. Corticosterone concentrations in quail were generally unaffected after 24 h of fasting, so the effects of elevated plasma corticosterone on corticosterone responses to a natural stressor in quail could not be determined. Corticosterone had marked effects on the physiology of quail for several weeks after treatment ended, suggesting that chronic elevations in plasma corticosterone resulting from climate change or human disturbance could have negative affects in birds even after exposure to a stressor ends.
The Ability and Attainment of Short‐Sighted Pupils

In a national study short-sighted children are found to be hard working and attentive in class, to have many academic hobbies and, take relatively little interest in sport: they are successful at school and have high ambitions for further education and employment. In non-verbal tests their scores are similar to those of children with perfect vision, but in attainment tests they have a considerable advantage. These findings are related to the age of onset of short sight and home circumstances. The hypothesis is put forward that families with a history of short sight have over the generations acquired academic interests and a high valuation of non-manual or professional employment that are passed on to the children.
The Evolution of Brand Preferences: Evidence from Consumer Migration

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant contemporaneous supply-side factors such as availability, prices, and advertising. Heterogeneity in brand preferences explains 40 percent of geographic variation in market shares. These preferences develop endogenously as a function of consumers' life histories and are highly persistent once formed, with experiences 50 years in the past still exerting a significant effect on current consumption. Counterfactuals suggest that brand preferences create large entry barriers and durable advantages for incumbent firms, and can explain persistence of early-mover advantage over long periods. Variation across product categories shows that the persistence of brand preferences is related in an intuitive way to both advertising levels and the social visibility of consumption.
Informing the Patient

1. Patients value most the information provided to them by doctors. Doctors do not seem to be able to get messages across as satisfactorily to lower social groups as to higher social groups, since they give less time per consultation and fewer explanations to working-class patients; they are the ones that are least influenced by health advice [24] and would benefit most from being given more time and attention in consultations. 2. The community pharmacists have made great play on becoming a major information source for the public but have not yet succeeded in this role. 3. In today's society individuals will have to take greater responsibility for their own healthcare. Patients must therefore actively demand more information from their doctors and pharmacists in order to make decisions. 4. Doctors and pharmacists must recognise that patients are often unaware of what they need to know. Patients' intelligence must never be under-estimated or their knowledge and understanding over-estimated. 5. The manufacturer has a major role in providing information by means of the patient information leaflet which must be in terms that can be understood and influence the patient's health behaviour. Written information is the only information to which a patient can repeatedly refer to reinforce messages given by doctors or pharmacists. Written information is however of most value to social groups A and B and is less appreciated by other groups.
Scene Text Analysis using Deep Belief Networks

This paper focuses on the recognition and analysis of text embedded in scene images using Deep learning. The proposed approach uses deep learning architectures for automated higher order feature extraction, thereby improving classification accuracies in comparison to handcrafted features used traditionally. Exhaustive experiments have been performed with Deep Belief Networks and Convolutional Deep Neural Networks with varied training algorithms like Contrastive Divergence, De-noising Score Matching and supervised learning algorithms such as logistic regression and Multi-layer perceptron. These algorithms have been validated on 4 standard datasets: Chars 74K English, Chars 74K Kannada, ICDAR 2003 Robust OCR dataset and SVT-CHAR dataset. The proposed network achieves improved recognition results on Chars74K English, Kannada and SVT-CHAR dataset in comparison to the state-of-art algorithms. For ICDAR 2003 dataset, the proposed network is marginally worse in comparison to Deep Convolutional networks. Although deep belief networks have been considerably used for several applications, according to the knowledge of the authors, this is the first paper to report scene text recognition using deep belief networks.
Improving Image Matting Using Comprehensive Sampling Sets

In this paper, we present a new image matting algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance on a benchmark dataset of images. This is achieved by solving two major problems encountered by current sampling based algorithms. The first is that the range in which the foreground and background are sampled is often limited to such an extent that the true foreground and background colors are not present. Here, we describe a method by which a more comprehensive and representative set of samples is collected so as not to miss out on the true samples. This is accomplished by expanding the sampling range for pixels farther from the foreground or background boundary and ensuring that samples from each color distribution are included. The second problem is the overlap in color distributions of foreground and background regions. This causes sampling based methods to fail to pick the correct samples for foreground and background. Our design of an objective function forces those foreground and background samples to be picked that are generated from well-separated distributions. Comparison on the dataset at and evaluation by www.alphamatting. com shows that the proposed method ranks first in terms of error measures used in the website.
Long-term Mortality Predictors in Patients with Small Aortic Annulus Undergoing Aortic Valve Replacement with a 19- or 21-mm Bioprosthesis

