Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimation of Genetic and Phenotypic Parameters for Production Traits and Somatic Cell Count for Jersey Dairy Cattle in Zimbabwe

Genetic and phenotypic parameters for production traits and somatic cell count (SCC) for Jersey dairy cattle in Zimbabwe were estimated. A total of 10986 lactation records were obtained from Zimbabwe Livestock Identification Trust, with cows calving in the period from 1996 to 2008. An ASReml program fitting an animal model was used for the analyses. Heritability estimates for milk yield, fat yield, protein yield, fat percentage, protein percentage, and Log10SCC were 0.30, 0.32, 0.33, 0.42, 0.44, and 0.08, respectively. The corresponding repeatability estimates were 0.39, 0.38, 0.39, 0.49, 0.51, and 0.16, respectively. The genetic and phenotypic correlations between different production traits ranged from −0.86 to 0.95 and from −0.88 to 0.98, respectively. The genetic and phenotypic correlations between production traits and Log10SCC were weak almost nonsignificantly differentl from zero. The results imply that milk traits for Jersey dairy cattle in Zimbabwe are more heritable. Therefore, these traits may be preferred by breeders as selection criteria for development of effective genetic improvement programme.
Asymptotic analysis of GPS systems fed by heterogeneous long-tailed sources

In this paper we consider a multi-buffered system consisting of N buffers accessed by heterogeneous long-tailed sessions and served according to the generalized processor sharing (GPS) discipline with weights {/spl phi//sub i/}. We assume that sessions arrive according to a Poisson process. A session of type i transmits at rate r/sub i/ and has a duration whose distribution is longtailed of the form P(/spl tau//sub i/>t)/spl sim//spl alpha//sub i/t/sup -(1+/spl beta/i)/ where /spl alpha//sub i/, /spl beta//sub i/>0. We obtain the large buffer asymptotics under very general stability hypotheses. In particular we show that recent results on the GPS asymptotics obtained by Borst, Boxma and Jelenkovic (see IEEE INFOCOM, vol.2, p.912-21, 2000) can be recovered and there are important cases for which we obtain exact asymptotes for which the previous results do not apply. The methodology exploits the sample-path description of the workload evolution under GPS as well as the marked Poisson structure of the inputs.
Negative Messages Spread Rapidly and Widely on Social Media

We investigate the relation between the sentiment of a message on social media and its virality, defined as the volume and the speed of message diffusion. We analyze 4.1 million messages (tweets) obtained from Twitter. Although factors affecting message diffusion on social media have been studied previously, we focus on message sentiment, and reveal how the polarity of message sentiment affects its virality. The virality of a message is measured by the number of message repostings (retweets) and the time elapsed from the original posting of a message to its Nth reposting (N-retweet time). Through extensive analyses, we find that negative messages are likely to be reposted more rapidly and frequently than positive and neutral messages. Specifically, the reposting volume of negative messages is 1.2--1.6-fold that of positive and neutral messages, and negative messages spread at 1.25 times the speed of positive and neutral messages when the diffusion volume is large.
Simultaneous pharmacokinetic modeling of cocaine and its metabolites, norcocaine and benzoylecgonine, after intravenous and oral administration in rats.

