Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A review of empirical evidence on gender differences in non- land agricultural inputs, technology, and services in

This paper reviews existing microeconomic empirical literature on gender differences in use, access, and adoption of non-land agricultural inputs in developing countries. This review focuses on four key areas: (1) technological resources, (2) natural resources, (3) human resources, and (4) social and political capital. In general, there has been more empirical research on inorganic fertilizer, seed varieties, extension services, and group membership than on tools and mechanization, life-cycle effects, and political participation. Across input areas, generally men have higher input measures than women; however, this finding is often sensitive to the use of models that control for other background factors, as well as the type of gender indicator implemented in the analysis. We find few studies that meet our inclusion criteria outside Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, future directions, opportunities, and recommendations for microeconomic gender analysis of non-land agricultural inputs are discussed.
Peeking without Spying : Collecting End-Host Measurements to Improve User Experience

Obtaining data directly from end hosts could benefit a broad set of applications, including application performance diagnosis, network troubleshooting, security profiling and even energy-saving policies. However, the data central to the study and development of such tools is fundamentally hard to collect. This situation has arisen both for technical reasons and for psychological ones. We believe that a lack of such end-host data has been a limiting factor in research on these topics. In this paper, we explore the design space of a measurement tool to run on end-hosts. Many tradeoffs arise such as the utility or benefit of collecting a given piece of data, the user’s comfort with that data being monitored, and the overhead incurred via the technique used to collect the data. We combine both qualitative and quantitative elements to drive our own decisions for designing such a tool: we conduct a user survey to understand user comfort issues, and we carry out evaluations of the overhead and utility of different techniques for collecting various data. We build an instance of such a data collection tool which exposes these tradeoffs in an explicit way and describe its design.
Decreased Dicer Expression Enhances SRP-Mediated Protein Targeting

We have shown that Dicer processes 7SL RNA into different fragments ranging from ∼20 to more than 200 nucleotides. Here we addressed the molecular functions of these 7SL RNA fragments and found that some of them functioned as dominant-negative regulators of the full-length 7SL RNA, interfering with signal recognition particle (SRP) complex formation. Transfection of these 7SL RNA fragments inhibited the expression of cell surface glycoproteins, the targeting of a reporter protein to the endoplasmic reticulum, and the secretion of secreted alkaline phosphatase. These results suggest that some Dicer-processed 7SL RNA fragments interfered with SRP-mediated protein targeting. Moreover, we showed that Dicer knockdown enhanced SRP-mediated protein targeting and that transfection of a mixture of the 7SL RNA fragments partially restored this effect. Our data indicate that Dicer can fine-tune the efficiency of SRP-mediated protein targeting via processing a proportion of 7SL RNA into fragments of different lengths.
The Advanced Computing Systems Association Reducing the Disk I/o of Web Proxy Server Caches Reducing the Disk I/o of Web Proxy Server Caches

The dramatic increase of HTTP traffic on the Internet has resulted in widespread use of large caching proxy servers as critical Internet infrastructure components. With continued growth the demand for larger caches and higher performance proxies grows as well. The common bottleneck of large caching proxy servers is disk I/O. In this paper we evaluate ways to reduce the amount of required disk I/O. First we compare the file system interactions of two existing web proxy servers, CERN and SQUID. Then we show how design adjustments to the current SQUID cache architecture can dramatically reduce disk I/O. Our findings suggest two that strategies can significantly reduce disk I/O: (1) preserve locality of the HTTP reference stream while translating these references into cache references, and (2) use virtual memory instead of the file system for objects smaller than the system page size. The evaluated techniques reduced disk I/O by 50% to 70%.
Rapid and Robust PCR-Based All-Recombinant Cloning Methodology

We report here a PCR-based cloning methodology that requires no post-PCR modifications such as restriction digestion and phosphorylation of the amplified DNA. The advantage of the present method is that it yields only recombinant clones thus eliminating the need for screening. Two DNA amplification reactions by PCR are performed wherein the first reaction amplifies the gene of interest from a source template, and the second reaction fuses it with the designed expression vector fragments. These vector fragments carry the essential elements that are required for the fusion product selection. The entire process can be completed in less than 8 hours. Furthermore, ligation of the amplified DNA by a DNA ligase is not required before transformation, although the procedure yields more number of colonies upon transformation if ligation is carried out. As a proof-of-concept, we show the cloning and expression of GFP, adh, and rho genes. Using GFP production as an example, we further demonstrate that the E. coli T7 express strain can directly be used in our methodology for the protein expression immediately after PCR. The expressed protein is without or with 6xHistidine tag at either terminus, depending upon the chosen vector fragments. We believe that our method will find tremendous use in molecular and structural biology.
Capability File Names: Separating Authorisation From User Management in an Internet File System

