Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Water Saving in Rice-Wheat Systems

Abstract Water shortage is a major constraint to sustaining and increasing the productivity of rice-wheat systems. Saving water can be elusive in that reducing seepage, percolation and runoff losses from fields does not necessarily save water if it can be recaptured at some other temporal or spatial scale, for example by groundwater pumping. Many technologies appear to save substantial amounts of water through reducing irrigation water requirement, but whether these are true water savings is uncertain as components of the water balance have not been quantified. Such technologies include laser levelling, direct drilling, raised beds, non-ponded rice culture and irrigation scheduling. It is questionable whether puddling saves water. Reducing non-beneficial evaporation losses is a true water saving, and optimal planting time of rice to avoid the period of highest evaporative demand and changing to non-ponded rice culture can save significant amounts of water. However, moving away from puddled, ponded to more aerobic rice culture sometimes brings new production problems. Furthermore, farmers faced with unreliable water supplies need to store water on their fields as insurance, and puddling assists retention of water during the rice crop. Rehabilitation and improvement of canal and power systems in Asia, funded by charging according to use, are required to facilitate adoption of many water saving technologies. Australian farmers pay fixed plus volumetric charges for water to cover the cost of infrastructure and operation of irrigation systems, which are continuously being improved to provide water on demand and minimise losses. They are able to plan their plantings based on knowledge of the likely amount of irrigation water available each season and crop water use requirement, and thus avoid wasting water and financial loss by overplanting and crop failure. Such approaches have the potential to increase production and water productivity in Asia, however the challenge would be to apply them in an equitable way that benefits many millions of subsistence farmers.
What Will You Do When You Grow Up?: The Social Construction of Children's Occupational Preferences

Children's occupational preferences can provide insights into the ways in which they learn about adult work in the society in which they live. While in traditional societies occupational knowledge and occupational identity can be seen as developing hand in hand, and children can be seen as legitimate peripheral participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in adult work, in industrialised societies children's opportunities to observe and participate in adult work are limited. This article examines the resources which children in such societies use in constructing ideas about their future occupations, and considers whether these ideas can be seen as occupational identities. Finally, implications for the curriculum are examined.
Cooperative crug isolation

With the widespread deployment of multi-core hardware, writing concurrent programs has become inescapable. This has made fixing concurrency bugs (or crugs) critical in modern software systems. Static analysis techniques to find crugs such as data races and atomicity violations are not scalable, while dynamic approaches incur high run-time overheads. Crugs pose a greater challenge since they manifest only under specific execution interleavings that may not arise during in-house testing. Thus there is a pressing need for a low-overhead program monitoring technique that can be used post-deployment. We present Cooperative Crug Isolation (CCI), a low-overhead instrumentation technique to isolate the root causes of crugs. CCI inserts instrumentation that records occurrences of specific thread interleavings at run-time by tracking whether successive accesses to a memory location were by the same thread or by distinct threads. The overhead of this instrumentation is kept low by using a novel cross-thread random sampling strategy. We have implemented CCI on top of the Cooperative Bug Isolation framework. CCI correctly diagnoses bugs in several nontrivial concurrent applications while incurring only 2--7% run-time overhead.
Mixed-methods evaluation of a novel online STI results service

Objectives Evidence on optimal methods for providing STI test results is lacking. We evaluated an online results service, developed as part of an eSexual Health Clinic (eSHC). Methods We evaluated the online results service using a mixed-methods approach within large exploratory studies of the eSHC. Participants were chlamydia- positive and negative users of online postal self-sampling services in six National Chlamydia Screening Programme (NCSP) areas and chlamydia-positive patients from two genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinics between 21 July 2014 and 13 March 2015. Participants received a discreetly worded National Health Service ’NHS no-reply’ text message (SMS) informing them that their test results were ready and providing a weblink to a secure website. Participants logged in with their date of birth and mobile telephone or clinic number. Chlamydia-positive patients were offered online management. All interactions with the eSHC system were automatically logged and their timing recorded. Post-treatment, a service evaluation survey (n=152) and qualitative interviews (n=36) were conducted by telephone. Chlamydia-negative patients were offered a short online survey (n=274). Data were integrated. Results 92% (134/146) of NCSP chlamydia-positive patients, 82% (161/197) of GUM chlamydia-positive patients and 89% (1776/1997) of NCSP chlamydia-negative participants accessed test results within 7 days. 91% of chlamydia-positive patients were happy with the results service; 64% of those who had tested previously found the results service better or much better than previous experiences. 90% of chlamydia-negative survey participants agreed they would be happy to receive results this way in the future. Interviewees described accessing results with ease and appreciated the privacy and control the two-step process gave them. Conclusion A discreet SMS to alert users/patients that results are available, followed by provision of results via a secure website, was highly acceptable, irrespective of test result and testing history. The eSHC results service afforded users privacy and control over when they viewed results without compromising access.
Noroviruses in Archival Samples