To accurately assess the mechanism of involvement of the active metabolite norcocaine in the effects of oral cocaine, it is essential to determine the rate and extent of the formation of norcocaine. Although this study was designed specifically for this aim, it was also of interest to characterize the metabolite kinetics of benzoylecgonine for comparative purpose. We first characterized the pharmacokinetics of cocaine, norcocaine, and benzoylecgonine by the i.v. route of administration; all three drugs decayed biexponentially. These pharmacokinetic estimates were then used for determination of the formation of norcocaine and benzoylecgonine after i.v. and p.o. (20-40 mg/kg) cocaine administration. Although t(1/2alpha), and t(1/2beta) were similar across the three compounds, the values of volume of distribution in the central compartment and clearance for benzoylecgonine were much smaller than those of cocaine and norcocaine. Norcocaine was not detected following i.v. cocaine; however, serum norcocaine concentrations were as high as those of oral cocaine. Both routes of cocaine administration produced benzoylecgonine. A pharmacokinetic model for the metabolite kinetics was proposed by sequentially adding the models that most adequately described the formation of each metabolite to the model of cocaine. For oral cocaine, the absolute bioavailability was 3.48%, whereas 6.04 and 2.26% of cocaine were converted to benzoylecgonine and norcocaine, respectively, during first-pass absorption regardless of dose. Furthermore, the majority of norcocaine and 92% of benzoylecgonine were formed during the first-pass absorption, leaving 8% of benzoylecgonine produced in systemic circulation. The profile of norcocaine as a metabolite confirmed the involvement of norcocaine in cocaine's behavioral effects.
Coevolutionary Computation

This article proposes a general framework for the use of coevolution to boost the performance of genetic search. It combines coevolution with yet another biologically inspired technique, called lifetime fitness evaluation (LTFE). Two unrelated problems—neural net learning and constraint satisfaction—are used to illustrate the approach. Both problems use predator-prey interactions to boost the search. In contrast with traditional single population genetic algorithms (GAs), two populations constantly interact and coevolve. However, the same algorithm can also be used with different types of coevolutionary interactions. As an example, the symbiotic coevolution of solutions and genetic representations is shown to provide an elegant solution to the problem of finding a suitable genetic representation. The approach presented here greatly profits from the partial and continuous nature of LTFE. Noise tolerance is one advantage. Even more important, LTFE is ideally suited to deal with coupled fitness landscapes typical for coevolution.
Anthropocene – a cautious welcome from environmental sociology?

This paper concerns the way in which environmental sociologists might approach the concept of ‘the Anthropocene’. As our title suggests, we extend in the paper a cautious welcome to this concept. Such a stance – an openness to ‘natural’ accounts accompanied by cautionary tales – has a long history within environmental sociology. In the paper, we document how the concept of the Anthropocene presents environmental sociology with a global environmental narrative that supports many of its own modes of thought. The concept of the Anthropocene reinforces, for example, the value of scholarship scrutinising ontological relationality, political-economic change, inter-disciplinary collaboration and cause-effect dynamics. At the same time, contemporary narratives of the Anthropocene seem to pose challenges for environmental sociology. We suggest that these narratives open up a need to think carefully about issues of naturalisation, difference, knowledge, agency and justice. We suggest that environmental sociology needs to draw on the full repertoire of its discipline in order to establish a critical-constructive relation between its own ways of thinking and those that are currently prominent within the narrative of the Anthropocene.
A Primer on Monotone Operator Methods

This tutorial paper presents the basic notation and results of monotone operators and operator splitting methods, with a focus on convex optimization. A very wide variety of algorithms, ranging from classical to recently developed, can be derived in a uniform way. The approach is to pose the original problem to be solved as one of finding a zero of an appropriate monotone operator; this problem in turn is then posed as one of finding a fixed point of a related operator, which is done using the fixed point iteration. A few basic convergence results then tell us conditions under which the method converges, and, in some cases, how fast. This approach can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s, and is still an active area of research. This primer is a self-contained gentle introduction to the topic.
The Optimal Distribution of Practice for the Acquisition of L2 Morphology: A Conceptual Replication and Extension

This study examined optimal learning schedules for second language (L2) acquisition of a morphological structure. Sixty participants studied the simple and complex morphological rules of a novel miniature language system so as to use them for oral production. They engaged in four training sessions in either shorter spaced (3.3-day interval) or longer spaced (7-day interval) learning conditions. From the beginning of the third training session, the 3.3-day interval group started to provide more accurate target rules than the 7-day interval group. This superior performance by the 3.3-day interval group was maintained on both 7- and 28-day delayed posttests with small to medium effect sizes. No significant difference was found between the two groups for utterance speed, nor did linguistic complexity exert an influence on the effectiveness of different distributions of learning conditions.
Representativeness errors for radiosonde observations

