Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plant root transcriptome profiling reveals a strain-dependent response during Azospirillum-rice cooperation

Cooperation involving Plant Growth-Promoting Rhizobacteria results in improvements of plant growth and health. While pathogenic and symbiotic interactions are known to induce transcriptional changes for genes related to plant defense and development, little is known about the impact of phytostimulating rhizobacteria on plant gene expression. This study aims at identifying genes significantly regulated in rice roots upon Azospirillum inoculation, considering possible favored interaction between a strain and its original host cultivar. Genome-wide analyzes of Oryza sativa japonica cultivars Cigalon and Nipponbare were performed, by using microarrays, seven days post-inoculation with Azospirillum lipoferum 4B (isolated from Cigalon) or Azospirillum sp. B510 (isolated from Nipponbare) and compared to the respective non-inoculated condition. A total of 7384 genes were significantly regulated, which represent about 16% of total rice genes. A set of 34 genes is regulated by both Azospirillum strains in both cultivars, including a gene orthologous to PR10 of Brachypodium, and these could represent plant markers of Azospirillum-rice interactions. The results highlight a strain-dependent response of rice, with 83% of the differentially expressed genes being classified as combination-specific. Whatever the combination, most of the differentially expressed genes are involved in primary metabolism, transport, regulation of transcription and protein fate. When considering genes involved in response to stress and plant defense, it appears that strain B510, a strain displaying endophytic properties, leads to the repression of a wider set of genes than strain 4B. Individual genotypic variations could be the most important driving force of rice roots gene expression upon Azospirillum inoculation. Strain-dependent transcriptional changes observed for genes related to auxin and ethylene signaling highlight the complexity of hormone signaling networks in the Azospirillum-rice cooperation.
Phase I clinical and pharmacokinetic study of oral penclomedine (NSC 338720) in adults with advanced solid malignancy.

Penclomedine is a synthetic alpha-picoline derivative that has shown antitumor activity both in preclinical development and in Phase I work using an i.v. preparation. The main toxicities seen in those studies were dose dependent and mainly neurocerebellar, with hematological toxicity being far less severe. This Phase I trial of p.o. penclomedine was conducted to potentially alter the toxicity profile and to avoid the neurological side effects seen with i.v. penclomedine. Eligibility criteria included microscopic confirmation of a solid malignancy or lymphoma with a lack of effective anticancer therapy. Twenty patients were enrolled. The median age was 60.5 years, and the median performance status was one. All but one patient had received prior systemic therapy. The starting dose of penclomedine was 200 mg/m(2) p.o. for 5 days, and was escalated according to a traditional Fibonacci sequence until the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) was observed. No treatment-related deaths were observed during the study. The MTD was determined to be 800 mg/m(2) p.o. for 5 days. Dose-limiting toxicities included mainly neurocerebellar symptoms such as ataxia and dysmetria, but neurocortical symptoms, such as confusion, were seen as well. Myelosuppression was less common and resulted in the discontinuation of therapy in only two patients. Pharmacokinetics show that the observed MTD is consistent with the i.v. preparations, and that the bioavailability of p.o. penclomedine is 49 +/- 18%. This regimen can be considered for additional studies in patients with intracranial neoplasms, because good central nervous system penetration is evident. Further development of penclomedine metabolites, such as 4-O-demethylpenclomedine, should be considered to minimize dose-limiting neurotoxicity.
The Mentality of Apes Revisited

Although early comparative psychology was seriously marred by claims of our species'supremacy, the residual backlash against these archaic evolutionary views is still being felt, even though our understanding of evolutionary biology is now sufficiently advanced to grapple with possible cognitive specializations that our species does not share with closely related species. The overzealous efforts to dismantle arguments of human uniqueness have only served to show that most comparative psychologists working with apes have yet to set aside the antiquated evolutionary ”ladder. “ Instead, they have only attempted to pull chimpanzees up to the ladder's highest imaginary rung — or perhaps, to pull humans down to an equally imaginary rung at the height of the apes. A true comparative science of animal minds, however, will recognize the complex diversity of the animal kingdom, and will thus view Homo sapiens as one more species with a unique set of adaptive skills crying out to be identified and understood.
International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems towards Behavior Control for Evolutionary Robot Based on Rl with Enn Regular Paper