Introduction Replacement of the aortic valve in patients with a small aortic annulus is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. A prosthesis-patient mismatch is one of the main problems associated with failed valves in this patient population. Objective To evaluate the long-term mortality predictors in patients with a small aortic annulus undergoing aortic valve replacement with a bioprosthesis. Methods In this retrospective observational study, a total of 101 patients undergoing aortic valve replacement from January 2000 to December 2010 were studied. There were 81 (80.19%) women with a mean age of 52.81±18.4 years. Severe aortic stenosis was the main indication for surgery in 54 (53.4%) patients. Posterior annulus enlargement was performed in 16 (15.8%) patients. Overall, 54 (53.41%) patients underwent concomitant surgery: 28 (27.5%) underwent mitral valve replacement, and 13 (12.7%) underwent coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Results Mean valve index was 0.82±0.08 cm2/m2. Overall, 17 (16.83%) patients had a valve index lower than 0.75 cm2/m2, without statistical significance for mortality (P=0.12). The overall 10-year survival rate was 83.17%. The rate for patients who underwent isolated aortic valve replacement was 91.3% and 73.1% (P=0.02) for patients who underwent concomitant surgery. In the univariate analysis, the main predictors of mortality were preoperative ejection fraction (P=0.02; HR 0.01) and EuroSCORE II results (P=0.00000042; HR 1.13). In the multivariate analysis, the main predictors of mortality were age (P=0.01, HR 1.04) and concomitant surgery (P=0.01, HR 5.04). Those relationships were statistically significant. Conclusion A valve index of < 0.75 cm2/m2 did not affect 10-year survival. However, concomitant surgery and age significantly affected mortality.
Distributed algorithms for computation of fair rates in multirate multicast trees

We study fairness in arbitrary networks with multicast capabilities. Multicast traffic in Internet and ATM provides a motivation for studying these networks. A study of fairness in multicast networks poses several interesting problems, e.g., the issue of inter-session fairness in addition to that of inter-session fairness in unicast networks. We develop a mathematical framework to model the fair allocation of bandwidth in multirate multicast networks with minimum and maximum rate constraints. We present distributed algorithms for computation of maxmin fair rates allocated to various source-destination pairs.
Preface: Blog terminology

Preface Introduction Examining the Blog-Media Relationship Mark Tremayne Part One: Blogging: Research on blogging using content analysis A Longitudinal Content Analysis of Blogs: 2003-2004 Susan C. Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Inna Kouper and Elijah Wright Audiences as Media Producers: A Content Analysis of 260 Blogs Zizi Papacharissi Pundits in Muckrakers' Clothing: Political Blogs and the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election D. Travers Scott Analyzing Political Conversation on the Howard Dean Candidate Blog Sharon Meraz Blogging for Better Health: Putting the 'Public' Back in Public Health S. Shyam Sundar, Heidi Hatfield Edwards, Yifeng Hu, and Carmen Stavrositu Part Two: Citizenship: Examining blog use, antecedents and consequences Reading Political Blogs During the 2004 Election Campaign: Correlates & Consequences William P. Eveland, Jr. and Ivan Dylko Blog Use Motivations: An Exploratory Study Barbara Kaye Credibility of Political Messages on the Internet: A Comparison of Blog Sources Lynda Lee Kaid and Monica Postelnicu Blog Readers: Predictors of Reliance on War Blogs Thomas Johnson and Barbara Kaye Part Three: The Future of Media: Examining the Impact of Blogging on Journalism Protection in the Blogosphere: Applying a Functional Definition of 'Press' to Blogs Laura Hendrickson Blogs Without Borders: International Legal Jurisdiction Issues Facing Bloggers Brian Carroll and Bob Frank Emergent Communication Networks as Civic Journalism Lou Rutigliano Citizen Journalism: A Case Study Clyde Bentley, Brian Hamman, Jeremy Littau, Hans Meyer, Brendan Watson and Beth Welsh Harnessing the Active Audience: Synthesizing Blog Research and Lessons for the Future of Media "Mark Tremayne" Contributors Index
The phylogeography of salmonid proliferative kidney disease in Europe and North America

