Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visitors' Perceptions of the Conservation Education Role of Zoos and Aquariums: Implications for the Provision of Learning Experiences

ABSTRACT Many zoos and aquariums consider themselves to be conservation organizations with a mission to educate and promote visitors' adoption of environmentally sustainable behavior. This article investigates the extent to which visitors share this view and discusses the implications of the findings for the provision of on-site and post-visit conservation education. A survey of 1,546 visitors to 13 zoos and aquariums found that although visitors gave highest priority to entertainment aspects of the experience, they also considered the provision of conservation education to be an important aspect of a zoo or aquarium visit. The findings suggest that zoos and aquariums need to develop new ways of engaging visitors for whom conservation learning is not the major purpose for visiting and provide post-visit experiences that reinforce and extend on-site conservation messages and action. Suggestions for accomplishing these are discussed.
Ensemble‐mean dynamics of the ENSO recharge oscillator under state‐dependent stochastic forcing

In this paper, the conceptual recharge oscillator model for the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) is utilized to study the influence of fast variability such as that associated with westerly wind bursts (WWB) on dynamics of ENSO and predictability. The ENSO‐WWB interaction is simply represented by stochastic forcing modulated by ENSO‐related sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies. An analytical framework is developed to describe the ensemble‐mean dynamics of ENSO under the stochastic forcing. Numerical ensemble simulations verify the main results derived from the analytical ensemble‐mean theory: the state‐dependent stochastic forcing enhances the instability of ENSO and its ensemble spread, generates asymmetry in the predictability of the onsets of cold and warm phases of ENSO, and leads to an ensemble‐mean bias that may eventually contribute to a climate mean state bias.
Competition of a Different Flavor: How a Strategic Group Identity Shapes Competition and Cooperation

Using an inductive study of 41 gourmet food trucks, we develop theory about how firms form a strategic group identity that shapes both competitive and cooperative behaviors among its members. Based on an analysis of group prototypes, we find that members cooperate to help each other meet the central tendencies of the group—the properties that typical group members have—and yet compete to strive for the ideal tendencies of the group—the attributes of members held in highest regard. These competitive and cooperative dynamics lead to three surprising consequences in light of previous research on strategic groups: (1) existing members of the strategic group help new firms enter the market; (2) resource scarcity leads to cooperation, not competition; and (3) when competition does emerge, it focuses on status within the group and not on price. To make sense of these empirical puzzles, we develop theory around the micro identity processes that allow a strategic group’s identity to persist and to shape its member firms’ behaviors, which alters how scholars understand the inner workings of strategic groups and their impact on both firms and markets.
Using cardio-respiratory signals to recognize emotions elicited by watching music video clips

The automatic recognition of human emotions from physiological signals is of increasing interest in many applications. Images with high emotional content have been shown to alter signals such as the electrocardiogram (ECG) and the respiration among many other physiological recordings. However, recognizing emotions from multimedia stimuli, such as music video clips, which are growing in numbers in the digital world and are the medium of many recommendation systems, has not been adequately investigated. This study aims to investigate the recognition of emotions elicited by watching music video clips, from features extracted from the ECG, the respiration and several synchronization aspects of the two. On a public dataset, we achieved higher classification rates than the state-of-the-art using either the ECG or the respiration signals alone. A feature related to the synchronization of the two signals achieved even better performance.
X13CMS: Global Tracking of Isotopic Labels in Untargeted Metabolomics

Studies of isotopically labeled compounds have been fundamental to understanding metabolic pathways and fluxes. They have traditionally, however, been used in conjunction with targeted analyses that identify and quantify a limited number of labeled downstream metabolites. Here we describe an alternative workflow that leverages recent advances in untargeted metabolomic technologies to track the fates of isotopically labeled metabolites in a global, unbiased manner. This untargeted approach can be applied to discover novel biochemical pathways and characterize changes in the fates of labeled metabolites as a function of altered biological conditions such as disease. To facilitate the data analysis, we introduce X13CMS, an extension of the widely used mass spectrometry-based metabolomic software package XCMS. X13CMS uses the XCMS platform to detect metabolite peaks and perform retention-time alignment in liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) data. With the use of the XCMS output, the program then identifies isotopologue groups that correspond to isotopically labeled compounds. The retrieval of these groups is done without any a priori knowledge besides the following input parameters: (i) the mass difference between the unlabeled and labeled isotopes, (ii) the mass accuracy of the instrument used in the analysis, and (iii) the estimated retention-time reproducibility of the chromatographic method. Despite its name, X13CMS can be used to track any isotopic label. Additionally, it detects differential labeling patterns in biological samples collected from parallel control and experimental conditions. We validated the ability of X13CMS to accurately retrieve labeled metabolites from complex biological matrices both with targeted LC/MS/MS analysis of a subset of the hits identified by the program and with labeled standards spiked into cell extracts. We demonstrate the full functionality of X13CMS with an analysis of cultured rat astrocytes treated with uniformly labeled (U-)13C-glucose during lipopolysaccharide (LPS) challenge. Our results show that out of 223 isotopologue groups enriched from U-13C-glucose, 95 have statistically significant differential labeling patterns in astrocytes challenged with LPS compared to unchallenged control cells. Only two of these groups overlap with the 32 differentially regulated peaks identified by XCMS, indicating that X13CMS uncovers different and complementary information from untargeted metabolomic studies. Like XCMS, X13CMS is implemented in R. It is available from our laboratory website at http://pattilab.wustl. edu/x13cms.php.
Heterozygous Mutation of Drosophila Opa1 Causes the Development of Multiple Organ Abnormalities in an Age-Dependent and Organ-Specific Manner