SUMMARY Data from the United Kingdom operational upper air network, as well as from special radiosonde trials, have been analysed to provide statistics of spatial and temporal atmospheric variations. These statistics are applied to a study of the network performance and of representativeness errors associated with the use of the data in synoptic analysis. The results also have application to comparisons between measurements from radiosondes and those from other observing systems. For example, it is demonstrated that minimum collocation errors associated with radiosonde temperature measurements located at the centre of a satellite radiometer scan spot of radius 55 km are <1 degC for levels in the troposphere and lower stratosphere.
The Association between Plasma D-dimer Levels and Community-Acquired Pneumonia

BACKGROUND: Plasma D-dimer levels are directly related to the intra- and extra-vascular coagulation that occurs in acute and chronic lung damage in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). OBJECTIVES: This study examines the relationship between the severity of community-acquired pneumonia and D-dimer levels. In addition, the study examines the correlations among community-acquired pneumonia, the radiological extent of the disease and mortality. METHODS: The Pneumonia Severity Index was used to classify patients into five groups. Patients were treated at home or in the hospital according to the guidelines for community-acquired pneumonia. Blood samples were taken from the antecubital vein with an injector and placed into citrated tubes. After they were centrifuged, the samples were evaluated with the quantitative latex method. RESULTS: The study included 60 patients who had been diagnosed with community-acquired pneumonia (mean age 62.5 ± 11.7) and 24 healthy controls (mean age 59.63 ± 6.63). The average plasma D-dimer levels were 337.3 ± 195.1ng/mL in the outpatient treatment group, 691.0 ± 180.5 in the inpatient treatment group, 1363.2 ± 331.5 ng/mLin the intensive care treatment group and 161.3 ± 38.1ng/mL in the control group (p<0.001). The mean D-dimer plasma level was 776.1 ± 473.5ng/mL in patients with an accompanying disease and 494.2 ± 280.1 ng/mL in patients without an accompanying disease (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Plasma D-dimer levels were increased even in community-acquired pneumonia patients who did not have an accompanying disease that would normally cause such an increase.
Reasoning in High Schools: Do it with ASP!

We report on a teaching experiment carried on in some high schools of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Starting with a two-hours talk on Artificial Intelligence and games proposed two years ago, the project went on with a short course on modeling with Answer Set Programming for students last year. In the current third year a course addressed to (high school) teachers has been organized. The aim is to prepare with them didactical material for their students to be used in the following years in the same schools, and possibly in other schools, without the need of lectures held by an external logic programming expert.
Mucociliary and long-term particle clearance in the airways of healthy non-smokers

Spherical monodisperse ferromagnetic iron oxide particles of 1.9 µm geometric and 4.2 µm aerodynamic diameter were inhaled by 13 healthy non-smokers using the shallow bolus technique. The bolus width was 100 ml and the penetration front depth was 150+/-27 ml. The mean flow rate during inhalation and exhalation was 250 ml/s. The Fowler dead space and the phase1 dead space of the airways was 282+/-49 ml and 164+/-34 ml, respectively. Deposition was below 20 % without breath holding and 51+/-8 % after 8 s breath holding time. We attempted to confine the bolus deposition to the bronchial airways by limiting the bolus front depth to the phase1 dead space volume. Particle retention was measured by the magnetopneumographic method over a period of 9 months. Particle clearance from the airways showed a fast and a slow phase, 49+/-9 % followed the fast phase with a mean half time of 3.0+/-1.6 hours and characterized the mucociliary clearance. The remaining fraction was cleared slowly with a half time of 109+/-78 days. The slow clearance phase was comparable to clearance measurements from the lung periphery of healthy non-smokers, which allowed macrophage-dependent clearance mechanisms of the slow cleared fraction to be taken into account. Despite the fact that part of the slowly cleared particles may originate from peripheral deposition, the data demonstrate that mucociliary clearance does not remove all particles being deposited in the airways and that a significant fraction undergoes long-term retention mechanisms, the origin of which is still under discussion.
Preparation and Characterization of Modified Soda Lignin with Polyethylene Glycol