Salmonid proliferative kidney disease (PKD) is caused by the myxozoan Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae. Given the serious and apparently growing impact of PKD on farmed and wild salmonids, we undertook a phylogeographic study to gain insights into the history of genealogical lineages of T. bryosalmonae in Europe and North America, and to determine if the global expansion of rainbow trout farming has spread the disease. Phylogenetic analyses of internal transcribed spacer 1 sequences revealed a clade composed of all North American sequences plus a subset of Italian and French sequences. High genetic diversity in North America and the absence of genotypes diagnostic of the North American clade in the rest of Europe imply that southern Europe was colonized by immigration from North America; however, sequence divergence suggests that this colonization substantially pre–dated fisheries activities. Furthermore, the lack of southern European lineages in the rest of Europe, despite widespread rainbow trout farming, indicates that T. bryosalmonae is not transported through fisheries activities. This result strikingly contrasts with the commonness of fisheries–related introductions of other pathogens and parasites and indicates that fishes may be dead–end hosts. Our results also demonstrate that European strains of T. bryosalmonae infect and induce PKD in rainbow trout introduced to Europe.
Beneficiary Satisfaction Regarding Old Age Pension Scheme and Its Utilization Pattern in Urban Puducherry: A Mixed Methods Study.

INTRODUCTION National Old Age Pension Scheme (NOAPS) was aimed at providing a safety net for India's aging population in terms of social, economical and moral support by helping eligible elderly citizens with direct cash benefit. AIM To assess the beneficiary satisfaction and utilization pattern of the monetary benefit received under the old age pension scheme and to explore the perception of the stakeholders regarding delivery of the pension. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a mixed method research consisting of both quantitative surveys and qualitative in-depth interviews. The survey was conducted among 205 randomly selected beneficiaries of old age pension scheme belonging to urban Puducherry. Around 12 qualitative interviews were conducted with beneficiaries, family members and Anganwadi workers. RESULTS The mean age of the study participants was 71 years. Almost 80% of participants avail pension from banks. Majority of participants (98%) were satisfied with the overall scheme, though half of them expressed their dissatisfaction with the amount of pension received. Among the study subjects, 65% were satisfied regarding the mechanism of delivery of old age pension. Anganwadi was the preferred mode of payment in 80% subjects. Around 85% of them spent the entire pension amount for their own use (health needs, travel, daily activities and social needs) while the remaining gave some economic support to their family. Half of them (55%) felt that they possess financial autonomy in planning their expenditure. Majority felt that receiving pension had given them economic empowerment, self-esteem and renewed confidence in life. CONCLUSION Financial assistance to the elderly empowers them and improves their social status, independence, self-esteem and overall quality of life. With increasing proportion of elderly in Indian population, it is important to study the effectiveness of such schemes so that corrective measures can be taken to facilitate its access to the disadvantaged section of the society.
Uterine resectoscopic myomectomy with and without microrelin pretreatment: a single-blinded randomized clinical trial

Study objective: To assess the outcomes of surgery in the group of patients who were submitted to preoperative GnRH agonists in comparison with those who received no medication. The levels of gonadotropin hormones (LH and FSH) and estradiol, which were measured 2 and 12 weeks after treatment, were also compared between two groups. Design: Single-blinded randomized clinical trial. Design classification: Canadian Task Force Classification I. Setting: University hospital. Patients: A total of 60 patients participated in this clinical trial. Inclusion criteria were: age between 18-50 y (premenopausal women). Interventions: Sixty patients were assigned randomly to intervention and control group. Intervention group received three doses of monthly intramuscular injections of Microrelin 3.75 mg (a sustained release formulation of triptorelin) before hysteroscopic myomectomy and control group received no medications. Uterine resectoscopic myomectomy was performed in both groups. Measurements and main results: Operation characteristics including operation time and amount of absorbed fluid were measured. Level of difficulty and satisfaction from surgeon’s view were assessed based on Visual Analog Scale (VAS). Serum levels of LH, FSH and estradiol were measured at the baseline and after 2 and 12 weeks in both groups. A total of 60 patients participated in this clinical trial. The sizes of myomas were significantly reduced in microrelin group in comparison with control group (33% reduction, p<0.0001). The administration of Microrelin led to significant reduction of estradiol, LH and FSH levels after 12 weeks. However a transient flare-up in the level of estradiol was detected after 2 weeks. The satisfaction level from operation from surgeon’s view was significantly higher (p=0.01) and the level of difficulty was lower in Microrelin group (p=0.049). No significant difference in haemoglobin drop after operation was detected between two groups. Conclusion: Our study showed that pretreatment with Microrelin before uterine resectoscopic myomectomy could lead to less surgical difficulties and subsequently lower operation time. The amount of haemoglobin (as an indicator of blood loss) was not affected with this intervention. Our study supports the beneficiary influence of GnRH agonists in outcomes of myomectomy.
Psychometric assessment of beck scale for suicidal ideation (BSSI) in general population in Tehran