The ability to access and share information over the Internet has introduced the need for new flexible, dynamic and fine-grained access control mechanisms. None of the current mechanisms for sharing information - distributed file systems and the web - offer adequate support for sharing in a large and highly dynamic group of users. Distributed file systems lack the ability to share information with unauthenticated users, and the web lacks fine grained access controls, i.e. the ability to grant individual users access to selected files. In this paper we present Capability File Names, a new access control mechanism, in which self-certifying file names are used as sparse capabilities that allow a user ubiquitous access to his files and enables him to delegate this right to a dynamic group of remote users. Encoding the capaility in the file name has two major advantages: it is self-supporting and it ensures full compatablity with existing programs. Capability file names have been implemented in a new file system called CapaFS. CapaFS separates user identification from authorisation, thus allowing users to share selected files with remote users without the intervention of a system administrator. The implementation of CapaFS is described and evaluated in this paper
Fetal ECG extraction using hybrid BSS techniques

In the task of extracting the fetal ECG from abdominal ECG, often blind source separation is used as an intermediate step. To solve this problem is generally employed PCA and ICA. The COMBI and MULTI-COMBI algorithms offer novel schemes for combining PCA and ICA, enabling exploit the strengths of both techniques. In this work, the performance of the algorithms COMBI, MULTICOMBI, EFICA and traditional JADE algorithm are compared. We used a semi-synthetic database. In all case, it is found that the COMBI and MULTICOMBI algorithms show better performance than the JADE, and EFICA algorithms.
Behaviour, Preferences and Cities: Urban Theory and Urban Resurgence

The resurgence of big, old cities and their regions is real, but it is merely a part of a broader pattern of urban change in the developed countries, whose broadest tendency is urban emergence, including suburbanisation, and movements of population to certain 'Sunbelt' regions. The problem is that it is difficult to accommodate explanation of both resurgence and emergence using the main explanations in the field today. These include: theories of the knowledge or creative economy, urban amenities, diversity and tolerance, and urban beauty. In most of their common specifications, they do well for either resurgent or emergent cities, but not for both at the same time. This suggests that these ideas, interesting as they are, require much greater specification and, in some cases, overhaul, in order to offer satisfactory responses to the diversity of patterns of urban growth. By examining some of these deficiencies, we conclude that urban theory needs a better understanding of urban choice behaviours and especially the effects of bundling, the limits to preference substitutions and the relationship between past and present preferences, in order to become fully effective in explaining urban resurgence and urban emergence. When these aspects of choice and preference are better integrated into urban theory, then the 'exogenous' causes of urbanisation can be made more endogenous and, in addition, they can be applied better to both emergence and resurgence. Urban research can, by so doing, also potentially become more policy-relevant.
Regulation Effects of Water and Nitrogen on the Source-Sink Relationship in Potato during the Tuber Bulking Stage

The source-sink relationship determines crop yield, and it is largely regulated by water and nutrients in agricultural production. This has been widely investigated in cereals, but fewer studies have been conducted in root and tuber crops such as potato (Solanum tuberosum L.). The objective of this study was to investigate the source-sink relationship in potato and the regulation of water and nitrogen on the source-sink relationship during the tuber bulking stage. A pot experiment using virus-free plantlets of the Atlantic potato cultivar was conducted, using three water levels (50%, 70% and 90% of field capacity) and three nitrogen levels (0, 0.2, 0.4 g N∙kg−1 soil). The results showed that, under all water and nitrogen levels, plant source capacity were small at the end of the experiment, since photosynthetic activity in leaves were low and non-structural reserves in underground stems were completely remobilized. While at this time, there were very big differences in maximum and minimum tuber number and tuber weight, indicating that the sink tuber still had a large potential capacity to take in assimilates. These results suggest that the source-supplied assimilates were not sufficient enough to meet the demands of sink growth. Thus, we concluded that, unlike cereals, potato yield is more likely to be source-limited than sink-limited during the tuber bulking stage. Water and nitrogen are two key factors in potato production management. Our results showed that water level, nitrogen level and the interaction between water and nitrogen influence potato yield mainly through affecting source capacity via the net photosynthetic rate, total leaf area and leaf life span. Well-watered, sufficient nitrogen and well-watered combined with sufficient nitrogen increased yield mainly by enhancing the source capacity. Therefore, this suggests that increasing source capacity is more crucial to improve potato yield.
EXPLORING THE NETWORK PHENOMENON AMONG SMALL EXPORTING

