Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development Interventions and Agriculture Adaptation: A Social Network Analysis of Farmer Knowledge Transfer in Ghana

Social ties play an important role in agricultural knowledge exchange, particularly in developing countries with high exposure to agriculture development interventions. Institutions often facilitate agricultural training projects, with a focus on agroecological practices, such as agroforestry and agrobiodiversity. The structural characteristics of social networks amongst land managers influences decision-making to adopt such adaptive agroecoloigcal practice; however, the extent of knowledge transfer beyond direct project participants is often unknown. Using a social network approach, we chart the structure of agrarian knowledge networks (n = 131) in six communities, which have been differentially exposed to agriculture development interventions in Ghana. Farmer network size, density and composition were distinctly variable; development project-affiliated farmers were embedded in larger networks, had non-affiliated farmers within their networks, were engaged in more diverse agricultural production and reported adopting and adapting agroecological practice more frequently. Such bridging ties that link across distinctive groups in a network can expose network members to new and innovative agroecological practices, such as increasing agrobiodiversity, thus, contributing to livelihood strategies that mitigate environmental and market risk. Furthermore, we show that these knowledge networks were crop-specific where network size varied given the type of crop produced. Such factors, which may influence the rate and extent of agroecological knowledge diffusion, are critical for the effectiveness of land management practices as well as the persistence of agriculture development interventions.
Competitor-Oriented Objectives: Myth of Market Share

Competitor-oriented objectives, such as market-share targets, are promoted by academics and are commonly used by firms. A 1996 review of the evidence, summarized in this paper, found that competitor-oriented objectives reduced profitability. We describe new evidence from 12 studies, one of which is introduced in this paper. The new evidence supports the conclusion that competitor-oriented objectives are harmful, especially when managers receive information about competitors' market shares. The evidence appears to have had little effect on managers' decisions and on what is taught in business schools.
Aging and Negotiating Social Stigma: Stereotypes and Stairs

Negative age-stereotypes can foster biopsychosocial health consequences within older adults; however, there is a paucity of research examining self-efficacy (a determinant of activity avoidance or uptake), and no research exploring stair navigation performances after exposure to age-stereotypes. The present work aimed to examine the influence of age-stereotype priming on stair navigation, while exploring self-efficacy as a moderator in older adults. Older adults aged 50 years or greater were voluntarily recruited within the Greater Toronto Area. In total, 130 older adults participated, of which 90 represented the “healthy” subsample and 40 represented those with osteoarthritis. Psychological questionnaires and stair navigation assessments were completed after exposure to age-stereotype primes. The following manuscripts act as independent and connected segments toward examining stereotype priming, stair navigation, and self-efficacy in older adults. Manuscript one illustrates the development of effective stereotype primes and statistical models for analyzing the effects of age-stereotypes on stair navigation and self-efficacy for stairs. The results confirmed variables and statistical methodologies to be used in further analyses, with implications for streamlining future research. Stemming from this work, manuscript two and three employ these models to examine the influence of age-stereotype priming on self-efficacy for stairs in healthy older adults from baseline to post-exposure, as well as the influence of priming on stair navigation. The results suggested negatively primed older adults experienced declines in self-efficacy for stairs, while displaying slower stair navigation compared to those positively primed. The implications speak to developing priming as an intervention tool to mitigate negative primes and enhance task-specific functionality and well-being in healthy older adults.
Group learning activities and perceived learning outcomes

ABSTRACT Group learning activities (GLAs) are commonly used curriculum activities in teacher education. The aim of this study was to determine which components of GLAs students perceive as significant for their learning. Student teachers from six Dutch universities of applied sciences completed a survey about GLAs they participated in. Findings show that students’ evaluations of task characteristics and group constellation are related to their perceived increase in domain knowledge. Furthermore task characteristics and guidance are related to students’ perceived development as primary school teachers. Verbal interaction and engagement partially and fully mediate several relationships between GLA components and learning outcomes.
Promoting Positive Post-Click Experience for In-Stream Yahoo Gemini Users

