Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DENDROECOLOGICAL STUDIES OF RHODODENDRON CAMPANULATUM D . DON ALONG THE ELEVATIONAL GRADIENT OF MANASLU CONSERVATION AREA , NEPAL HIMALAYA

The increase in temperature due to global warming is affecting forest ecosystems worldwide. At the treeline ecotone growth is usually restricted by low temperatures. Recently, the impacts of climate change have been visible with the upward shift of the Himalaya fir (Abies spectabilis) in Nepal. Rhododendron campanulatum D. Don grows at the treeline ecotone and subalpine forest. Hardly any studies have been carried on this species in Nepal. The local people have reported that this species has been seen colonizing upper altitude in recent years, however, these needs to be verified with dendroecological studies. The study aims to assess the response of R. campanulatum to climatic variability and to evaluate the relationship of its basal diameter (Groundline) and age using dendroecological methods. Results reveal that the basal diameter was found to be significantly correlated with age (r2= 0.824, p<0.00001). Using the basal diameter age equations, attempts were made to study the age distribution along the altitudinal gradient. The species limit was observed at 4090 m asl. The age structure differed along the altitudinal gradient with multi age cohorts below the treeline and younger cohorts above the treeline. Results show that this species is migrating up at a rate of 24.7m per decade.
Industry Effects on Firm and Segment Profitability Forecasting: Do Aggregation and Diversity Matter?

Abstract. A recent study shows that industry-specific analysis has no incremental advantage over economy-wide analysis in forecasting firm profitability. This result seems puzzling because some earlier studies have documented the importance of industry effects in explaining firm profitability. We reconcile the apparent inconsistency by showing that industry effects on profitability forecasting exist at the more refined business segment level, but are obscured by aggregated reporting at the firm level. Using segment-level analysis as well as firm-level analysis that also utilizes segment-level information, we provide consistent evidence supporting that industry-specific analysis is more accurate than economy-wide analysis in predicting the profitability of business segments and the profitability of single-segment firms.
Working paper 1507 TAF Effect on Liquidity Risk Exposure

Using a unique bank-level dataset, we assess the impact of the Term Auction Facility program on bank liquidity risk. The change in the US housing price index at state levels between 2002:Q1 and 2006:Q3 is the exclusion restriction to control for potential selection bias. On average, TAF banks exhibit higher ex ante levels of liquidity risk and they drastically reduce funding liquidity risk in the periods after the first time they received TAF funds. TAF banks show larger reductions in liquidity and they are more likely to be headquartered in US states that experienced sharper housing price appreciation before 2007.
English vocabulary exposure in South African township schools: Pitfalls and opportunities

Background: This small-scale study investigated English vocabulary exposure from graded readers and teacher talk in Grade 3 classrooms in poorly resourced township schools in South Africa. Vocabulary is one of the key building blocks for becoming a fluent reader. Most words are learnt through incidental exposure to oral or written language. Objectives: This study is a first attempt to investigate opportunities for incidental vocabulary exposure in poorly resourced classrooms in South Africa. Method: A corpus linguistics approach was used to analyse a written corpus of 57 143 tokens and a spoken corpus of 12 242 tokens. Results: The study showed that there are vast differences between levels of written and spoken vocabulary in the classrooms and that the role for oral vocabulary exposure in classrooms is restricted. Spoken vocabulary registered above the K-3 word frequency level largely came from teachers’ read alouds of print materials. Conclusion: The study findings show that even in contexts where print exposure is limited, oral language cannot compensate for the richness of written vocabulary. Situational constraints, such as lack of books, negatively influenced the effective use of graded readers. Opportunities for incidental vocabulary learning, as well as implications for policy and further research, are discussed.
for Health Care Professionals and Users : An Evaluation of Websites for Perinatal Anxiety Journal Item

Background: Many websites are available with information and resources for perinatal anxiety; however, there is limited research on the quality and content of these sites. Objective: This study aims to identify what sites are available on perinatal anxiety, identify any information and therapeutic advice given, and review its accuracy and website design. Methods: We conducted an evaluation of websites for perinatal anxiety. Eligible websites (N=50) were evaluated for accuracy of information, resources for mothers, website quality, and readability. Results: Information was often incomplete and focused on symptoms rather than risk factors or impact of untreated perinatal anxiety. Websites often had information on treatment (46/50, 92%), but much less on screening (19/50, 38%). Most sites provided at least some resources to support mothers (49/50, 98%), but active, guided support was infrequent (25/50, 50%). Website quality was extremely variable and mostly difficult to read (42/50, 84%). Conclusions: This study recommends the top 4 websites on perinatal anxiety for health care professionals and users. There is a need for websites to be developed that provide accurate, evidence-based information that women can relate to with quality support resources. Furthermore, these sites should be easy to use and readable. (JMIR Ment Health 2018;5(4):e11464) doi:10.2196/11464
City Research Online

