Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Organic Dairy Production – Herd Characteristics and Genotype by Environment Interactions

The aim of this thesis was to gain further knowledge about the performance of cows in organic dairy production and their ability to adapt to the organic production environment. Milk production traits, fertility traits, somatic cell count (SCC) and longevity traits were analysed in organic and conventional herds and the reasons for culling in the two systems were investigated. Furthermore, the genetic correlation between traits expressed in organic and conventional production was estimated to assess the occurrence of genotype by environment interaction (GxE). The data contained records from almost all organic and conventional herds in Sweden. This thesis shows that performance of organically managed dairy cows differs from conventionally managed cows. Cows in organic herds had lower production, better fertility and higher SCC than cows in conventional herds. However, the performance of cows in organic production depended to a large extent on the lower milk production level. At a given production level, organically managed cows had slightly worse fertility but equal SCC as cows in conventional herds. Cows stayed longer in organic herds than in conventional herds and the main reason for culling differed between the production systems. The main reason for culling in organic production was poor udder health followed by low fertility. In conventional production the main reason for culling was low fertility followed by poor udder health. The results indicate that organic farmers are more concerned about udder health than conventional farmers are. Genetic correlations for production, fertility, SCC and longevity, estimated in organic and conventional dairy production were in general close to unity. The results indicate that current breeding values for Swedish Red bulls, estimated in conventional production, are adequate for organic production. Weak GxE was found for fertility traits in Swedish Holstein cows, indicating that some cows of this breed are better suited for organic production than others. However, the magnitude of GxE does not justify development of a separate breeding programme for the organic population today.
Relation between bone turnover, oestradiol, and energy balance in women distance runners.

OBJECTIVE: To explore relations between biochemical markers of bone turnover, indices of nutritional status, and serum oestradiol concentration in women distance runners. METHODS: Thirty three women distance runners of mean age (SD) 27.2 (1.8) years participated. Eighteen were defined as eumenorrhoeic, nine as amenorrhoeic, and six as oligomenorrhoeic. Mean (SD) running distance was 47.6 (22.4) km/week. Using bivariate correlation and regression analysis, serum levels of osteocalcin and bone alkaline phosphatase (BAP) and also urine deoxypyridinoline/creatinine (Dpyr/Cr) were correlated with mean daily energy balance, body mass index (BMI; kg/m2), and serum levels of total 3,5,3'-triiodothyronine and oestradiol within each group by menstrual status. RESULTS: All the amenorrhoeic women were in negative energy balance; they had a lower BMI, lower serum levels of oestradiol, triiodothyronine, osteocalcin and BAP and a lower urine Dpyr/Cr than any of the oligomenorrhoeic or eumenorrhoeic women. These variables were also lower in oligomenorrhoeic than in eumenorrhoeic women. Positive correlations were observed between serum levels of osteocalcin or BAP and both BMI and serum oestradiol concentration in amenorrhoeic, but not in oligomenorrhoeic or eumenorrhoeic women. Urine Dpyr/Cr did not correlate with any other variable within any group. Serum oestradiol concentration correlated positively with BMI in amenorrhoeic and oligomenorrhoeic, but not eumenorrhoeic women. CONCLUSIONS: Positive correlations between serum levels of bone formation markers, BMI and serum oestradiol concentration in our amenorrhoeic runners suggested that their reduced bone formation was linked to a low BMI and an oestrogen deficiency. Reduced bone turnover in amenorrhoeic distance runners has not previously been shown. These findings emphasise the importance of body mass and its possible link with a chronic energy deficit and hypothalamic dysfunction on bone remodelling balance in amenorrhoeic runners.
Finite element analysis of filament-wound composite pressure vessel under internal pressure

In this study, finite element analysis (FEA) of composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV), using commercial software ABAQUS 6.12 was performed. The study deals with the simulation of aluminum pressure vessel overwrapping by Carbon/Epoxy fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP). Finite element method (FEM) was utilized to investigate the effects of winding angle on filament-wound pressure vessel. Burst pressure, maximum shell displacement and the optimum winding angle of the composite vessel under pure internal pressure were determined. The Laminae were oriented asymmetrically for [00,00]s, [150,-150]s, [300,-300]s, [450,-450]s, [550,-550]s, [600,-600]s, [750,-750]s, [900,-900]s orientations. An exact elastic solution along with the Tsai-Wu, Tsai-Hill and maximum stress failure criteria were employed for analyzing data. Investigations exposed that the optimum winding angle happens at 550 winding angle. Results were compared with the experimental ones and there was a good agreement between them.
The Effect of Rheological Parameters on the Ballistic Properties of Shear Thickening Fluid (STF)‐Kevlar Composites