Click-through rate (CTR) is the most common metric used to assess the performance of an online advert; another performance of an online advert is the user post-click experience. In this paper, we describe the method we have implemented in Yahoo Gemini to measure the post-click experience on Yahoo mobile news streams via an automatic analysis of advert landing pages. We measure the post-click experience by means of two well-known metrics, dwell time and bounce rate. We show that these metrics can be used as proxy of an advert post-click experience, and that a negative post-click experience has a negative effect on user engagement and future ad clicks. We then put forward an approach that analyses advert landing pages, and show how these can affect dwell time and bounce rate. Finally, we develop a prediction model for advert quality based on dwell time, which was deployed on Yahoo mobile news stream app running on iOS. The results show that, using dwell time as a proxy of post-click experience, we can prioritise higher quality ads. We demonstrate the impact of this on users via A/B testing.
Lending the brain a hand : The influence of motor activation on language processing and language learning

markdownabstractAbstract The goals of this dissertation were (1) to investigate what gesture instructions (observation, imitation, or enactment) are most effective for improving verb learning in primary school children, and whether these gestures are equally effective for learning verbs from different verb categories and for children with different levels of language ability? (2) to investigate whether the effectiveness of gestures in word learning is similar for children and adults. (3) to explore whether learning and memorizing action words is influenced by seeing depictions of actions that mismatch the mental simulation that is automatically created when hearing the definition of an action word. (4) try to explain where the potential effects of mental simulations on language processing stem from.
Information Revelation in Relational Contracts

We explore subjective performance reviews in long-term employment relationships. We show that firms benefit from separating the task of evaluating the worker from the task of paying him. The separation allows the reviewer to better manage the review process, and can, therefore, reward the worker for his good performance with not only a good review contemporaneously, but also a promise of better review in the future. Such reviews spread the reward for the worker’s good performance across time and lower the firm’s maximal temptation to renege on the reward. The manner in which information is managed exhibits patterns consistent with a number of well-documented biases in performance reviews.
Neurochemical and behavioral tolerance to cocaine following treatment with cocaine analogs

The search for a pharmacologic treatment of cocaine addiction has lead to the study of possible cocaine analogs to be used as substitution therapy, much like methadone is used in heroin addiction. The goal is to identify compounds which may produce cross-tolerance to cocaine and thus blunt cocaine’s euphoric effects. The effects of acute (three hours) and chronic (seven days) exposure to intravenous cocaine, cocaethylene, or isopropyl cocaine on the response to a subsequent cocaine challenge were examined. Neurochemical (microdialysis nucleus accumbens dopamine level measurements) and behavioral (locomotor activity) measures were compared. The relative potency of isopropyl cocaine compared to cocaine in the anesthetized rat was also examined. The results of the acute tolerance experiments showed no behavioral tolerance in any group; however, there was a decrease in dopamine response to a cocaine challenge in the cocaineand cocaethylene-pretreated groups. Though acute neurochemical tolerance was suggested, these data need to be interpreted with caution as the cocaine pretreatment group had a sustained, high baseline during the three hour maintenance which may be the animals’ maximal response to cocaine. Cocaethylene seemed to produce acute tolerance to itself during the three hour maintenance phase as neither the neurochemical nor the behavioral effects were sustained. Chronically, cocaineand cocaethylene-pretreated animals demonstrated a reduced response to a subsequent cocaine challenge compared to placebo; the isopropyl cocaine pretreated animals behaved no differently from the placebo group. Isopropyl cocaine is much less potent than cocaine in its ability to elevate dopamine in both awake and anesthetized animals. Most significantly, these studies show that behavioral tolerance was achieved after one week of cocaethylene pretreatment. Cocaethylene or its related analogs shows some promise as a possible pharmacological treatment of cocaine addiction as chronic treatment blunts the subsequent effects of cocaine. Neurochemical and Behavioral Tolerance to Cocaine Following Treatment with Cocaine Analogs By Tobias T. Lee Yale University School of Medicine Faculty Advisors Peter Jatlow, md Charles Bradberry, PhD
Bone Histology in Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki (Ornithischia: Iguanodontia) – Variation, Growth, and Implications