Application of recent techniques to detect current pathogens in archival effluent samples collected and concentrated in 1987 lead to the characterization of norovirus GGII.6 Seacroft, unrecognized until 1990 in a clinical sample. Retrospective studies will likely increase our knowledge about waterborne transmission of emerging pathogens.
Lethal Mutagenesis in Viruses and Bacteria

In this work we study how mutations that change physical properties of cell proteins (stability) affect population survival and growth. We present a model in which the genotype is presented as a set folding free energies of cell proteins. Mutations occur upon replication, so stabilities of some proteins in daughter cells differ from those in the parent cell by amounts deduced from the distribution of mutational effects on protein stability. The genotype–phenotype relationship posits that the cell's fitness (replication rate) is proportional to the concentration of its folded proteins and that unstable essential proteins result in lethality. Simulations reveal that lethal mutagenesis occurs at a mutation rate close to seven mutations in each replication of the genome for RNA viruses and at about half that rate for DNA-based organisms, in accord with earlier predictions from analytical theory and experimental results. This number appears somewhat dependent on the number of genes in the organisms and the organism's natural death rate. Further, our model reproduces the distribution of stabilities of natural proteins, in excellent agreement with experiments. We find that species with high mutation rates tend to have less stable proteins compared to species with low mutation rates.
Serological, colostral and milk responses of cows vaccinated with a single dose of a combined vaccine against rotavirus, coronavirus and Escherichia coli F5 (K99)

Twenty-five Ayrshire/Friesian cows were vaccinated once with a new combined vaccine against rotavirus, coronavirus and Escherichia coli F5 (K99) or given a saline placebo 31 days before the first expected calving date. Blood samples were taken from the cows at intervals from vaccination until seven days after calving and from their calves up to 28 days after birth, and colostrum and milk samples were collected from the cows at intervals for 28 days after calving. There was a significant increase in the mean specific antibody titre against all three antigens in the serum of the vaccinated animals (even in the presence of pre-existing antibody) which was accompanied by increased levels of protective antibodies to rotavirus, coronavirus and E coli F5 (K99) in their colostrum and milk for at least 28 days.
Sibship Composition, Mealtime Behaviors, and the Weight Status of Early School-Age Children.

Childhood obesity continues to be a public health concern, and effective intervention strategies are needed. Understanding the associations of family structure and functioning with child weight status can help inform family-based interventions and optimize their outcomes. The association between sibship composition (i.e., birth order and number and sex of siblings) and child weight status has not been well established or fully explored. The objective of this dissertation was to examine the association between sibship composition and child weight status, and to investigate maternal feeding behavior, child eating behavior, and sibling interactions during mealtimes as pathways underlying this association. Three analytic samples (N=273, N=274, and N=75) were selected from an initial cohort of 301 low-income mother-child dyads based on specific inclusion criteria and covariates of interest for each study. Participants were recruited from Head Start facilities in South-Central Michigan. During study visits, participants completed questionnaires, anthropometry, and a videotaped laboratory mealtime observation. Participants also completed 3 videotaped family mealtime observations at home. Multiple logistic regression was used to examine the association of birth order and number and sex of siblings with odds of overweight or obesity. Path analysis was used to examine maternal feeding behavior as well as child eating behavior as mediators in the association of birth order with child overweight or obesity. Sibling interactions during mealtimes were coded from the family mealtime observation videos, and path analysis was used to examine encouragements to eat received by the index child (IC) from the sibling as a mediator in the association of birth order and sex of sibling with child body mass index z-score (BMIz). Among the analytic sample of 273, only children and youngest siblings had higher odds of overweight or obesity compared to oldest siblings (OR: 4.18, 95% CI: 1.67,10.46 and OR: 3.21, 95% CI: 1.41,7.33, respectively). Having younger siblings and having at least one brother were associated with lower odds (OR: 0.38, 95% CI: 0.21,0.69 and OR: 0.47, 95% CI: 0.28,0.81, respectively). Among the analytic sample of 274, the association between only child status and greater likelihood of overweight or obesity was fully mediated by higher maternal discouragement to eat and lower maternal praise (all p values < 0.05). The association between youngest sibling status and greater likelihood of overweight or obesity was partially mediated by lower maternal praise and lower child food fussiness (all p values < 0.05). Among the analytic sample of 75, being the younger sibling in a sibling dyad was associated with the IC receiving more encouragements to eat from the sibling (β: 0.93, 95% CI: 0.59, 1.26, p<0.0001). However, the IC having a sister compared with a brother was not associated with receiving more encouragements to eat from the sibling (β: 0.18, 95% CI: -0.09, 0.47, p=0.20). The IC receiving more
Cooperation and Group Size in the N-Person Prisoners' Dilemma