The addition of colloidal shear thickening fluids (STFs) to Kevlar fabrics has been shown to enhance the ballistic penetration resistance of the fabric, under conditions of low velocities and small target sizes. It is believed that this improvement in ballistic properties is related to the resistance of the STF to deformation at high strain rates, since the addition of Newtonian fluids to Kevlar fabric does not improve ballistic performance. However, the precise role of the STF, and its rheological properties, in the ballistic defeat process are not known. In this study, ballistic and rheological experiments are performed to determine the effect of fluid viscosity, particle loadings, and particle size and shape on the behavior of STF‐Kevlar composites. These results will be help to determine which rheological parameters are most critical to achieving enhanced composite properties.
Good practices in collecting umbilical cord and placental blood 1

Abstract Objective: to identify the factors related to the quality of umbilical cord and placental blood specimens, and define best practices for their collection in a government bank of umbilical cord and placental blood. Method: this was a descriptive study, quantitative approach, performed at a government umbilical cord and placental blood bank, in two steps: 1) verification of the obstetric, neonatal and operational factors, using a specific tool for gathering data as non-participant observers; 2) definition of best practices by grouping non-conformities observed before, during and after blood collection. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and the following statistical software: Statistica(r) and R(r). Results: while there was a correlation with obstetrical and neonatal factors, there was a larger correlation with operational factors, resulting in the need to adjust the professional practices of the nursing staff and obstetrical team involved in collecting this type of blood. Based on these non-conformities we defined best practices for nurses before, during and after blood collection. Conclusion: the best practices defined in this study are an important management tool for the work of nurses in obtaining blood specimens of high cell quality.
The impact of caregiver distress on the longitudinal development of child acute post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in pediatric injury victims.

OBJECTIVE The present study prospectively examined the development of child PTSD symptoms (PTSS) and the impact of caregiver PTSS on child PTSS following injury. METHODS One hundred and eighteen ED patients and their caregivers were interviewed in-hospital and 2- and 6-weeks posttrauma. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear regressions examined the development of PTSS. RESULTS A model combining child and caregiver 2-week PTSS into one latent family PTSS variable provided the best fit to the data. Child in-hospital avoidance symptoms predicted higher levels of 2-week family PTSS. Two-week family PTSS predicted child 6-week PTSS. Post hoc analyses revealed an interaction between in-hospital caregiver avoidance symptoms and child reexperiencing symptoms in predicting 6-week child PTSS. CONCLUSIONS Results highlight the dynamic development of child PTSS. Different symptom clusters may be related to higher PTSS at differing times posttrauma and may inform the development of time-sensitive methods of assessment and intervention for injury victims.
Drug-resistant Diarrheogenic Escherichia coli, Mexico

Diarrheogenic Escherichia coli isolates from 45 (73%) of 62 hospitalized patients were resistant to common antimicrobial drugs. Sixty-two percent were multidrug resistant, and >70% were resistant to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and ampicillin. Ciprofloxacin and cefotaxime were uniformly active. Effective and safe oral agents are needed to treat children with bacterial diarrhea.
Noise Robust Exemplar Matching Using Sparse Representations of Speech

Performing automatic speech recognition using exemplars (templates) holds the promise to provide a better duration and coarticulation modeling compared to conventional approaches such as hidden Markov models (HMMs). Exemplars are spectrographic representations of speech segments extracted from the training data, each associated with a speech unit, e.g. phones, syllables, half-words or words, and preserve the complete spectro-temporal content of the speech. Conventional exemplar-matching approaches to automatic speech recognition systems, such as those based on dynamic time warping, have typically focused on evaluation in clean conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel noise robust exemplar matching framework for automatic speech recognition. This recognizer approximates noisy speech segments as a weighted sum of speech and noise exemplars and performs recognition by comparing the reconstruction errors of different classes with respect to a divergence measure. We evaluate the system performance in keyword recognition on the small vocabulary track of the 2nd CHiME Challenge and connected digit recognition on the AURORA-2 database. The results show that the proposed system achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art noise robust recognition systems.
Exploiting Program Semantics to Place Data in Hybrid Memory

Large-memory applications like data analytics and graph processing benefit from extended memory hierarchies, and hybrid DRAM/NVM (non-volatile memory) systems represent an attractive means by which to increase capacity at reasonable performance/energy tradeoffs. Compared to DRAM, NVMs generally have longer latencies and higher energies for writes, which makes careful data placement essential for efficient system operation. Data placement strategies that resort to monitoring all data accesses and migrating objects to dynamically adjust data locations incur high monitoring overhead and unnecessary memory copies due to mispredicted migrations. We find that program semantics (specifically, global access characteristics) can effectively guide initial data placement with respect to memory types, which, in turn, makes run-time migration more efficient. We study a combined offline/online placement scheme that uses access profiling information to place objects statically and then selectively monitors run-time behaviors to optimize placements dynamically. We present a software/hardware cooperative framework, 2PP, and evaluate it with respect to state-of-the-art migratory placement, finding that it improves performance by an average of 12.1%. Furthermore, 2PP improves energy efficiency by up to 51.8%, and by an average of 18.4%. It does so by reducing run-time monitoring and migration overheads.
The Economics of Rotating Savings and Credit Association: Evidence from Ethiopia