This paper proposes a behavior‐switching control strategy of an evolutionary robot based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and genetic algorithm (GA). This method is able not only to construct the reinforcement learning models for autonomous robots and evolutionary robot modules that control behaviors and reinforcement learning environments, and but also to perform the behavior‐switching control and obstacle avoidance of an evolutionary robot in the unpredictable environments with the static and moving obstacles by combining ANN and GA. The experimental results have demonstrated that our method can perform the decision‐making strategy and parameter setup optimization of ANN and GA by learning and can effectively escape from a trap of local minima, avoid motion deadlock status of humanoid soccer robotic agents, and reduce the oscillation of the planned trajectory among the multiple obstacles by crossover and mutation. We have successfully applied some results of the proposed algorithm to our simulation humanoid robotic soccer team CIT3D which won the 1st prize of RoboCup Championship and ChinaOpen2010 and the 2 nd place of the official RoboCup World In comparison with the conventional behavior network and the adaptive behavior method, our algorithm simplified the genetic encoding complexity, improved the convergence rate  and the network performance.
Is the Environmental Kuznets Curve Driven by Structural Change? What Extended Time Series May Imply for Developing Countries

The objectives of the Consulting Assistance on Economic Reform (CAER II) project are to contribute to broad-based and sustainable economic growth and to improve the policy reform content of USAID assistance activities that aim to strengthen markets in recipient countries. Services are provided by the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and its subcontractors. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau for Global Programs, Field Support and Research, Center for Economic Growth and Agricultural Development, Office of Emerging Markets through Contracts PCE-C-00-95-00015-00 and PCE-Q-00-95-00016-00.
Employee reactions to talent pool membership

Purpose – Despite a large literature on talent management there is very little research on the comparative attitudes of employees in talent pools with those not in talent pools. This is an important omission as employee reactions should influence how effective talent programmes are and how they can be designed and evaluated. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to explore the work-related attitudes of employees who are members and non-members of talent pools. Design/methodology/approach – Matched samples of employees working in a single public sector, scientific organization were surveyed using a standard survey and open questioning to elicit and compare the voices of included and excluded employees. Findings – Employees in talent pools were more positive about their future prospects than employees outside talent pools who reported feelings of lower support from the organization, stronger feelings of unfairness and had lower expectations of the organization’s interest in them. Research limitations/i.
Monetary Policy Expectations and Economic Fluctuations at the Zero Lower Bound

Using a panel of survey‐based measures of future interest rates from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study the dynamic relationship between shocks to monetary policy expectations and fluctuations in economic activity and inflation. We propose a smallscale structured recursive vector autoregression (VAR) model to identify the macroeconomic effects of changes in expectations about monetary policy. Our results show that when interest rates are away from the zero‐lower bound, a perception of higher future interest rates leads to a significant rise in current measures of inflation and a rise in economic activity. However, when interest rates approach zero, the effect on economic activity is the opposite, with significant but lagged decreases in economic activity following an upward revision to expected future interest rates. The impact of changes in expectations about monetary policy is robust when we control for other features of the transmission mechanism (e.g., long‐term interest rates, quantitative easing, exchange rate movements and even oil price shocks). Our findings also show that monetary policy expectations contribute up to 34 percent to the variability of economic activity (and 24 percent on inflation) while policy rates are fixed at the zero‐lower bound. This evidence points to the importance of managing monetary policy expectations (forward guidance) as a crucial policy tool for stimulating economic activity at the zero‐lower bound.
Optimal Tuning of Linear Quadratic Regulators Using Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization

Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is an optimal multivariable feedback control approach that minimizes the excursion in state trajectories of a system while requiring minimum controller effort. The behaviour of a LQR controller is determined by two parameters: state and control weighting matrices. These two matrices are main design parameters to be selected by designer and greatly influence the success of the LQR controller synthesis. However, it is not a trivial task to decide these two matrices. The classic approaches such as trial-and-error, Bryson’s method, and pole placement are labour-intensive, time consuming and do not guarantee the expected performance. Furthermore, these techniques only aim to minimize the quadratic performance index and do not consider other control objectives such as minimizing the overshoot, rise time, settling time, and steady state error. In this paper, for the first time, we apply quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm to automatically and optimally adjust weighting matrices. QPSO is an extension of conventional PSO algorithm, in which particles obey the quantum mechanics rather than Newtonian mechanics. We applied the proposed approach to stabilize an inverted pendulum system. The results suggest that QPSO-based LQR outperforms LQR tuned by trial-and-error, genetic algorithm and conventional PSO methods in terms of rising time, settling time and quadratic performance index. Also, it is competitive with mentioned approaches in terms of maximum overshoot percentage and steady-
Singing voice detection using perceptually-motivated features