Soda lignin does not have thermal flowing characteristics and it is impossible for it to be further thermally molded. To achieve the fusibility of soda lignin for fiber preparation by melt-spinning, an effective method for soda lignin modification was conducted by cooking it with polyethylene glycol (PEG) 400 at various ratios. The higher the ratio of PEG that was used, the more PEG molecular chains were grafted at the alpha carbon of the soda lignin through ether bonds, resulting in lower thermal transition temperatures and more excellent fusibility. The modified soda lignin with a weight ratio of lignin to PEG of 1:4 exhibited a relative thermal stability of molten viscosity at selected temperatures. Thereafter, the resultant fusible soda lignin was successfully melt-spun into filaments with an average diameter of 33 ± 5 μm, which is smaller than that of some industrial lignins. Accordingly, it is possible to utilize soda lignin to produce fibrous carbonaceous materials.
Low temperature fabrication of highly transparent conducting SnO2–ZnO films by inexpensive, simplified spray technique

Abstract Transparent conducting SnO2–ZnO films were fabricated by employing an inexpensive, simplified spray technique using a perfume atomiser at relatively low substrate temperature (360±5°C) compared with the conventional spray pyrolysis method. The structural studies reveal that the films are crystalline in nature with preferential orientation along the (101) plane. The average optical transmittance in the visible range is >88%. The electrical resistivity increases with the increase in Zn concentration. The low temperature coefficient of resistance (–1·191 K–1) shows that the films have good thermal stability. The wide band gap (3·50–3·56 eV) and reasonable figure of merit (1·63 × 10–2 Ω–1) of the films make them desirable candidates for low cost solar cell window layers. Thus, this simplest spray technique can be used as a promising alternative to conventional spray for the massive production of economic SnO2–ZnO films for solar cell applications.
Essays on Economic Dynamics and Policy Problems

In these essays, I consider the economic dynamics that have important implications to policy problems. I use the dynamic optimization and computational methods to answer questions related to interesting economic problems. In the first essay, ”Optimal Monetary Policy with Labor Market Frictions and Real Wage Rigidity: the Role of the Wage Channel,” I use a monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to consider the Ramsey-optimal monetary policy. I introduce right-to-manage bargaining into the labor search model instead of efficient bargaining, and find that price stability is restored in the Ramsey-optimal monetary policy without real wage rigidity. Right-to-manage means that firms can adjust hours per worker and have a labor demand schedule on real wages. The wage channel makes price markups stable by smoothing hiring cost, and real wages and hours per worker are determined as if they are in the Walrasian labor market with a variable wage markup. With real wage rigidity, wage markups are countercyclical and volatile, and deviation from price stability is optimal. Whereas a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing unemployment with endogenous price markups is important for the optimal volatility of inflation in efficient bargaining, wage markups and labor market inefficiencies, stemming from real wage rigidity via the wage channel, play a crucial role in right-to-manage bargaining.
ELECTRON THERMALIZATION AND PHOTON EMISSION FROM MAGNETIZED COMPACT SOURCES

We present detailed calculations of the electron thermalization by synchrotron self-absorption accounting for cooling by Compton scattering. For the first time, we solve the coupled kinetic equations for electrons and photons without any approximations on the relevant cross-sections and compute self-consistently the resulting electron and photon distributions. The results presented in this contribution may be applied to the magnetized coronae around galactic black hole accretion disks.
Examining self-efficacy as a mediator on the relation between bullying role behaviors and academic success in early adolescence