Background: Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSSI) is a widely used instrument to assess suicidality. However, there is only limited information about the psychometric characteristics of BSSI in the Persian language. In this study, we investigated the validity, reliability and factor structure of the BSSI in the general population of Tehran. Methods: Initially, 900 questionnaire packages were distributed to the general population of Tehran (response rate: 59 percent), using cluster random sampling method. The questionnaire package consisted of a demographic questionnaire, the Persian translation of the BSSI, Symptom checklist-90- Revised (SCL-90-R), Beck Hopelessness Inventory (BHI) and Philips Social Support Appraisal Scale. Internal consistency and correlations of the BSSI scores with other constructs were investigated. Factor analysis was done using principal component method. Results: The Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the screening part and the whole scale were satisfactory (>0.8). The scores of both the screening part and the total scale in individuals who experienced suicidal attempt were higher than others. Both the screening part and the total scale had a positive correlation with depression and Global Severity Index in SCL-90-R, and a negative correlation with social support. The scores of the screening part had a positive correlation with anxiety, psychoticism, hostility and hopelessness as well. The screening part consisted of a single factor which explains 60% of the total variance. Conclusion: The Persian translation of the BSSI has desirable psychometric properties in research setting. However, the clinical usage of the scale remains to be explored, and the factor structure of the whole questionnaire should be assessed in a clinical sample.
Continuous speech recognition using a context sensitive ANN and HMM2s

The phonetic context has a large effect on phonemes in a continuous speech signal [1]. Therefore recognition systems that model allophones using context-dependent Hidden Markov Models have been implemented [4]. Second-order HMMs (HMM2s have a great ability for the segmentation in the temporal domain [6][7] but have some difficulties in the recognition because the MLE training (Maximum Likelihood Estimation) is not discriminant, whereas the discrimination is one of the abilities of the Artificial Neural Networks models. In the last three years we have developed a new ANN model named OWE (Orthogonal Weight Estimator)[10][11]. The principle of the OWE is a ANN that classifies an input pattern according to contextual environment. This new ANN architecture tackles the problem of context dependent behaviour training. Roughly, the principle is based on main MLP (Multilayered Perceptron) in which each synaptic weight connection value is estimated by another MLP (an OWE) with respect to context representation. In this paper, we present 2 hybrid systems for phoneme recognition. In both systems, 48 context independent HMM2s segment the input signal. In the first system, the OWE performs the labelling of segments and, in the second system, the OWE outputs are the input frames of the HMM2s. Experiments on TIMIT range from 56% to 67% accuracies on the 48 phonemes set.
A strategy for modelling the effect of a continuous covariate in medicine and epidemiology.

Low-dimensional parametric models are well understood, straightforward to communicate to other workers, have very smooth curves and may easily be checked for consistency with background scientific knowledge or understanding. They should therefore be ideal tools with which to represent smooth relationships between a continuous predictor and an outcome variable in medicine and epidemiology. Unfortunately, a seriously restricted set of such models is used routinely in practical data analysis - typically, linear, quadratic or occasionally cubic polynomials, or sometimes a power or logarithmic transformation of a covariate. Since their flexibility is limited, it is not surprising that the fit of such models is often poor. Royston and Altman's recent work on fractional polynomials has extended the range of available functions. It is clearly crucial that the chosen final model fits the data well. Achieving a good fit with minimal restriction on the functional form has been the motivation behind the major recent research effort on non-parametric curve-fitting techniques. Here I propose that one such model, a (possibly over-fitted) cubic smoothing spline, may be used to define a suitable reference curve against which the fit of a parametric model may be checked. I suggest a significance test for the purpose and examine its type I error and power in a small simulation study. Several families of parametric models, including some with sigmoid curves, are considered. Their suitability in fitting regression relationships found in several real data sets is investigated. With all the example data sets, a simple parametric model can be found which fits the data approximately as well as a cubic smoothing spline, but without the latter's tendency towards artefacts in the fitted curve.