Using a unique individual level data on the membership of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) collected in 1994 from seven major urban centres in Ethiopia, we provide one of the few econometric tests of the economic theory of ROSCAs. In recognition of the heterogeneity of rosca types across space, we provide basic information about the characteristics of roscas in urban areas of Ethiopia. In addition, we use individual and household level data to describe the characteristics of both rosca participants and non-participants. The findings from the descriptive part of the analysis indicate that most of the rosca members are female, relatively richer and the major motive to join roscas is to buy consumer durables. For instance, Over 45% of households reported that they joined roscas with a purpose to buy durables. In terms of frequency of saving, most rosca members tend to save weekly and monthly, the latter being the predominant choice and a non-negligible amount is being mobilise through the informal institutions. The econometric evidence shows an inverse relationship between volume of rosca contribution and size of rosca as predicted by theory. In addition, we find an inverse relationship between frequency of rosca draw/saving and amount of saving. The welfare position of the household-food expenditurehas been found to be a significant determinant of the volume of rosca contribution but not the decision to join rosca. Most of our findings are consistent with findings elsewhere.
Resilience of Structured Peer-to-Peer Systems

In this paper, we attempt to provide an extensive and detailed summary of existing work in the area of Structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems resilience. Broadly speaking, resilience of a P2P system is the ability of the system to defend against threats due to system dynamics (in terms of node joins and leaves) and malicious nodes. The coverage in this paper includes resilience metrics, threats, approaches to analyze resilience and enhancements proposed to individual system design features to enhance resilience. Specifically, we first discuss important design features of popular structured P2P systems, the performance metrics and several possible threats and attack scenarios that threaten the performance of structured P2P systems. We then provide a broad overview of approaches to analyze resilience employed by researchers in this area. Following this, we describe an analytical approach developed by us to analyze resilience of structured P2P systems. Our approach is Markov-Chain based and can be applied to analyze systems with relatively stable size and uniformly distributed nodes. We then discuss the insights we obtain on resilience using our analytical approach. Following in the same direction, we then discuss enhancements to individual structured P2P system design features that have been proposed by researchers to increase overall system resilience. We then discuss two of our enhancements, namely CAN-SW (CAN Small World) and RChord (Reverse Chord) to enhance resilience of the CAN and Chord system respectively. Our approaches to design these enhancements derive inspiration from the importance of redundancy and the richness in graph-theory.
Macromolecular synthesis inhibitors prevent oxidative stress-induced apoptosis in embryonic cortical neurons by shunting cysteine from protein synthesis to glutathione

Although macromolecular synthesis inhibitors have been demonstrated to prevent neuronal apoptosis in a number of paradigms, their mechanisms of protection remains unclear. Recently, we found that neuronal death resulting from cystine deprivation, glutathione loss, and oxidative stress is apoptotic and is prevented by inhibitors of macromolecular synthesis. We now report that protection is associated with enhanced availability of acid-soluble cyst(e)ine and restoration of cellular glutathione levels. N-acetylcysteine, an agent that delivers exogenous cysteine intracellularly and raises glutathione, is also protective, while buthionine sulfoximine, an inhibitor of glutathione synthesis, prevents protection by inhibitors of macromolecular synthesis. These results suggest that protection provided by these agents, in this paradigm, derives from shunting of the amino acid cysteine from global protein synthesis into the formation of the antioxidant glutathione.
Extensive genetic variability of simian immunodeficiency virus from African green monkeys

Serological surveys have revealed that 30 to 50% of wild-caught African green monkeys have antibodies reactive to simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a retrovirus related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Although the nucleotide sequence of one SIVagm isolate, Tyo1, was recently reported, the extent of genetic variability among SIVagm isolates remains to be determined. Restriction endonuclease mapping of infectious molecular clones of two SIVagm isolates (266 and 385), described in this note, revealed conservation of only 4 of 39 sites across the genome. Partial sequence analysis of the molecular clones revealed only 80% amino acid sequence conservation in the pol gene. Although the three Kenyan SIVagm isolates, Tyo1, 385, and 266, are more closely related to each other than to other primate lentiviruses, genetic variation among these three isolates is much greater than that observed previously among individual HIV type 1 (HIV-1), HIV-2, or SIVmac isolates. Less variability among HIV-1 and HIV-2 isolates could be explained by recent entry into the human population. The extensive genetic variation in these Kenyan SIVagm isolates should prompt continued examination of SIVagm variability from dispersed geographic regions; SIVagm strains much more closely related to HIV-1, HIV-2, or SIVmac which would be reasonable candidates for recent cross-species transmission may be found.
MultiScale: memory system DVFS with multiple memory controllers