Perceptual features are motivated by human perception of sounds. In this paper, several perceptually-motivated features such as harmonic, vibrato and timbre are studied to detect singing voice segments in a song. In addition, singing formant and attack-decay envelope of the sound are also studied for acoustic feature formulation. The cepstral coefficients which reflect the timbre characteristics are formulated by combining information from harmonic content, vibrato, singing formant and attack-decay envelope of the sound. Bandpass filters that spread according to the octave frequency scale are used to extract vibrato and harmonic information. Several experiments are conducted using a database that includes 84 popular songs from commercially available CD recordings. The experiments show that the proposed feature formulation methods are effective.
Fire Resistance Design Guidelines for High Strength Concrete Columns

An overview of the research program, aimed at developing fire resistance design guidelines for high strength concrete (HSC) columns, is outlined. A comparison is made of the fire resistance performance of HSC column with that of normal strength concrete column. The various factors that influence the structural behaviour of high strength concrete columns under fire conditions are discussed. Design guidelines are presented for mitigating spalling and enhancing fire endurance of HSC columns.
Measurement of the z- and x-dependence of the Mean Transverse Momentum of Charged Hadrons, Charged Pions and K_s^0 at HERMES

The mean transverse momenta of hadrons, , produced in e^+ N deep inelastic scattering was studied as a function of the hadron energy fraction z and the Bjorken variable x. The statistical accuracy of the HERMES data permitted to observe at high z differences in between hadrons with positive and negative charges, h^+, h^- and K_s^0 for the first time. These differences can presumably be explained by the flavour dependence of the intrinsic transverse momentum distributions of quarks in the initial nucleon.
Achieving Communicative Competence in Business English : A study of teacher and participant attitudes in Business English courses

The increasing globalization of trade has resulted in a growing need for Swedish corporations to ensure that their work force is able to communicate in English. In order to meet this demand, there is a growing market of companies offering courses in Business English. When English is used for communication between people from different linguacultural backgrounds in a business context it is referred to as BELF (Business English as a Lingua Franca). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not the participants and teachers in different classes of Business English are more open to the non-native speaker model, as this type of course is supposed to prepare the students for communication with people of various nationalities. This was done with the aim to explore how these attitudes can be linked to the development of communicative competence in a business context. In the study a survey was distributed to twenty-one participants of courses in Business English and four teachers were interviewed. The study showed that although the business context affects the attitudes of the participants, there is still a preference for a native-like model. However, the teachers show an open attitude towards BELF, focusing instead on promoting communicative competence in their teaching. The findings of this study support previous research in the field indicating that there exists a certain discrepancy between the perceptions of the teachers and learners as to what constitutes an effective communicator.
Fusarium and mycotoxin spectra in Swiss barley are affected by various cropping techniques

ABSTRACT Fusarium head blight is one of the most important cereal diseases worldwide. Cereals differ in terms of the main occurring Fusarium species and the infection is influenced by various factors, such as weather and cropping measures. Little is known about Fusarium species in barley in Switzerland, hence harvest samples from growers were collected in 2013 and 2014, along with information on respective cropping factors. The incidence of different Fusarium species was obtained by using a seed health test and mycotoxins were quantified by LC-MS/MS. With these techniques, the most dominant species, F. graminearum, and the most prominent mycotoxin, deoxynivalenol (DON), were identified. Between the three main Swiss cropping systems, Organic, Extenso and Proof of ecological performance, we observed differences with the lowest incidence and toxin accumulation in organically cultivated barley. Hence, we hypothesise that this finding was based on an array of growing techniques within a given cropping system. We observed that barley samples from fields with maize as previous crop had a substantially higher F. graminearum incidence and elevated DON accumulation compared with other previous crops. Furthermore, the use of reduced tillage led to a higher disease incidence and toxin content compared with samples from ploughed fields. Further factors increasing Fusarium infection were high nitrogen fertilisation as well as the application of fungicides and growth regulators. Results from the current study can be used to develop optimised cropping systems that reduce the risks of mycotoxin contamination.
Budgeting for Women's Rights: Monitoring Government Budgets for Compliance with CEDAW