: The problem of efficient use of resources in wireless access networks becomes critical today with users expecting continuous high-speed network access. While access network capacity continues to increase, simultaneous operation of multiple wireless access networks presents an opportunity to increase the data rates available to end-users even further using intelligent cross-network resource sharing. This paper introduces a new Integrated Mobility and Resource Management (IMRM) framework for automatic execution of policies for cross-network resource sharing using traffic offload and pre-emptive resource reservation algorithms. The presented framework enables both mobile-initiated and network-initiated resource sharing policies to be executed. This paper presents the framework in detail and analyses its performance using extensive ns-2 simulations of the operation of a set of static policies based on measured signal strength, and dynamic pre-emptive network-initiated policies in a WiFi/WiMAX scenario. The detailed evaluation of the static policies clearly shows that the quality of voice applications shows large deviation, mostly due to very different levels of delay in access networks. Based on these conclusions, this paper presents a design of two new dynamic policies and shows that such policies, when efficiently implemented using the new IMRM framework can greatly improve the capacity of the network to serve voice traffic with a minimal impact on the data traffic and with a very low signalling overhead.
Inexact Alternating Direction Methods for Image Recovery

In the image processing community, there have recently been many restoration and reconstruction problems that can be reformulated into linearly constrained convex programming models whose objective functions have separable structures. These favorable reformulations have promoted impressive applications of the alternating direction method (ADM) in the field of image processing. At each iteration, the computation of ADM is dominated by solving two subproblems exactly. However, in many restoration and reconstruction applications, it is either impossible or extremely expensive to obtain exact solutions of these ADM subproblems. This fact urges the development on inexact versions of ADM, which allow the generated ADM subproblems to be solved approximately subject to certain inexactness criteria. In this paper, we develop some truly implementable inexact ADMs whose inexactness criteria controlling the accuracy of the ADM subproblems are easily implementable. The convergence of the new inexact ADMs will be proved. Numerical results on several image processing problems will be given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed inexact ADMs.
Preparing Students for a Bright Outlook: Survey of the Preparation of High School Counselors for Advising on Technician Careers

This paper details a survey study of high school counselors’ awareness of and comfort with advising students in technician/technologist careers. The survey focused on careers designated as Bright Outlook by the US Department of Labor to explore familiarity with these careers, the effectiveness of the current career advising process, and recommendations on additional support or resources. Results indicate participants were more familiar with technician/technologist careers in health and medicine than those in engineering or other areas of science. Counselors acknowledged the importance of familiarity with a career in the career advising process, but communicate a number of challenges they face in meeting this need. The participants provide specific recommendations for additional supports, and future research in this area is recommended.
Testing the expectations hypothesis: some new evidence for Japan

The deregulation of the Japanese financial markets and the adoption of an interest rate policy instrument by the Bank of Japan prompted a number of empirical investigations of the expectation hypothesis (EH) of the term structures of interest rates in Japan. This paper is a continuation of this research. It deviates from the previous work on the EH in Japan in two respects. First, it tests the EH by estimating a general vector autoregression (VAR) of the long-term and short-term rates and testing the restrictions implied by the EH on the VAR using a Lagrange multiplier test. Second, the issue of stationarity of interest rates is considered. The paper not only considers the possibility that Japanese interest rates are nonstationary, but also analyzes the implications of nonstationarity for the EH.
Detection of periodontal pathogens in a Uruguayan population with aggressive periodontitis using conventional and molecular methods

1 Microbiology Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0001-8397-6639 2 Microbiology Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0002-6702-8046 3 Biological Sciences Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0002-9221-6671 4 Biological Sciences Department, School of Dentistry, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0002-3011-2201 5 Periodontics Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0001-9888-506X 6 Periodontics Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0002-7307-2625 7 Periodontics Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0002-7837-6492 8 Microbiology Department, School of Dentistry. Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. ORCID: 0000-0003-4403-3376 Abstract
Overwinter alterations in energy stores and growth in juvenile fishes inhabiting areas receiving metal mining and municipal wastewater effluents