Background Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki is a small ornithopod dinosaur known from thousands of bones and several ontogenetic stages. It was found in a single locality within the Tendaguru Formation of southeastern Tanzania, possibly representing a single herd. Dysalotosaurus provides an excellent case study for examining variation in bone microstructure and life history and helps to unravel the still mysterious growth pattern of small ornithopods. Methodology/Principal Findings Five different skeletal elements were sampled, revealing microstructural variation between individuals, skeletal elements, cross sectional units, and ontogenetic stages. The bone wall consists of fibrolamellar bone with strong variability in vascularization and development of growth cycles. Larger bones with a high degree of utilization have high relative growth rates and seldom annuli/LAGs, whereas small and less intensively used bones have lower growth rates and a higher number of these resting lines. Due to the scarcity of annuli/LAGs, the reconstruction of the life history of Dysalotosaurus was carried out using regularly developed and alternating slow and fast growing zones. Dysalotosaurus was a precocial dinosaur, which experienced sexual maturity at ten years, had an indeterminate growth pattern, and maximum growth rates comparable to a large kangaroo. Conclusions/Significance The variation in the bone histology of Dysalotosaurus demonstrates the influence of size, utilization, and shape of bones on relative growth rates. Annuli/LAGs are not the only type of annual growth cycles that can be used to reconstruct the life history of fossil vertebrates, but the degree of development of these lines may be of importance for the reconstruction of paleobehavior. The regular development of annuli/LAGs in subadults and adults of large ornithopods therefore reflects higher seasonal stress due to higher food demands, migration, and altricial breeding behavior. Small ornithopods often lack regularly developed annuli/LAGs due to lower food demands, no need for migration, and precocial behavior.
Combined effect of water loss and wounding stress on gene activation of metabolic pathways associated with phenolic biosynthesis in carrot

The application of postharvest abiotic stresses is an effective strategy to activate the primary and secondary metabolism of plants inducing the accumulation of antioxidant phenolic compounds. In the present study, the effect of water stress applied alone and in combination with wounding stress on the activation of primary (shikimic acid) and secondary (phenylpropanoid) metabolic pathways related with the accumulation of phenolic compound in plants was evaluated. Carrot (Daucus carota) was used as model system for this study, and the effect of abiotic stresses was evaluated at the gene expression level and on the accumulation of metabolites. As control of the study, whole carrots were stored under the same conditions. Results demonstrated that water stress activated the primary and secondary metabolism of carrots, favoring the lignification process. Likewise, wounding stress induced higher activation of the primary and secondary metabolism of carrots as compared to water stress alone, leading to higher accumulation of shikimic acid, phenolic compounds, and lignin. Additional water stress applied on wounded carrots exerted a synergistic effect on the wound-response at the gene expression level. For instance, when wounded carrots were treated with water stress, the tissue showed 20- and 14-fold increases in the relative expression of 3-deoxy-D-arabino-heptulosanate synthase and phenylalanine ammonia-lyase genes, respectively. However, since lignification was increased, lower accumulation of phenolic compounds was detected. Indicatively, at 48 h of storage, wounded carrots treated with water stress showed ~31% lower levels of phenolic compounds and ~23% higher lignin content as compared with wounded controls. In the present study, it was demonstrated that water stress is one of the pivotal mechanism of the wound-response in carrot. Results allowed the elucidation of strategies to induce the accumulation of specific primary or secondary metabolites when plants are treated with water stress alone or when additional water stress is applied on wounded tissue. If the accumulation of a specific primary or secondary metabolite were desirable, it would be recommended to apply both stresses to accelerate their biosynthesis. However, strategies such as the use of enzymatic inhibitors to block the carbon flux and enhance the accumulation of specific compounds should be designed.
Some Progress in Lattice Boltzmann Method. Part I. Nonuniform Mesh Grids