This study explores the relationship between group size and member cooperation when individual and group interests conflict. Existing theories incorrectly imply that larger groups should experience more difficulty in providing “public goods” (goods whose benefits are not confined to the purchaser). A theoretically based typology that identifies nine systematic patterns associated with changes in group size and parameters of individual and group payoff structure is presented. The typology describes nine different ways in which group size can affect cooperation in the provision of public goods. In a computer-administered experiment using three of these nine types and group sizes of three, six, and nine, 90 college students were given sequences of opportunities to choose between “cooperation” (which benefited everyone) and “noncooperation” (which benefited the chooser but harmed everyone else). For one of these types, a counter-intuitive but theoretically predicted positive relationship between group size and cooperation was found. Two explanations for a theoretically unexpected negative relation between group size and cooperation in the other conditions are developed, one based on Steiner's concept of a conjunctive task, the other based on the decreasing information value of responses in larger groups.
Cardiac Surgery, Carotid Stenosis, and Stroke Prevention

Abstract Stroke following cardiac surgery is a major source of morbidity and mortality. In patients undergoing cardiac surgery, the presence of severe carotid stenosis is associated with a higher incidence of postoperative stroke. Carotid revascularization procedures, such as carotid endarterectomy and stenting, are frequently performed under such circumstances in an effort to reduce the incidence of stroke. The available literature suggests that most postoperative strokes are not directly related to carotid stenosis. Synchronous carotid revascularization and cardiac surgery renders a higher risk of cardiovascular complications. In this article, we summarize the incidences of postoperative stroke and carotid stenosis in this population, discuss the pathogenesis of stroke in these patients, and propose strategies for managing patients undergoing cardiac surgery with severe carotid stenosis.
Constructing Composite Likelihoods in General Random Fields

We propose a simple estimator based on composite likelihoods for parameter learning in random field models. The estimator can be applied to all discrete graphical models such as Markov random fields and conditional random fields, including ones with higher-order energies. It is computationally efficient because it requires only inference over treestructured subgraphs of the original graph, and it is consistent, that is, it asymptotically gives the optimal parameter estimate in the model class. We verify these conceptual advantages in synthetic experiments and demonstrate the difficulties encountered by popular alternative estimation approaches.
Categorical Scaling of Duration Bisection in Pigeons (Columba livia), Mice (Mus musculus), and Humans (Homo sapiens)

A fundamental assumption underlying research in translational neuroscience is that animal models represent many of the same neurocognitive mechanisms and decision processes used by humans. Clear demonstrations of such correspondences will be crucial to the discovery of the neurobiological underpinnings of higher-level cognition. One domain likely to support fruitful comparisons is interval timing, because humans and other animals appear to share basic similarities in their ability to discriminate the durations of events in the seconds-to-minutes range. Here, we report that in a duration-bisection procedure using a series of anchor durations ranging from 2 through 5 s, pigeon, mouse, and human subjects classified a given signal duration as subjectively shorter than an adjacent, physically shorter signal duration when the two durations lay on opposite sides of a putative category boundary. These bisection reversals provide strong evidence for continuity of temporal cognition across a wide range of vertebrate species.
The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events

We challenge the widespread presumption that matter and objects are ontologically prior to processes and events, and also the less widespread but increasingly popular view that processes and events are ontologically prior to matter and objects. Instead we advance a third view according to which each of these pairs of categories is ontologically dependent on the other. In particular, taking a cue from an ontology of devices, we identify the object as an interface between those processes which are internal to it and those which are external to it and which it may be said to enact, thereby linking objects intrinsically to the processes in which they are involved as well as providing a more powerful determinant of object identity than more traditional, non-dynamic criteria based on demarcation from the environment. The internal processes are themselves external processes in relation to the components of the object which enact them, leading to a potentially open-ended recursive decomposition of both objects and processes in a complex web of mutual interdependency. We also discuss how matter is related to objects, and processes to events, bringing the four categories together in a diagram which clarifies the relations between them - often considered problematic - and establishes a framework for a highly general top-level ontology.
To go or not to go for the sell: Regulatory focus and personal sales performance

Selling products and services is a central function in organizations. Although explaining sales success has mainly been approached from broad trait perspectives, tactical decision-making potentially explains additional variance in this crucial outcome. We propose and find that promotion focus positively predicts sales agents’ success, while prevention focus negatively predicts sales success. These relations were significant while controlling for five-factor traits. Predictors were measured before participants started on the job; outcome was the total number of sales participants made. As such, results evidence incremental validity of regulatory focus in predicting objective sales performance.
Expression of Somatostatin Receptor 2 in Somatotropinoma Correlated with the Short-Term Efficacy of Somatostatin Analogues