The paper attempts to explore the role of networks in small firms internationalization in Tanzania. It notes that while firm internationalization has been studied extensively, inquiry into how small firms enter foreign markets and the strategies they use has not received much attention. The study is further motivated by the fact that export performance of Developing countries is alarmingly low, and hence there is need for African Governments to create an environment that will stimulate small firms competitiveness in the current globalized export markets. One such approach is to promote partnering and networks. The Tanzanian exploratory study has revealed that networks eliminate small firms ownership disadvantages and their perceived psychic distance thereby facilitating their entry into foreign markets.
Ranking with Fairness Constraints

Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can result in decreased diversity in the type of content presented, promote stereotypes, and polarize opinions. In order to address such issues, we study the following variant of the traditional ranking problem when, in addition, there are fairness or diversity constraints. Given a collection of items along with 1) the value of placing an item in a particular position in the ranking, 2) the collection of sensitive attributes (such as gender, race, political opinion) of each item and 3) a collection of constraints that, for each k, bound the number of items with each attribute that are allowed to appear in the top k positions of the ranking, the goal is to output a ranking that maximizes the value with respect to the original rank quality metric while respecting the constraints. This problem encapsulates various well-studied problems related to bipartite and hypergraph matching as special cases and turns out to be hard to approximate even with simple constraints. Our main technical contributions are fast exact and approximation algorithms along with complementary hardness results that, together, come close to settling the approximability of this constrained ranking maximization problem. Unlike prior work on the constrained matching problems, our algorithm runs in linear time, even when the number of constraints is large, its approximation ratio does not depend on the number of constraints, and it produces solutions with small constraint violations. Our results rely on insights about the constrained matching problem when the objective satisfies properties that appear in common ranking metrics such as Discounted Cumulative Gain, Spearman's rho or Bradley-Terry.
Stabilizing sensitivity in large single-photon image sensors with an integrated 3 . 3-to-25 V all-digital charge pump

Abstract This paper presents a digitally controlled charge pump (DCP) to supply high voltages, while ensuring temperature and load current independence of excess bias in cameras based on avalanche photodiodes. This is achieved through a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) based monitoring mechanism that continuously reconfigures the DCP using a feedback loop to compensate breakdown voltage variations by temperature and load current in real time. The sensitivity of the SPADs, or photon detection probability, is maintained to within 1.9% when the temperature shifts from 28 ◦C to 65 ◦C and the load current changes from 0 μA to 100μA.
Examining the Technology Acceptance Model Using Physician Acceptance of Telemedicine Technology

The rapid growth of investment in information technology (IT) by organizations worldwide has made user acceptance an increasingly critical technology implementation and management issue. While such acceptance has received fairly extensive attention from previous research, additional efforts are needed to examine or validate existing research results, particularly those involving different technologies, user populations, and/or organizational contexts. In response, this paper reports a research work that examined the applicability of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in explaining physicians' decisions to accept telemedicine technology in the health-care context. The technology, the user group, and the organizational context are all new to IT acceptance/adoption research. The study also addressed a pragmatic technology management need resulting from millions of dollars invested by health-care organizations in developing and implementing telemedicine programs in recent years. The model's overall fit, explanatory power, and the individual causal links that it postulates were evaluated by examining the acceptance of telemedicine technology among physicians practicing at public tertiary hospitals in Hong Kong. Our results suggested that TAM was able to provide a reasonable depiction of physicians' intention to use telemedicine technology. Perceived usefulness was found to be a significant determinant of attitude and intention but perceived ease of use was not. The relatively low R-square of the model suggests both the limitations of the parsimonious model and the need for incorporating additional factors or integrating with other IT acceptance models in order to improve its specificity and explanatory utility in a health-care context. Based on the study findings, implications for user technology acceptance research and telemedicine management are discussed.
Social Studies Teacher Candidates' Views on Historical Thinking Skills.

Current study aimed to present Social Studies teacher candidates’ views on historical thinking skills. Study was conducted using qualitative design and working group was composed of a total of 121 teacher candidates (62 females and 59 males) attending Social Studies Teaching Department of Karadeniz Technical University and Adiyaman University Faculties of Education. Results showed that Social Studies teacher candidates were aware of historical thinking skills and they regarded historical thinking skills as important although they did not fully develop thinking skills in the area and they wished to receive training in the field. The fact that the majority of Social Studies teacher candidates perceived historical thinking skills as thinking about history regarding the conditions of a specific period and some teacher candidates perceived historical thinking skills as empathizing with and comprehending historical events may be interpreted in a manner that teacher candidates perceived historical thinking as historical comprehension. Research results showed that other dimensions and sub dimensions of historical thinking skills were not highly emphasized by the candidates. Teacher candidates stated that the biggest problem in acquiring historical thinking skills was related to the method used in teaching. Key words: Social studies, history, historical thinking.
Comparison of protein expression pattern between the Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine-resistant RKL9 and chloroquine-sensitive MRC2 strains

