Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fate and efficacy of polyacrylamide applied in furrow irrigation: full-advance and continuous treatments.

Polyacrylamide (PAM) is applied to 400000 irrigated hectares annually in the USA to control irrigation-induced erosion, yet the fate of dissolved PAM applied in irrigation water is not well documented. We determined the fate of PAM added to furrow streams under two treatments: Initial-10, 10 mg L(-1) PAM product applied only during the initial hours of the irrigation, and Cont-1, 1.0 mg L(-1) PAM product applied continuously during the entire irrigation. The study measured PAM concentrations in 167-m-long PAM-treated furrow streams and along a 530-m tail ditch that received this runoff. Soil was Portneuf silt loam (coarse-silty, mixed, superactive, mesic Durinodic Xeric Haplocalcid) with 1.5% slope. Samples were taken at three times during the irrigations, both during and after PAM application. Polyacrylamide was adsorbed to soil and removed from solution as the streams traversed the soil-lined channels. The removal rate increased with stream sediment concentration. Stream sediment concentrations were higher when PAM concentrations were <2 mg L(-1) a.i., for early irrigations, and when untreated tributary flows combined with the stream. In these cases, PAM concentration decreased to undetectable levels over the flow lengths used in this study. When inflows contained >6 mg L(-1) PAM a.i., stream sediment concentrations were minimal and PAM concentrations did not change down the furrow, though they decreased to undetectable levels within 0.5 h after application ceased. One percent of applied PAM was lost in tail-ditch runoff. This loss could have been eliminated by treating only the furrow advance or not treating the last two irrigations.
The Ralph Report Depreciation Proposals and Investment Neutrality

The Review of Business Taxation chaired by Mr John Ralph has suggested sweeping changes to business taxation in Australia. In particular it has been proposed that accelerated depreciation provisions be removed to finance a reduction in the company tax rate. If some degree of accelerated depreciation is to be retained, it is suggested that this should involve a uniform loading on depreciation rates for all assets. The aim is to provide a more uniform treatment of assets with different economic lives. This paper examines the neutrality of these proposals for unincorporated enterprises and companies owned by Australian shareholders.
Model based control of series elastic actuators

This contribution presents a comprehensible model based approach of a control structure to control the output force of series elastic actuators. The controller is based on a linear model of the actuator, which can be reduced to a PT2 element if a disturbance compensator is included. This allows for a straightforward design of a state space controller and an intuitive choice of the controller parameters. An actuator design is presented and the required system parameters are identified. The performance of the control structure is proven by experiment.
Effective Community Search for Large Attributed Graphs

Given a graph G and a vertex q ∈ G, the community search query returns a subgraph of G that contains vertices related to q. Communities, which are prevalent in attributed graphs such as social networks and knowledge bases, can be used in emerging applications such as product advertisement and setting up of social events. In this paper, we investigate the attributed community query (or ACQ), which returns an attributed community (AC) for an attributed graph. The AC is a subgraph of G, which satisfies both structure cohesiveness (i.e., its vertices are tightly connected) and keyword cohesiveness (i.e., its vertices share common keywords). The AC enables a better understanding of how and why a community is formed (e.g., members of an AC have a common interest in music, because they all have the same keyword "music"). An AC can be "personalized"; for example, an ACQ user may specify that an AC returned should be related to some specific keywords like "research" and "sports". To enable efficient AC search, we develop the CL-tree index structure and three algorithms based on it. We evaluate our solutions on four large graphs, namely Flickr, DBLP, Tencent, and DBpedia. Our results show that ACs are more effective and efficient than existing community retrieval approaches. Moreover, an AC contains more precise and personalized information than that of existing community search and detection methods.
Weibo use and political participation: the mechanism explaining the positive effect of Weibo use on online political participation among college students in contemporary China

ABSTRACT This study examines the various aspects of Weibo use, including the number of people users follow; the number of fans they have; the frequency with which they read friends’, celebrities’, and opinion leaders’ Weibo; and the number of Weibo group memberships on youth online political participation in contemporary China. The study also investigates the underlying mechanisms explaining the positive effects of Weibo use on youth online political participation using survey methods. Chinese users mainly use Weibo to satisfy their needs for information and connectedness. As an alternative source of information, Weibo indeed functions as an ‘online school of political participation’ to foster political interest, a sense of belonging to an online community, and civic virtue among Weibo users. As a new platform for Chinese to form online civic groups, memberships in Weibo groups significantly increases users’ likelihood of being politically mobilized, which is essential for online collective participation. Our study shows that Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s [(1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] civic voluntarism model can be extended to the online environment in an authoritarian system.
Is Productivity Growth Correlated with Improvements in Management Quality? An empirical study using interview surveys in Korea and Japan

Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) show that differences in management practices are correlated with productivity differences at the firm level. In this paper, we conducted similar interview surveys on management practices in Japanese and Korean firms in 2008 and 2012. We find that overall management scores in Japan—as an average of organizational and human resource management scores—are higher than those in Korea. However, the second survey shows that the gap in management scores between the two countries has shrunken over time. In addition, the average management quality in Korean large firms has surpassed that of Japanese large firms. This result is consistent with the literature comparing big businesses in Korea and Japan. This study also compares additional aspects of management styles, such as speed in decision making and the role of various communication channels, which is not done in the literature. When we estimate a production function including management score using all samples, we find a positive and significant relationship between management scores and productivity. Most estimation results show that organizational management scores are correlated with firm performances in Japanese firms, while human resource management scores are correlated with performance in Korean firms. We also find that management practices are correlated with improvements in capital and labor efficiencies. In the case of Japan, better organizational management practices in the past improve current firm performance. Our results show that the Japanese government and firms should promote management reforms to restore international competitiveness.
Photoperiodic regulation of the seasonal pattern of photosynthetic capacity and the implications for carbon cycling

Although temperature is an important driver of seasonal changes in photosynthetic physiology, photoperiod also regulates leaf activity. Climate change will extend growing seasons if temperature cues predominate, but photoperiod-controlled species will show limited responsiveness to warming. We show that photoperiod explains more seasonal variation in photosynthetic activity across 23 tree species than temperature. Although leaves remain green, photosynthetic capacity peaks just after summer solstice and declines with decreasing photoperiod, before air temperatures peak. In support of these findings, saplings grown at constant temperature but exposed to an extended photoperiod maintained high photosynthetic capacity, but photosynthetic activity declined in saplings experiencing a naturally shortening photoperiod; leaves remained equally green in both treatments. Incorporating a photoperiodic correction of photosynthetic physiology into a global-scale terrestrial carbon-cycle model significantly improves predictions of seasonal atmospheric CO2 cycling, demonstrating the benefit of such a function in coupled climate system models. Accounting for photoperiod-induced seasonality in photosynthetic parameters reduces modeled global gross primary production 2.5% (∼4 PgC y−1), resulting in a >3% (∼2 PgC y−1) decrease of net primary production. Such a correction is also needed in models estimating current carbon uptake based on remotely sensed greenness. Photoperiod-associated declines in photosynthetic capacity could limit autumn carbon gain in forests, even if warming delays leaf senescence.
Preaspiration in Hebrides English

Preaspirated voiceless stops, a well-documented feature of Scottish Gaelic (Ní Chasaide 1985, Clayton 2010, Nance & Stuart-Smith 2013), have also been reported in the English spoken in the Hebrides island chain (Borgstrøm 1940, Wells 1982, Shuken 1984). However, a detailed description of preaspiration in Hebrides English has previously been unavailable. This paper presents the results of a phonetic study of preaspirated voiceless stops in Hebrides English, based on the speech of 24 English–Scottish Gaelic bilinguals from nine regions within the Hebrides island chain. The paper describes the effect of linguistic features on the duration and frequency of preaspiration, including place of articulation, word position, and vowel context. The paper also considers the role of social factors, including speakers’ geographic origin, age, and gender, finding that preaspiration is more frequent among women and among older speakers, especially older female speakers from Lewis. The paper concludes that preaspiration is likely to be an obsolescent feature in Hebrides English, rather than an innovative feature as in other varieties of English such as Tyneside or Aberystwyth (Docherty & Foulkes 1999, Foulkes, Docherty & Watt 2001, Hejná 2015).
AN EXAMINATION OF BLACK-WHITE CRIME DIFFERENCES IN A SAMPLE OF PREVIOUSLY INCARCERATED YOUTH: DOES NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXT EXPLAIN THE RACE GAP IN ADULT CRIME?

Stephen Demuth, Ph.D., Advisor Past studies of the relationship between race and crime consistently find higher levels of overall offending among black adults than white adults. Interestingly, this race gap in adult crime tends to be considerably larger than the race gap in adolescent delinquency. In the present study, I examine a longitudinal sample of serious juvenile delinquents (N = 197) and attempt to explain the racial disparity in crime prevalence that exists in adulthood. In the current sample, although whites report significantly higher levels of delinquency than blacks during adolescence, this trend reverses in adulthood. I explore the extent to which social and structural factors such as employment, marriage, and criminal networks explain this shift in offending and focus, in particular, on the impact of neighborhood context on the emergence of race differences in crime during young adulthood. I also examine the possibility that neighborhood context might have different crime-causing or crime-dampening effects for blacks and whites (i.e., interactive effects). Results of regression analyses suggest that past delinquency and involvement in criminal networks are positively related to adult crime prevalence, but adult stability factors such as marriage, relationship happiness, and employment appear to be only marginally related to adult criminality. Furthermore, while neighborhood efficacy is negatively related to adult crime prevalence, it does not explain the race-crime gap, net of other factors. Interactions between race and neighborhood variables are significant, indicating that the relationship between race and adult crime is moderated by neighborhood quality. Specifically, analyses reveal that neighborhood effects are largely significant for blacks only. Furthermore, the subset of black respondents living in sample-
Contrast letter acuity as a visual component for the Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite

Background: Visual dysfunction is one of the most common causes of disability in multiple sclerosis (MS). The Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite (MSFC), a new clinical trial outcome measure, does not currently include a test of visual function. Objective: To examine contrast letter acuity as a candidate visual function test for the MSFC. Methods: Binocular contrast letter acuity testing (Sloan charts) was performed in a subgroup of participants from the International Multiple Sclerosis Secondary Progressive Avonex Controlled Trial (IMPACT Substudy) and in MS patients and disease-free control subjects from a cross-sectional study of visual outcome measures (Multiple Sclerosis Vision Prospective cohort [MVP cohort]). High-contrast visual acuity was measured in both studies; MVP cohort participants underwent additional binocular testing for contrast sensitivity (Pelli–Robson chart), color vision (D-15 desaturated test), and visual field (Esterman test, Humphrey Field Analyzer II). Results: Contrast letter acuity (Sloan charts, p < 0.0001, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis) and contrast sensitivity (Pelli–Robson chart, p = 0.003) best distinguished MS patients from disease-free control subjects in the MVP cohort. Correlations of Sloan chart scores with MSFC and Expanded Disability Statue Scale (EDSS) scores in both studies were significant and moderate in magnitude, demonstrating that Sloan chart scores reflect visual and neurologic dysfunction not entirely captured by the EDSS or MSFC. Conclusions: Among clinical measures, contrast letter acuity (Sloan charts) and contrast sensitivity (Pelli–Robson chart) demonstrate the greatest capacity to identify binocular visual dysfunction in MS. Sloan chart testing also captures unique aspects of neurologic dysfunction not captured by current EDSS or MSFC components, making it a strong candidate visual function test for the MSFC.
Differences in the Nemosis Response of Normal and Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts from Patients with Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background Tumor-stroma reaction is associated with activation of fibroblasts. Nemosis is a novel type of fibroblast activation. It leads to an increased production of growth factors and proinflammatory and proteolytic proteins, while at the same time cytoskeletal proteins are degraded. Here we used paired normal skin fibroblasts and cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF) and primary and recurrent oral squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) cells to study the nemosis response. Principal Findings Fibroblast nemosis was analyzed by protein and gene expression and the paracrine regulation with colony formation assay. One of the normal fibroblast strains, FB-43, upregulated COX-2 in nemosis, but FB-74 cells did not. In contrast, CAF-74 spheroids expressed COX-2 but CAF-43 cells did not. Alpha-SMA protein was expressed in both CAF strains and in FB-74 cells, but not in FB-43 fibroblasts. Its mRNA levels were downregulated in nemosis, but the CAFs started to regain the expression. FSP1 mRNA was downregulated in normal fibroblasts and CAF-74 cells, but not in CAF-43 fibroblasts. Serine protease FAP was upregulated in all fibroblasts, more so in nemotic CAFs. VEGF, HGF/SF and FGF7 mRNA levels were upregulated to variable degree in nemosis. CAFs increased the colony formation of primary tumor cell lines UT-SCC-43A and UT-SCC-74A, but normal fibroblasts inhibited the anchorage-independent growth of recurrent UT-SCC-43B and UT-SCC-74B cells. Conclusions Nemosis response, as observed by COX-2 and growth factor induction, and expression of CAF markers α-SMA, FSP1 and FAP, varies between fibroblast populations. The expression of CAF markers differs between normal fibroblasts and CAFs in nemosis. These results emphasize the heterogeneity of fibroblasts and the evolving tumor-promoting properties of CAFs.
Quantifying Data Worth Toward Reducing Predictive Uncertainty

The present study demonstrates a methodology for optimization of environmental data acquisition. Based on the premise that the worth of data increases in proportion to its ability to reduce the uncertainty of key model predictions, the methodology can be used to compare the worth of different data types, gathered at different locations within study areas of arbitrary complexity. The method is applied to a hypothetical nonlinear, variable density numerical model of salt and heat transport. The relative utilities of temperature and concentration measurements at different locations within the model domain are assessed in terms of their ability to reduce the uncertainty associated with predictions of movement of the salt water interface in response to a decrease in fresh water recharge. In order to test the sensitivity of the method to nonlinear model behavior, analyses were repeated for multiple realizations of system properties. Rankings of observation worth were similar for all realizations, indicating robust performance of the methodology when employed in conjunction with a highly nonlinear model. The analysis showed that while concentration and temperature measurements can both aid in the prediction of interface movement, concentration measurements, especially when taken in proximity to the interface at locations where the interface is expected to move, are of greater worth than temperature measurements. Nevertheless, it was also demonstrated that pairs of temperature measurements, taken in strategic locations with respect to the interface, can also lead to more precise predictions of interface movement.
Online Privacy Concerns and Privacy Management: A Meta-Analytical Review