The winter stress syndrome hypothesis proposes that the combination of winter conditions and contaminant exposure reduces overwinter survival in juvenile fishes, mainly due to increased depletion of stored energy (lipids). To test this hypothesis in the field, juvenile fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas), creek chub (Semotilus atromaculatus), and white sucker (Catostomus commersoni) were collected from three exposure sites along Junction Creek, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, representing cumulative inputs from metal mining and municipal wastewater. Overwinter survival potential was determined through measurements of growth (length, weight, muscle RNA/DNA ratio, muscle proteins) and energy stores (whole body triglycerides) in fish collected just prior to and following the overwinter period. We hypothesized that fish collected from exposure sites would exhibit reduced growth and energy storage compared to reference fish in both fall and spring, and that fish from all sites would exhibit reduced energy storage in spring compared to the previous fall. Whole body Se concentrations were elevated (11–42 μg/g dry wt) in juvenile fathead minnows and white sucker collected at two exposure sites in comparison to fish collected from the reference site (3–6 μg/g dry wt). In contrast to our hypothesis, fathead minnows were larger with greater triglyceride stores at exposure sites compared to the reference site. White suckers were smaller at exposure sites but did not differ in triglycerides among sites. Overall, the results in these fish species exposed to metal mining and municipal wastewaters do not support the winter stress syndrome hypothesis. It is recommended that future studies focus on relating growth and energy storage with other environmental factors such as habitat and food availability in addition to anthropogenic contamination.
Pausal Forms and Prosodic Structure in Tiberian Hebrew

Vincent DeCaen and Elan Dresher investigate the reasons that pausal forms in Tiberian Hebrew, which are expected to occur at the end of ‘intonational phrases’, at times appear where Tiberian accents are conjunctive rather than disjunctive. They challenge an earlier opinion that such mismatches represent different traditions or stages of interpreting the biblical text, maintaining instead that these mismatches are due to limitations inherent in the Tiberian system of accents.
Protein SUMOylation modulates calcium influx and glutamate release from presynaptic terminals

Posttranslational modification by small ubiquitin‐like modifier (SUMO) proteins is emerging as an important regulatory mechanism for neuronal function and dysfunction. Although multiple potential presynaptic SUMOylation substrate proteins have been proposed from sequence analysis the functional consequences of presynaptic SUMOylation have not been determined. Here we show that SUMOylation of presynaptic proteins modulates neurotransmitter release. Increasing protein SUMOylation by entrapping recombinant SUMO‐1 in synaptosomes decreased glutamate release evoked by KCl whereas decreasing SUMOylation with the SUMO‐specific protease SENP‐1 enhanced KCl‐evoked release. In contrast, SUMO increased and SENP‐1 decreased synaptosomal glutamate release evoked by kainate stimulation. Consistent with these results, SENP‐1 increased Ca2+ influx into synaptosomes evoked by KCl whereas it decreased kainate‐induced Ca2+ influx. These results demonstrate that, in addition to postsynaptic effects, protein SUMOylation acts to modulate neurotransmitter release and thereby regulate synaptic function.
THE LOGIC OF MULTI-USE OF PUBLIC OPEN SPACES IN CHIANG MAI CITY

The research methodology consists of surveying forty-two public open spaces in Chiang Mai City. The resulting data are then used to conduct matrix analyses and the analysis of urban morphological structure using overlay mapping and figure-ground techniques. The study areas are grouped according to district, function, setting, and management. Subsequently three public open spaces, namely Ratchadamnoen Walking Street, Warorot Market Street, and the footpath behind Chiang Mai University are chosen for detailed study of users through questionnaire. The result of the study supports the hypothesis. It reveals that the three factors –specific characteristics of space, urban morphological structure and users– accounted for the multi-use of public open spaces at three different levels. The first level concerns basic factors, the second level concerns supporting factors and the third level concerns attraction factors. It also reveals that the effective multi-use of public open spaces depends on the appropriate combination of these factors.
DISTRIBUTION OF DIFFERENT SOIL ALGAL TAXA IN RELATION TO PHYSICO-CHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SOIL AT GHARBIA GOVERNORATE

The algal flora of some cultivated soils in addition to edaphic and physicochemical characters of sols were extensively studied at four different locations in Gharbia Governorate during the period from April 1995 to March 1996. From the total count recorded (218 species) it was found that 143 species belong to cyanophyta, 60 species to chlorophyta, 13 species to Bacillariophyta and 2 species to Euglenophyta. The cyanophyta was frequently encountered constituting 65.5% of the total algal poulations of all soil samples, with predominance of filamentous oscillatoroid forms (Oscillatoria, Phormidium, Lyngbya and Nostoc). Unicellular and colonial coccoid forms mostly represented chlorophyta, constituting 27.5% of the total recorded algal population. The results also revealed that soil and algal variables varied markedly between locations. Thus, the most soil variables, soil moiture, organic matter, total organic nitrogen, carbonates, silt, clay, Na + , Ca +2 and Cl ions) were correlated with cyanobacterial growth in the studied locations. Whereas, the occurance of Cholrophyta species was correlated with the most previously mentioned variables in addition to phosphorous. AT the same time, the growth of Bacillariophyta species was correlated with moisture content, pH value, carbonates, sulphates and phosphorous. While, euglenophytes were dependent on organic matter, silt, clay, total N, Na + and K + ions in their maintenance.
BARRIER MEMBRANES FOR RIDGE AUGMENTATION – IS THERE AN OPTIMAL PORE SIZE? by RAJESH GUTTA PATRICK J. LOUIS, COMMITTEE CHAIR