Optic Atrophy 1 (OPA1) is a ubiquitously expressed dynamin-like GTPase in the inner mitochondrial membrane. It plays important roles in mitochondrial fusion, apoptosis, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and ATP production. Mutations of OPA1 result in autosomal dominant optic atrophy (DOA). The molecular mechanisms by which link OPA1 mutations and DOA are not fully understood. Recently, we created a Drosophila model to study the pathogenesis of optic atrophy. Heterozygous mutation of Drosophila OPA1 (dOpa1) by P-element insertion results in no obvious morphological abnormalities, whereas homozygous mutation is embryonic lethal. In eye-specific somatic clones, homozygous mutation of dOpa1 causes rough (mispatterning) and glossy (decreased lens deposition) eye phenotypes in adult Drosophila. In humans, heterozygous mutations in OPA1 have been associated with mitochondrial dysfunction, which is predicted to affect multiple organs. In this study, we demonstrated that heterozygous dOpa1 mutation perturbs the visual function and an ERG profile of the Drosophila compound eye. We independently showed that antioxidants delayed the onset of mutant phenotypes in ERG and improved larval vision function in phototaxis assay. Furthermore, heterozygous dOpa1 mutation also caused decreased heart rate, increased heart arrhythmia, and poor tolerance to stress induced by electrical pacing. However, antioxidants had no effects on the dysfunctional heart of heterozygous dOpa1 mutants. Under stress, heterozygous dOpa1 mutations caused reduced escape response, suggesting abnormal function of the skeletal muscles. Our results suggest that heterozygous mutation of dOpa1 shows organ-specific pathogenesis and is associated with multiple organ abnormalities in an age-dependent and organ-specific manner.
Extensible untrusted code verification

Various mechanisms exist for enforcing that untrusted code satisfies basic but essential security properties, such as memory safety. A security mechanism needs to be trustworthy, so that users can feel secure that the mechanism can not in some way be tricked by malicious or erroneous code. It is increasingly important that security mechanisms be flexible enough to handle software systems written in more than one language. Finally a security mechanism must be a practical and usable tool; it must scale to handle realistic software systems. Standard security enforcement techniques using intermediate languages run on virtual machines are disappointing; in particular, the intermediate languages are too fixed to handle a wide variety of source languages in a natural way, even when the intermediate language is designed with flexibility in mind. In this dissertation I propose a security enforcement mechanism called the Open Verifier. The Open Verifier allows a producer of untrusted code to include with the code an untrusted verifier called an extension. The trusted framework of the Open Verifier works together with the untrusted extension to produce a complete trustworthy verification. The code producer can tailor the extension to the particular source language and compilation strategy used to produce the untrusted code, ensuring the flexibility of the system. At the same time the trusted framework is kept reasonably simple and small, and easy to trust. In order to produce a trustworthy verification from an untrusted verifier, the extension is required to emit intermediate results which can be checked by the trusted components of the system. In fact, the extension must produce the proofs of obligations produced by the trusted framework. The heart of this dissertation is the architecture and logic of that interaction. Additionally, to show that the Open Verifier is a practical and usable tool, I describe by example the process of producing an extension for a realistic language, highlighting in particular the proof development strategies.
English as medium of instruction in the new global linguistic order: Global characteristics, local consequences