Objective: The objective of this study was to compare the protein expression patterns of Plasmodium falciparum extracellular and intracellular proteins separated by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) from the chloroquine-sensitive (CQS) MRC2 strain and chloroquine-resistant (CQR) RKL9 strain. Materials and Methods: Both the extracellular protein (ECP) and intracellular protein (ICP) were extracted and solubilized. The proteins were separated by 2-DE, first based on their charges using isoelectric focusing and then their sizes by electrophoresis. The separated protein spots were detected by silver staining, and further, the protein spot density was analyzed by an image analysis software. Results: 2-DE separated the proteins extracted from the CQS and CQR strains based on their differentially expressed protein patterns. Extracellular Protein Analysis: A total of 109 and 77 protein spots were detected by image analysis of ECP extracted from MRC2 and RKL9 strains, respectively. There was a marked reduction in protein expression pattern in the CQR strain when compared with the CQS strain. Interestingly, 50 and 18 protein spots were uniquely expressed in MRC2 and RKL9 strains, respectively. When MRC2 strain-expressed proteins were taken as the control, 12 upregulated and 14 downregulated protein spots were observed in the RKL9 strain-extracted proteins. Intracellular Protein Analysis: ICP extracted from MRC2 and RKL9 strains showed 187 and 199 protein spots by an image analysis software, and a small enhancement of protein expression was measured when comparing the CQR strain with CQS strain. There were 67 and 79 unique protein spots detected in MRC2 and RKL9 strains, respectively. A total of 120 protein spots were similar when MRC2 proteins were taken as the control; among these protein spots, 40 upregulated and 22 downregulated protein spots were detected in RKL9 strain-expressed protein. Conclusions: Both these unique and matched protein spots might be molecularly potent drug targets for chloroquine resistance in P. falciparum. Further identification of these proteins by mass spectrometry/peptide sequencing is essential to clearly understand the mechanism of resistance.
Neighborhood Guardianship and Property Crime Victimization

In this study, we assess the extent to which the availability of guardians, guardianship expectations, and guardianship actions explain the variation of neighborhood property crime rates and self-reported property crime victimization. Furthermore, we examine whether or not the strength of these relationships is moderated by the neighborhood composition. We use data from the Australian Community Capacity Study (ACCS), a survey of 4,000 respondents from 148 neighborhoods across Brisbane, Australia, and employ regression and multi-level regression techniques. We find that particular aspects of guardianship do protect against crime; however, the relationship between guardianship and crime is influenced by neighborhood diversity, disadvantage, and residential instability.
Nimesulide, a COX-2 inhibitor, does not reduce lesion size or number in a nude mouse model of endometriosis.

BACKGROUND Women with endometriosis have elevated levels of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) in peritoneal macrophages and endometriotic tissue. Inhibition of COX-2 has been shown to reduce inflammation, angiogenesis and cellular proliferation. It may also downregulate aromatase activity in ectopic endometrial lesions. Ectopic endometrial establishment and growth are therefore likely to be suppressed in the presence of COX-2 inhibitors. We hypothesized that COX-2 inhibition would reduce the size and number of ectopic human endometrial lesions in a nude mouse model of endometriosis. METHODS The selective COX-2 inhibitor, nimesulide, was administered to estrogen-supplemented nude mice implanted with human endometrial tissue. Ten days after implantation, the number and size of ectopic endometrial lesions were evaluated and compared with lesions from a control group. Immunohistochemical assessment of vascular development and macrophage and myofibroblast infiltration in control and treated lesions was performed. RESULTS There was no difference in the number or size of ectopic endometrial lesions in control and nimesulide-treated nude mice. Nimesulide did not induce a visually identifiable difference in blood vessel development or macrophage or myofibroblast infiltration in nude mouse explants. CONCLUSION The hypothesized biological properties of COX-2 inhibition did not influence lesion number or size in the nude mouse model of endometriosis.
Testing the Causal Links Between School Climate, School Violence, and School Academic Performance

The present study explores the causal link between school climate, school violence, and a school’s general academic performance over time using a school-level, cross-lagged panel autoregressive modeling design. We hypothesized that reductions in school violence and climate improvement would lead to schools’ overall improved academic performance. School-level secondary analysis of the California Healthy Kids Survey was conducted at three points in time. Findings offer credible evidence that a school’s overall improvement in academic performance is a central causal factor in reducing violence and enhancing a school’s climate. In the discussion, we suggest that when strong efforts to improve academics are taken, schools may tend to include issues of climate and victimization as part of those academic reform efforts.