This meta-analysis investigates privacy concerns and literacy as predictors of use of online services and social network sites (SNSs), sharing information, and adoption of privacy protective measures. A total of 166 studies from 34 countries (n = 75,269) were included in the analysis. In line with the premise of privacy paradox, privacy concerns did not predict SNS use. However, users concerned about privacy were less likely to use online services and share information and were more likely to utilize privacy protective measures. Except for information sharing, the relationships were comparable for intentions and behavior. Analyses also confirm the role that privacy literacy plays in enhancing use of privacy protective measures. The findings can be generalized across gender, cultural orientation, and national legal systems.
How People Talk with Robots: Designing Dialog to Reduce User Uncertainty

If human-robot interaction is mainly shaped by users’ strategies to deal with their unfamiliar artificial com¬munication partner, as it is suggested here, robot dialog design should orient at reducing users’ uncertainty about the affordances of the robot and the joint task. Two experiments are presented that investigate the impact of verbal robot utterances on users’ behavior; results show that users react sensitively to subtle linguistic cues that may guide them into appropriate understandings of the robot. Furthermore, the role of user expectations and robot appearance are discussed in the light of the model presented.
Continuous Peripheral Nerve Blocks: A Review of the Published Evidence

A continuous peripheral nerve block, also termed “perineural local anesthetic infusion,” involves the percutaneous insertion of a catheter adjacent to a peripheral nerve, followed by local anesthetic administration via the catheter, providing anesthesia/analgesia for multiple days or even months. Continuous peripheral nerve blocks may be provided in the hospital setting, but the use of lightweight, portable pumps permits ambulatory infusion as well. This technique's most common application is providing analgesia after surgical procedures. However, additional indications include treating intractable hiccups; inducing a sympathectomy and vasodilation to increase blood flow after a vascular accident, digit transfer/replantation, or limb salvage; alleviating vasospasm of Raynaud disease; and treating peripheral embolism and chronic pain such as complex regional pain syndrome, phantom limb pain, trigeminal neuralgia, and cancer-induced pain. After trauma, perineural infusion can provide analgesia during transportation to a distant treatment center, or while simply awaiting surgical repair. Catheter insertion may be accomplished using many possible modalities, including nerve stimulation, ultrasound guidance, paresthesia induction, fluoroscopic imaging, and simple tactile perceptions (“facial click”). Either a nonstimulating epidural-type catheter may be used, or a “stimulating catheter” that delivers electrical current to its tip. Administered infusate generally includes exclusively long-acting, dilute, local anesthetic delivered as a bolus only, basal only, or basal-bolus combination. Documented benefits appear to be dependent on successfully improving analgesia, and include decreasing baseline/breakthrough/dynamic pain, supplemental analgesic requirements, opioid-related side effects, and sleep disturbances. In some cases, patient satisfaction and ambulation/functioning may be improved; an accelerated resumption of passive joint range-of-motion realized; and the time until discharge readiness as well as actual discharge from the hospital or rehabilitation center achieved. Lastly, postoperative joint inflammation and inflammatory markers may be decreased. Nearly all benefits occur during the infusion itself, but several randomized controlled trials suggest that in some situations there are prolonged benefits after catheter removal as well. Easily rectified minor complications occur somewhat frequently, but major risks including clinically relevant infection and nerve injury are relatively rare. This article is an evidence-based review of the published literature involving continuous peripheral nerve blocks.
Anthropogenic impacts on Costa Rican bat parasitism are sex specific

Abstract While anthropogenic impacts on parasitism of wildlife are receiving growing attention, whether these impacts vary in a sex‐specific manner remains little explored. Differences between the sexes in the effect of parasites, linked to anthropogenic activity, could lead to uneven sex ratios and higher population endangerment. We sampled 1108 individual bats in 18 different sites across an agricultural mosaic landscape in southern Costa Rica to investigate the relationships between anthropogenic impacts (deforestation and reductions in host species richness) and bat fly ectoparasitism of 35 species of Neotropical bats. Although female and male bat assemblages were similar across the deforestation gradient, bat fly assemblages tracked their hosts closely only on female bats. We found that in female hosts, parasite abundance per bat decreased with increasing bat species richness, while in male hosts, parasite abundance increased. We hypothesize the differences in the parasite–disturbance relationship are due to differences in roosting behavior between the sexes. We report a sex‐specific parasite–disturbance relationship and argue that sex differences in anthropogenic impacts on wildlife parasitism could impact long‐term population health and survival.