The English language is continuing to establish itself as a global lingua franca in a period of unprecedented globalisation. In the period 1995n2005 educational systems worldwide have shown interest in the adoption of English as a medium of instruction. Teaching through a second language has been successful in certain educational environments. A methodological approach, ‘Content and Language Integrated Learning’, emerged in Europe in 1995. The period 2000n 2006 has seen swift adoption of this educational approach across Europe, at all levels of education. This paper argues that failure to achieve satisfactory educational outcomes when teaching through English are commonplace in certain countries. This failure is compounded by stakeholders seeing barriers to learning in terms of language, as opposed to learning needs, cognition and methodologies. By integrating language and subject teaching, various forms of educational success can be achieved where classrooms comprise learners with diverse levels of linguistic competence.
Asset Prices And Macroeconomic Uncertainty : The Role of Inflation and Monetary Policy Implications

This paper documents that uncertainty about future inflation and uncertainty about future consumption growth are channels of macroeconomic uncertainty and as such predict asset valuations. Roughly 50% of the variation in price-earnings ratios can be attributed to the variation in macroeconomic uncertainty. Inflation volatility is identified during long periods of time as the primary predictor of future valuation ratios rather than consumption growth volatility which is commonly used in the literature. Moreover, high valuation ratios sharply predict low subsequent macroeconomic uncertainty, in particular low uncertainty about future inflation. The paper highlights the importance of changes in the uncertainty proxies’ time variability in different economic states for the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on asset valuations. It provides evidence that shifts in the macroeconomy and monetary policy variables, help to explain the time-varying patterns in asset valuations during the last decades. JEL-code: G10, G12, E44
End-to-End Answer Chunk Extraction and Ranking for Reading Comprehension

This paper proposes dynamic chunk reader (DCR), an end-to-end neural reading comprehension (RC) model that is able to extract and rank a set of answer candidates from a given document to answer questions. DCR is able to predict answers of variable lengths, whereas previous neural RC models primarily focused on predicting single tokens or entities. DCR encodes a document and an input question with recurrent neural networks, and then applies a word-by-word attention mechanism to acquire question-aware representations for the document, followed by the generation of chunk representations and a ranking module to propose the top-ranked chunk as the answer. Experimental results show that DCR could achieve a 66.3% Exact match and 74.7% F1 score on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset.
Knautia dinarica (Caprifoliaceae): taxonomy, typification and update of the Italian distribution

New Italian populations of Knautia dinarica , formerly known only for Sila (Calabria, Southern Italy), were discovered in Abruzzo (Central Italy) and Basilicata (Southern Italy). In order to correctly classify these populations, a taxonomic study was carried out, including morphological and karyological analyses and the typification of the names Knautia sylvatica var. dinarica and K. arvensis f. silana . We conclude that in Italy only K. dinarica subsp. silana occurs, to be considered as endemic to central-southern Apennines and vicariant of K. dinarica subsp. dinarica , occurring in the Balkan peninsula. Both subspecies can be either diploid (2 n = 20) or tetraploid (2 n = 40), and are distinguished by the different mean shape of the basal leaves (the ratio length/width is higher in Italian plants).
Resilience of Soil Microbial Communities to Metals and Additional Stressors: DNA-Based Approaches for Assessing “Stress-on-Stress” Responses

Many microbial ecology studies have demonstrated profound changes in community composition caused by environmental pollution, as well as adaptation processes allowing survival of microbes in polluted ecosystems. Soil microbial communities in polluted areas with a long-term history of contamination have been shown to maintain their function by developing metal-tolerance mechanisms. In the present work, we review recent experiments, with specific emphasis on studies that have been conducted in polluted areas with a long-term history of contamination that also applied DNA-based approaches. We evaluate how the “costs” of adaptation to metals affect the responses of metal-tolerant communities to other stress factors (“stress-on-stress”). We discuss recent studies on the stability of microbial communities, in terms of resistance and resilience to additional stressors, focusing on metal pollution as the initial stress, and discuss possible factors influencing the functional and structural stability of microbial communities towards secondary stressors. There is increasing evidence that the history of environmental conditions and disturbance regimes play central roles in responses of microbial communities towards secondary stressors.
Neurite Outgrowth Inhibitors in Gliotic Tissue