EXAMINING SELF-EFFICACY AS A MEDIATOR ON THE RELATION BETWEEN BULLYING ROLE BEHAVIORS AND ACADEMIC SUCCESS IN EARLY ADOLESCENCE Christina Piccirillo, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Northern Illinois University, 2016 Michelle K. Demaray, Director The purpose of this project was to explore the mediating effects of social and academic self-efficacy on the relations between bullying role behaviors and academic achievement. Research has primarily focused on the bully and the victim in bullying situations, which neglects to examine the experiences of those who witness or are involved in the aggressive act, including assisting bullies, defending victims, and ignoring others. As a result, research has overlooked how other bullying roles relate to academic performance. However, research has explored how various bullying role behaviors relate to self-efficacy. Additionally, self-efficacy has been associated with academic performance, such as GPA. The purpose of the current study was to add to the existing bullying role behavior literature by investigating the relations among bully participant role behaviors, self-efficacy beliefs, and GPA. This project investigated the mediational effect of social and academic self-efficacy on the relation between bullying role behaviors and GPA. The mediation models were evaluated separately by gender to differentiate this effect in males and females. In other words, does social and academic self-efficacy explain the association between bully participant role behaviors and GPA in males and females? Data were collected on 7-grade students (N= 348). In general, most models exploring the association between bullying role behaviors and GPA through social and academic self-efficacy had consistent results in the male and female samples; however, there were some significant results that were supported in females only (victimization experience). When exploring the mediation models, individuals who engaged in bullying, assisting, outsider behaviors or experience victimization had negative associations with social self-efficacy and academic self-efficacy; there were no significant positive associations between defending behavior and self-efficacy. Across all models, social and academic self-efficacy were significantly and positively associated. Additionally, all or most of the models found significant positive associations between academic self-efficacy and GPA and significant and negative associations between social self-efficacy and GPA. The results of the mediational model varied for each bullying role behavior to suggest that an individual’s behavior when bullying occurs influences their self-perceptions and GPA differentially. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS
High-Expressed CXCR7 Contributes to CXCL12-Mediated Protection from Apoptosis in Lymphoma Cells

Viral genes may act as oncogenes and interact with intracellular proteins, which are related to oncogenesis and tumor growth. Autocrining CXCL12 in growing tumor tissue plays critical roles in modulating cell proliferation and survival through its receptor CXCR4 and CXCR7. Recently, a number of research reports indicated that CXCR7 displays high expression in many kinds of tumor tissues and cell lines and that high -expressed CXCR7 may be involved in cell survival and migration. To date, CXCR7’s biological function and signaling in cancer pathogenesis is unclear. In this study, we first found there are higher expression of CXCR7 in both lymphocyte nodes and EBV positive lymphoma cell line IB4. The results further suggested that high-expressed CXCR7 plays a role in CXCL12 mediated anti-apoptosis and inhibition of CXCR7 through CXCR7 inhibitor CCX771 significantly attenuated the function of CXCL12 on anti-apoptosis. Furthermore, we observed that CXCR7 inhibitor directly reduced protection of endogenous CXCL12 from apoptosis in EBV positive lymphoma cell line. Finally, the results revealed that CXCL12 activated CXCR7 trafficking to membrane and interaction of CXCR7 and β-arrestin-2 during anti-apoptosis process. The study suggested that the high expressed CXCR7 may have effect on anti-apoptosis and inhibitor of CXCR7 may become potential target for cancer therapy.
Relationship between Physical Activities of Women and the Prevalence of Some Common Diseases: Empirical Evidence from Saudi Arabia

The aim of this study was to explore relationships between common diseases, i.e. obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol as well as asthma, and socio-demographic variables: residence place, age, weight, educational level, along with level of physical activity among women in Saudi Arabia. On the strength of a purposive sample, it comprised of 1233 Saudi women from central, eastern, western, northern and southern regions of KSA. The findings supported the hypotheses that obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol and asthma were related to place of residence, age, weight, educational level, as well as level of physical activity. Hence, the results highlighted the importance of socio-demographic and exercise in controlling common diseases to a considerable extent.