The expression of somatostatin receptor subtypes (SSTRs) in pituitary growth hormone- (GH-) secreting adenomas may predict the response to somatostatin analogues (SSA). Our aim was to evaluate the value of the immunohistochemical (IHC) scores of 2 subtypes, SSTR2 and SSTR5, in predicting the short-term efficacy of SSA therapy in patients with active acromegaly. Ninety-three newly diagnosed acromegalic patients were included in our study. These patients were categorized into either a SSA-pretreated group (SA, n = 63) or a direct-surgery group (DS, n = 30), depending on whether or not presurgical SSA treatment was received. IHC analysis, using a 12-grade scoring system, with rabbit monoclonal antibodies against SSTR2 and SSTR5, was performed on all adenoma tissues. The reduction of GH, IGF-1, and tumor size after treatment with SSA for 3 months was measured. Compared with that in the DS group, SSTR2 expression was lower in the SA group. Additionally, in the SA group, SSTR2 expression was positively correlated with the reduction of IGF-1 and tumor volume. However, there was no correlation between the SSTR5 score and the efficacy of SSA. In conclusion, the protein expression of SSTR2, but not of SSTR5, is a valuable indicator in predicting biochemical and tumor size response to short-term SSA treatment in acromegalic patients.
Transmetatarsal Amputation Prosthesis with Carbon-Fiber Plate: Enhanced Gait Function

Tang SFT, Chen CPC, Chen MJL, Chen WP, Leong CP, Chu NK: Transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis with carbon-fiber plate: Enhanced gait function. Am J Phys Med Rehabil 2004;83:124–130. ObjectiveTo determine whether the design of a transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis with a carbon-fiber plate would improve gait pattern in patients with transmetatarsal amputations. DesignIn the gait laboratory in a tertiary medical center, eight male patients with transmetatarsal amputations were recruited. Nine able-bodied male volunteers were recruited as the control group. A full-length standard shoe and a transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis with a carbon-fiber plate were the footwear used. Our transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis included a custom-molded insole, a mounted toe filler, and a thin, lightweight, carbon-fiber plate incorporated directly beneath the insole. ResultsAfter wearing the transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis with a carbon-fiber plate, the results of the kinetic and kinematic studies were summarized. ConclusionThe transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis with a carbon-fiber plate improved gait pattern significantly in patients with transmetatarsal amputations. Drastic shoe modifications are not necessary to have the prosthesis inserted. The carbon-fiber plate functions like the spring-steel shank within the sole of the shoe. The carbon-fiber plate, the toe filler, and the total-contact insole are all mounted as a whole to ensure better foot contact. Therefore, our transmetatarsal amputation prosthesis with a carbon-fiber plate can be a good alternative choice of footwear in patients with transmetatarsal amputations.
Lack of association between aspirin-triggered 15-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid release and mast cell/eosinophil activation in nasal polyps from aspirin-sensitive patients.

BACKGROUND The mechanism of aspirin sensitivity in patients with asthma and rhinosinusitis has been attributed to arachidonic acid metabolism abnormalities. OBJECTIVE We aimed to test whether aspirin-triggered generation of 15-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (15-HETE) in nasal polyp dispersed cells (NPDCs) from aspirin-sensitive patients is associated with activation of inflammatory cells. METHODS Polyps were obtained from 11 aspirin-sensitive and 19 aspirin-tolerant patients with chronic rhinosinusitis. NPDCs were stimulated by aspirin or calcium ionophore. Levels of 15-HETE, leukotriene (LT) C4, eosinophil cationic protein (ECP), and tryptase were measured in NPDC supernatant. RESULTS NPDCs from aspirin-sensitive patients contained more eosinophils (14% vs 9%, P < .05) and released 2.4-fold more ECP (P < .01) at baseline. Stimulation with aspirin (200 microM) resulted in a significant increase in 15-HETE generation only in tissue from aspirin-sensitive patients (mean increase, 82%) but did not induce any increase in the release of LTC4, ECP, or tryptase. Preincubation with calcium ionophore resulted in significantly enhanced generation of 15-HETE, ECP, tryptase, and LTC4 in patients from both groups. Incubation of NPDCs with misoprostol inhibited aspirin-induced 15-HETE generation in aspirin-sensitive patients and calcium ionophore-induced 15-HETE, ECP, and tryptase release in both aspirin-sensitive and aspirin-tolerant patients. CONCLUSION Our study demonstrated that aspirin-induced 15-HETE generation in nasal polyps from aspirin-sensitive patients is not associated with activation of mast cells and eosinophils. Misoprostol has a potent inhibitory effect on the activation of cells derived from the site of nasal mucosal inflammation, regardless of sensitivity to aspirin.