Gliotic tissue is the major obstacle to axon regeneration after CNS injury. We designed tissue culture assays to search for molecules responsible for neurite outgrowth inhibition in gliotic tissue. All the inhibitory activity in injured brain tissue was located in a plasma membrane heparan-sulphate and condroitin-sulphate type-proteoglycan of apparent molecular weight 200 kDalton. The proteoglycan core protein (apparent MW 48,000 kD) was biologically inactive, whereas the glycosamine-glycan (GAG) chains accounted for the inhibitory activity. Because of its cell location and mode of induction, the inhibitor was called injured membrane proteoglycan, IMP. IMP prevented neurite outgrowth initiation when attached to the culture substrate and caused growth cone collapse when added in solution to neurons with already growing neurites. We concluded that IMP was responsible for preventing injured CNS fibre regeneration. Double-staining immunohistochemistry of normal and gliotic tissue with anti-IMP monoclonal antibodies together with glial and neuronal markers, permitted the unequivocal definition of inhibitor presenting cells by confocal microscopy. IMP-immunostaining in normal CNS was observed exclusively on neurons. However, after a lesion, immunostaining occurred primarily on intensely GFAP-positive reactive astrocytes, but not on OX-42 positive microglia. The availability of antibodies permitted rapid affinity-purification of the neurite inhibitor and comparison with similar molecules possibly expressed during development. IMP itself or a highly related form, was expressed in embryonic brain, reaching maximal expression around postnatal day 3 and decreasing strongly in normal adult tissue. Perinatal rat brain proteoglycans inhibited neurite outgrowth similarly, though not identically, to IMP. Our data suggest that perinatal membrane and injured membrane proteoglycans may differ in GAG composition. IMP-like immunoreactivity was also found in developing brain, predominantly in neurons in normal brain, associating after a lesion with reactive astrocytes. Thes results suggest that injury evokes re-expression of IMP previously expressed during CNS development. One of the monoclonal antibodies to IMP blocked inhibitory activity, restoring neurite outgrowth in vitro. We are currently preparing Fab fragments to test the possibility that the antibody may block inhibition of central sprout growth in vivo. The combined use of blocking antibody fragments to neurite outgrowth inhibitors and transplants of growth-promoting glia, may help in the repair brain and spinal cord lesions.
An Empirical Analysis of Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities Credit Ratings: Australian Evidence

The ultimate goal of structuring Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) transactions is to obtain a high credit rating as this has an impact on the yield obtainable and the success of the issue. Though bond rating agencies claim that their ratings reflect each agency’s opinion about an issue’s potential default risk and rely heavily on a committee’s analysis of the issuer’s ability and willingness to repay its debt and therefore researchers would not be able to replicate their ratings quantitatively (Kim 2005), we follow previous researchers who gone ahead and replicated bond ratings on the premise that the financial variables extracted from public financial statements, such as financial ratios, contain a large amount of information about a company’s credit risk (Huang et al. 2004). We use artificial neural networks (ANN) and ordinal regression (OR) as alternative methods to predict CMBS ratings. OR results show that rating agencies use only a subset of variables they describe or indicate as important to CMBS rating as some of the variables they use were statistically insignificant. Overall, ANN show superior results to OR in predicting CMBS ratings.
Bacteriophages as Potential Treatment for Urinary Tract Infections

Background: Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most prevalent microbial diseases and their financial burden on society is substantial. The continuing increase of antibiotic resistance worldwide is alarming so that well-tolerated, highly effective therapeutic alternatives are urgently needed. Objective: To investigate the effect of bacteriophages on Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae strains isolated from the urine of patients suffering from UTIs. Material and methods: Forty-one E. coli and 9 K. pneumoniae strains, isolated from the urine of patients suffering from UTIs, were tested in vitro for their susceptibility toward bacteriophages. The bacteriophages originated from either commercially available bacteriophage cocktails registered in Georgia or from the bacteriophage collection of the George Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology. In vitro screening of bacterial strains was performed by use of the spot-test method. The experiments were implemented three times by different groups of scientists. Results: The lytic activity of the commercial bacteriophage cocktails on the 41 E. coli strains varied between 66% (Pyo bacteriophage) and 93% (Enko bacteriophage). After bacteriophage adaptation of the Pyo bacteriophage cocktail, its lytic activity was increased from 66 to 93% and only one E. coli strain remained resistant. One bacteriophage of the Eliava collection could lyse all 9 K. pneumoniae strains. Conclusions: Based on the high lytic activity and the potential of resistance optimization by direct adaption of bacteriophages as reported in this study, and in view of the continuing increase of antibiotic resistance worldwide, bacteriophage therapy is a promising treatment option for UTIs highly warranting randomized controlled trials.
Depresión. Diferencias de género

The current review deals with some theories and previous research to illustrate the varied explanations for the gender differences in depression. Therefore, the criteria and findings of several researchers are exposed, as well as some explanations and limitations of the published articles. All investigators think that the rates of prevalence of depression are higher in women, but there are no agreements for the rates of recurrence that seem to be equal in both sexes. Some biological factors, such as hormonal and genetic may contribute to the differences in depression. A greater exposure to stressors has been proposed as being part of the explanation for the female excess in the risk for depression. Women are also more vulnerable to the depressogenic effect of the stressors. The men and women respond differentially to antidepressants. More recent studies have suggested that while men respond better to tricyclic antidepressants, women show a superior response to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.