The fraction of server energy consumed by the memory system has been increasing rapidly and is now on par with that consumed by processors. Recent work demonstrates that substantial memory energy can be saved with only a small, tightly-controlled performance degradation using memory Dynamic Frequency and Voltage Scaling (DVFS). Prior studies consider only servers with a single memory controller (MC); however, multicore server processors have begun to incorporate multiple MCs. We propose MultiScale, the first technique to coordinate DVFS across multiple MCs, memory channels, and memory devices. Under operating system control, MultiScale monitors application bandwidth requirements across MCs. It then uses a heuristic algorithm to select and apply a frequency combination that will minimize the overall system energy within user-specified per-application performance constraints. Our results demonstrate that MultiScale reduces system energy consumption significantly, compared to prior approaches, while respecting the user-specified performance constraints.
Transcatheter versus surgical aortic valve replacement: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised and non-randomised trials

Introduction Many patients deemed inoperable for surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) have been treated successfully by transcatheter aortic-valve replacement (TAVR). This meta-analysis is designed to evaluate the performance of TAVR in comparison with SAVR. Methods A systematic search was conducted using MEDLINE, PubMed, EMBASE, Current Contents Connect, the Cochrane library, Google Scholar, Science Direct and Web of Science. Original data were abstracted from each study and used to calculate a pooled OR and 95% CI. Results Among three randomised controlled trials (RCTs), differences between the two cohorts were not statistically significant for the frequency of stroke (OR=1.94, 95% CI=0.813 to 4.633), incidence of myocardial infarction (MI), (OR=0.765, 95% CI=0.05 to 11.76) 30-day mortality rate, 1-year mortality rate (0.82, 95% CI=0.62 to 1.09) and acute kidney injury incidence rate. The non-RCTs demonstrated that the TAVR group had an amplified frequency aortic regurgitation at discharge (OR=5.465, 95% CI=3.441 to 8.680). While differences between the two cohorts were not statistically significant for the incidence of MI (OR=0.697, 95% CI=0.22 to 2.21), stroke (OR=0.575, 95% CI=0.263 to 1.259), acute renal failure requiring haemodialysis (OR=0.943, 95% CI=0.276 to 3.222), 30-day mortality (OR=0.869, 95% CI=0.621 to 1.216) and the need for a pacemaker (OR=1.832, 95% CI=0.869 to 3.862), a lower incidence of patients needing transfusion (OR=0.349, 95% CI=0.121 to 1.005) and new-onset atrial fibrillation (OR=0.296, 95% CI=0.124 to 0.706) was seen in the TAVR group. Conclusions Randomised and observational evidence adjusted on the baseline patient’s characteristics finds a similar risk for 30 days mortality, 1-year mortality, stroke, MI and acute kidney injury in TAVR and SAVR.
Quality of Life Outcomes in Patients Living with Stoma

Background: Despite efforts to maintain the intestinal tissue and treat gastrointestinal disease, a large number of patients undergo ostomy surgery each year. Using stoma reduces the patient's quality of life (QOL) greatly. Although there are approximately 3000 patients in Iran; there is little information about the impact of stoma on their QOL. Aims: The study aims to evaluate QOL of stoma patients using a special measurement tool. Settings and Design: This survey was a cross-sectional study that was conducted on 102 random samples of stoma patients. Materials and Methods: The City of Hope Quality of Life-Ostomy Questionnaire was used for collecting demographic and clinical information and evaluating QOL. Statistical Analysis Used: Univariate and multiple regression analyses were performed to identify predictors of QOL. Results: The mean score for the overall QOL for stoma patients was 7.48 ± 0.9. 70% of patients were dissatisfied with sexual activities. More than half of them reported feelings of depression following stoma surgery. Univariate analysis indicated that factors such as the type of ostomy (temporary/permanent), the underlying disease that had led to the stoma, depression, problem with location of ostomy, and change in clothing style had significant effects on overall QOL and its subscales (P < 0.05). The results of the regression analyses showed that only depression and problem with the location of ostomy were statistically significant in predicting patients’ QOL and its subscales (P < 0.05). Conclusions: The findings demonstrated that living with stoma influences the overall aspect of QOL. Education for the patients and their families is important for improving the stoma patients’ QOL. Sexual and psychological consultation may also improve patients’ QOL.