This title presents an insightful and thorough examination of the effect of budgets on women's lives in the developing world. It includes extensive case studies that illustrate the relation between monetary policy and women's choices in education, health care, employment and other areas. People's access to services and resources are determined by government budget policies. Gender budgets initiatives around the world have attempted to systematically examine how government budgets address discrimination with regard to women's access to housing, employment, health, education, and other services. Often, these exercises have been eye-openers: a budget analysis of domestic violence policies and laws in seven countries in Latin America, for example, revealed that appropriations for domestic violence programs and interventions were non-existent in cases. Similar evidence of gender discrimination is found when examining taxation policies. This publication adds a landmark to the discourse on the link between human rights standards and government budgets. It elaborates on how budgets and budget policy making processes can be monitored for compliance with human rights standards, in particular with the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Combining substantive analysis with country examples, the publication explores how a rights-based budget analysis can be applied to public expenditure, public revenue, macroeconomics of the budget, and budget decision-making.
Biomedical Imaging and Intervention Journal Evaluation of Dose Coverage to Target Volume and Normal Tissue Sparing in the Adjuvant Radiotherapy of Gastric Cancers: 3d-crt Compared with Dynamic Imrt

Purpose: To assess the potential advantage of intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) over 3D-conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) planning in postoperative adjuvant radiotherapy for patients with gastric carcinoma. Methods and materials: In a retrospective study, for plan comparison, dose distribution was recalculated in 15 patients treated with 3D-CRT on the contoured structures of same CT images using an IMRT technique. 3D-conformal plans with three fields and four-fields were compared with seven-field dynamic IMRT plans. The different plans were compared by analyzing the dose coverage of planning target volume using TV 95 , D mean , uniformity index, conformity index and homogeneity index parameters. To assess critical organ sparing, D mean , D max , dose to one-third and two-third volumes of the OARs and percentage of volumes receiving more than their tolerance doses were compared. Results: The average dose coverage values of PTV with 3F-CRT and 4F-CRT plans were comparable, where as IMRT plans achieved better target coverage(p<0.001) with higher conformity index value of 0.81±0.07 compared to both the 3D-CRT plans. The doses to the liver and bowel reduced significantly (p<0.001) with IMRT plans compared to other 3D-CRT plans. For all OARs the percentage of volumes receiving more than their tolerance doses were reduced with the IMRT plans. Conclusion: This study showed that a better target coverage and significant dose reduction to OARs could be achieved with the IMRT plans. The IMRT can be preferred with caution for organ motion. The authors are currently studying organ motion in the upper abdomen to use IMRT for patient treatment.
Neutral details associated with emotional events are encoded: evidence from a cued recall paradigm

ABSTRACT Enhanced emotional memory often comes at the cost of memory for surrounding background information. Narrowed-encoding theories suggest that this is due to narrowed attention for emotional information at encoding, leading to impaired encoding of background information. Recent work has suggested that an encoding-based theory may be insufficient. Here, we examined whether cued recall—instead of previously used recognition memory tasks—would reveal evidence that non-emotional information associated with emotional information was effectively encoded. Participants encoded positive, negative, or neutral objects on neutral backgrounds. At retrieval, they were given either the item or the background as a memory cue and were asked to recall the associated scene element. Counter to narrowed-encoding theories, emotional items were more likely than neutral items to trigger recall of the associated background. This finding suggests that there is a memory trace of this contextual information and that emotional cues may facilitate retrieval of this information.
ANALISIS PENGARUH STRUKTUR KEPEMILIKAN, KEBIJAKAN DIVIDEN DAN KEBIJAKAN HUTANG TERHADAP NILAI PERUSAHAAN DENGAN VARIABEL KONTROL UKURAN PERUSAHAAN, PERTUMBUHAN PERUSAHAAN DAN KINERJA PERUSAHAAN(studi pada perusahaan manufaktur yang terdaftar di BEI periode 2009-2011)

Based on the research gap and the gap phenomenon that has previously described the research problem in this study can be formulated that there are inconsistencies between empirical phenomena with existing theory and research inconsistencies. The using of variables in this research are institutional ownership, managerial ownership, dividend policy, policy on debt and value of enterprise variable size companies, including control the growth of the company and the performance of the company (study on the manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia stock exchange period 2009-2011). The population in this research is all the manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesian stock exchange from 2009 to 2011 period. A sample in this research is manufacturing firm in accordance with the specified criteria. A method of analysis used the statistics descriptive and the assumption of classical continued with linear regression worship of idols with the level of significance of 5%. This study concludes some of the following : Institutional ownership variable is not proven to affect the value of the company, Variable managerial ownerships proven to affects the firm value, Dividend policy is proved positive to affect the value of the company, Debt policy proven to effect on firm value, The size of the company is proved positive effect on firm value, The growth of the company is not proven to affect the value of the firm, The performance of the company proved positive to effect firm value