A new lattice Boltzmann algorithm is proposed to simulate the Navier? Stokes equation on arbitrary nonuniform mesh grids. The new algorithm retains the advantages of the lattice Boltzmann method: parallel of algorithm, ease of programming, and ability to incorporate microscopic interactions. A simulation of flow in a two-dimensional symmetric channel with sudden expansion is carried out using the new algorithm on a nonuniform mesh. The results of the simulation are in excellent agreement with previous experimental and numerical results.
Comparing Transformational Leadership in Successful and Unsuccessful Companies

In this article, while it is attempted to describe the problem and its importance, transformational leadership is studied by considering leadership theories. Issues such as the definition of transformational leadership and its aspects are compared on the basis of the ideas of various connoisseurs and then it (transformational leadership) is examined in successful and unsuccessful companies. According to the methodology, the method of research, hypotheses, population and statistical sample are investigated and research findings are analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistical methods in the framework of analytical tables. Finally, our conclusion is provided by considering the results of statistical tests. The final result shows that transformational leadership is significantly higher in successful companies than unsuccessful ones P<0.0001).
Immune cell dysfunctions in breast cancer patients detected through whole blood multi-parametric flow cytometry assay

ABSTRACT Monitoring functional competence of immune cell populations in clinical routine represents a major challenge. We developed a whole-blood assay to monitor functional competence of peripheral innate immune cells including NK cells, dendritic and monocyte cell subsets through their ability to produce specific cytokines after short-term stimulation, detected through intra-cytoplasmic staining and multi-parametric flow-cytometry. A PMA/ionomycin T cell activation assay complemented this analysis. Comparing cohorts of healthy women and breast cancer (BC) patients at different stages, we identified significant functional alteration of circulating immune cells during BC progression prior to initiation of treatment. Of upmost importance, as early as the localized primary tumor (PT) stage, we observed functional alterations in several innate immune populations and T cells i.e. (i) reduced TNFα production by BDCA-1+ DC and non-classical monocytes in response to Type-I IFN, (ii) a strong drop in IFNγ production by NK cells in response to either Type-I IFN or TLR7/8 ligand, and (iii) a coordinated impairment of cytokine (IL-2, IFNγ, IL-21) production by T cell subpopulations. Overall, these alterations are further accentuated according to the stage of the disease in first-line metastatic patients. Finally, whereas we did not detect functional modification of DC subsets in response to TLR7/8 ligand, we highlighted increased IL-12p40 production by monocytes specifically at first relapse (FR). Our results reinforce the importance of monitoring both innate and adaptive immunity to better evaluate dysfunctions in cancer patients and suggest that our whole-blood assay will be useful to monitor response to treatment, particularly for immunotherapeutic strategies.
ATP during Early Bladder Stretch Is Important for Urgency in Detrusor Overactivity Patients

ATP is an important mediator of urgency in women with detrusor overactivity (DO). In order to understand how different degrees of bladder stretch elicited ATP release in DO patients compared with controls, sequential aliquots were collected during cystometry and ATP release was measured at each degree of bladder filling, in female patients with DO and controls. In both DO and control groups, ATP release was induced during bladder filling, suggesting that stretch stimulated further ATP release. However, the luminal ATP concentrations were already high at early filling stage (200 mL), which was even greater than those at the later filling stages (400 mL and maximum cystometric capacity, MCC), indicating that a substantial ATP release has been induced during early filling (200 mL) in both DO and controls. In DO, ATP release at 200 mL was significantly higher in those with low first desire to void (FDV) (≤200 mL) than in those with higher FDV (>200 mL); this may suggest that ATP release at early stretch may play an important role in urgency (early sensation) in DO. ATP concentrations remained unchanged after voiding, suggesting that voiding did not further induce ATP release into intraluminal fluid.
Teacher-coach role conflict in school-based physical education in USA: a literature review and suggestions for the future