Background: Alveolar bone loss is often a sequelae of edentulism. However, several reconstruction procedures with bone grafts and barrier membranes are used to restore the lost bony architecture. The value of titanium mesh barriers has been shown to be reliable both in vertical and horizontal ridge augmentation procedures. However, there is a paucity of literature supporting the role of pore size of barrier membranes in preventing soft tissue ingrowth during ridge augmentation procedures. There are multiple reports describing a layer of soft tissue with varying thickness beneath the mesh and adhering to the newly regenerated bone. The objective of this study was 1) to identity the presence of an optimal pore size that facilitates qualitative bone regeneration, 2) to identify the critical pore size that excludes soft tissue ingrowth into regenerative sites, 3) to determine if cortical perforations have any effect on bone regeneration, and 4) to reiterate that bone graft containment is an important parameter for successful regeneration. Methods: The study involved 4 adult hound dogs that were randomly divided into 3 groups. Groups 1 and 2 consisted of one animal each, sacrificed at one month and two months respectively. Group 3 consisted of two animals, sacrificed at the end of four months after the surgical procedure. All the animals received corticocancellous tibial bone grafting to the bilateral mandibular body/ramus areas. The left mandible received
Patients' perceptions of the decision-making process leading to extraction of permanent teeth in Norway.

Extraction is the final step in a continuous process in which oral health-related factors and psycho-social processes play a role. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the patient's perception of the decision-making process leading to the extraction of permanent teeth and to determine whether and how patient-associated characteristics might influence who made the decision to extract and if the patients felt they had any influence on the dentist's decision. A national random sample of Norwegian dentists (n = 500) recorded reasons for tooth extraction during a period of 2 weeks in 1988. A total of 437 patients responded (73%), of whom 54% were women. Nearly 33% of the respondents stated that it was their own decision to extract, while about two thirds said that the dentist had suggested extraction. Whether the dentist or the patient made the decision to extract teeth was significantly influenced by the patient's dental attendance pattern, place of residence, number of teeth and belief in retention of his/her own teeth for life (P < 0.05). There was no significant bivariate effect of patients' age, sex, educational level, or score on Corah's Dental Anxiety Scale on who made the decision to extract. Only 0.4% of patients said that family, friends or colleagues had influenced the decision to have teeth extracted. A logistic regression analysis with: "Was it the dentist or the patient who made the suggestion to extract teeth? " as the dependent variable, and the four bivariately significant independent variables showed for all patients that none had a significant effect. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Combining Ability and Gene Action for Yield and Processing Qualities in F 1 Tomato ( Lycopersicon esculentum Mill . ) Hybrids

Investigations were undertaken to study the combining ability and gene action for yield and processing qualities in F1 hybrids of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) by studying 80 hybrids that were developed, involving 14 parents mated in a line × tester fashion (both direct and reciprocal crosses). Among the parents, PT 4716A was judged as the best general combiner for the characters viz., plant height and number of fruits/plant and SL 120 was judged as the best general combiner for fruit weight and yield. The hybrids CLN 2026C × SL120, CLN 2026E × SL 120, LE 812 × SL 120 and CLN 1464A × SL 120 were judged as being the best specific combiners for yield and processing qualities. SCA variance was higher than GCA variance for all the characters indicating a better role of the non-additive type of gene action, thus emphasizing the importance of heterosis breeding to improve all characters studied. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
SPERIMENTALI CURRICOLO : NEUROSCIENZE CICLO 29 ° COGNITIVE AND CLINICAL PHENOTYPE IN DEMENTIA WITH LEWY BODIES

s . 5 Introduction . 9 1. Evaluation of dementia . 12 1.1 Dementia with Lewy bodies . 16 1.2 Alzheimer disease . 25 1.3 Overlap between dementia with Lewy bodies and Alzheimer disease . 31 2. Evaluation of mild cognitive impairment . 35 2.1 Mild cognitive impairment converting into dementia with Lewy bodies . 39 3. EXPERIMENTS . 45 Study1. 45 Assessment of visual-constructional deficits in MCI-DLB. 45 Results . 46 Discussion . 49 Study 2. 51 Assessment of visual attention, visual-spatial and visual-constructional deficits in MCI-DLB. 51 Results . 53 Discussion . 56 Study 3. 60 Analysis of memory do ai : spe ifi ver al e ory i di es of the Rey’s Auditory Ver al Lear i g Test. 60 Results . 63 Discussion . 66 Study 4. 69 Analysis of memory domain in mild cognitive impairment: investigating the efficacy of the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT). 69 Results . 72 Discussion . 76 4. CONCLUSIONS . 78 Appendix . 82 References . 86