Teacher-coach role conflict in school-based physical education in USA: a literature review and suggestions for the future Teaching and coaching are two different occupational roles, and teachers who also coach have stressful work environments common to all educational settings, but each occupational role has specific stress and burnout problems. The responsibilities of physical education (PE) teachers and coaches are distinguishable from one another. These different roles and role conflicts may create stress among PE teachers who also coach. The history of physical education shows that there are contextual factors that promote PE teacher-coach role conflict. The aim of this paper is to analyse these contextual factors via using a literature review analysis and to provide suggestions about teacher-coach role conflict for school-based physical education in USA.
Mouse connexin37: cloning and functional expression of a gap junction gene highly expressed in lung

The coding sequence (333 amino acids) of a new connexin protein, designated mouse connexin37 (Cx37 or Cx37.6) due to the deduced theoretical molecular mass of 37.600 kD, has been determined from cDNA and genomic clones. As seen in other connexins, its gene has no introns within the coding region and the deduced amino acid sequence is predicted to have similar topology to other connexins that form intercellular channels. The amino acid sequence of mouse Cx37 is most similar to rat connexin43 (59% identity) and Xenopus connexin38 (66% identity) when compared from the NH2 terminus to the end of the fourth putative transmembrane region. When expressed in Xenopus oocytes Cx37 forms functional intercellular channels that exhibit more sensitive and rapid gating in response to voltage than any previously characterized vertebrate gap junction. Under stringent conditions the Cx37 cDNA hybridizes to an mRNA of 1.7 kb that is found highly abundant in lung and to progressively lesser extents in brain, kidney, skin, spleen, liver, intestine, and heart. Embryonic brain, kidney, and skin express two to fivefold higher levels of the Cx37 transcript than the corresponding adult tissues. Cx37 transcripts were also found to increase two to threefold in response to retinoic acid treatment of cultured embryonic carcinoma F9 cells.
Differential Expression of Chemokine Receptors and Chemotactic Responsiveness of Type 1 T Helper Cells (Th1s) and Th2s

T helper cells type 1 (Th1s) that produce interferon-γ predominantly mediate cellular immune responses and are involved in the development of chronic inflammatory conditions, whereas Th2s which produce large amounts of IL-4 and IL-5 upregulate IgE production and are prominent in the pathogenesis of allergic diseases. The precise factors determining whether Th1- or Th2-mediated immune responses preferentially occur at a peripheral site of antigen exposure are largely unknown. Chemokines, a superfamily of polypeptide mediators, are a key component of the leukocyte recruitment process. Here we report that among four CXC (CXCR1-4) and five CC (CCR1-5) chemokine receptors analyzed, CXCR3 and CCR5 are preferentially expressed in human Th1s. In contrast, Th2s preferentially express CCR4 and, to a lesser extent, CCR3. In agreement with the differential chemokine receptor expression, Th1s and Th2s selectively migrate in response to the corresponding chemokines. The differential expression of chemokine receptors may dictate, to a large extent, the migration and tissue homing of Th1s and Th2s. It may also determine different susceptibility of Th1s and Th2s to human immunodeficiency virus strains using different fusion coreceptors.
Studies on microbial diversity in anaerobic overflow fermentation with DGGE

Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) has the virtue of high reliability, good repetition and easy operation, and been widely used in environmental science research areas. It was used to study the dynamic succession of bacterial communities of anaerobic fermentation of dairy cattle manure during the microbial stationary phase. The results showed that the population of bacterium was abundant while the superiority of that was not evident, and the increment of gas production was steady.