Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development and evaluation of a threshing machine for Prosopis africana seed

A decorticating machine for Prosopis Africana was developed, tested and evaluated. Prosopis Africana is popular in the Sub-Saharan Africa, with all the parts of the tree useful for medicinal purposes. This study focuses on the threshing of the pod to obtain the seed, which is the most widely used of the parts of the Prosopis Africana tree. Results from preliminary investigations carried out of on some physical and engineering properties of the pod and seed were used in the design of a threshing machine. The machine was tested with pods at a moisture content of 8% w.b. using speeds of 300, 350, 400 and 450rpm at four feed rates of 1, 2, 3 and 4kg/min. The threshing efficiency (TE), cleaning efficiency (CE) and seed loss (SL) increased as the drum speed increased. There was however no significant difference in the variations of the values of TE, CE and SL at different feed rates but the TE and CE decreased with increase in feed rate. The maximum threshing and cleaning efficiencies were obtained at a speed of 450 rpm as 95.8% and 96.0% respectively at a feed rate of 1 and 4 Kg/min. The highest seed loss (19.1%) was obtained at a drum speed of 450rpm and feed rate of 4Kg/min. The high threshing and cleaning efficiencies obtained in the threshing of Prosopis Africana and minimal loss have shown that there is a prospect in the mechanization of the processing and handling operation hence commercialization and promotion of mechanized threshing at a large scale. Keywords : threshing, Prosopis Africana , development, evaluation, seed Journal of Applied Science, Engineering and Technology Vol. 5(1&2) 2005: 56-62
Plasma oxytocin in human pregnancy and parturition

Oxytocin concentrations were determined in serial peripheral plasma samples collected from clinically normal women during pregnancy and labor. Measurable concentrations of this hormone were detected in all maternal plasma samples during pregnancy, but there were wide differences in values between patients. Serial samples from individual patients revealed a pattern of gradual rise of oxytocin levels with advancing gestation and the increase in concentration was statistically significant. There were no significant differences in oxytocin levels at any stage of labor, with or without epidural analgesia. Oxytocin levels at the onset of the second stage did not differ statistically from those at crowning. Comparison of cross-sectional data showed no significant difference between the mean oxytocin concentration in early labor and in late pregnancy. Oxytocin surges occurred, but not in a regular pattern. Plasma oxytocin concentration did not increase after pelvic examination, sweeping of the membranes, low amniotomy or after cervical vibration. After spontaneous vaginal delivery, umbilical arterial plasma levels of oxytocin were consistently higher than plasma concentrations from the umbilical vein. The fetal arterio-venous difference was less pronounced at elective cesarean section. At spontaneous vaginal delivery, with and without epidural anesthesia, plasma levels from the umbilical artery were significantly higher than the maternal levels. After vaginal delivery, oxytocin levels in cord plasma were significantly higher than at elective abdominal delivery. Some methodological aspects with regard to blood sampling and to plasma oxytocin radioimmunoassay procedures are discussed. From the results presented it is concluded that the human fetus can be an important source of oxytocin and that neurohumoral birth reflexes described in animals do not occur systematically in man.
Perceptions and Practices of Student Binge Drinking: An Observational Study of Residential College Students

Professionals have debated the use of the term binge drinking over the past couple of decades, yet little attention has been paid to college student perceptions. We explored how students at one university qualitatively defined binge drinking; whether their own definitions coincided with those adopted by researchers; and whether students' own definitions varied according to their behavior. The most common definition provided by studesnts included a description of the consumption of a large, non-specific, amount of alcohol. Only half of the students who, by standard definition, participated in binge drinking in the previous 30 days actually identified their behavior as such. Finally, binge drinkers were more likely to define binge drinking in an extreme manner such that it results in vomiting or blacking out.
Comparing childhood leukaemia treatment before and after the introduction of a parental education programme in Indonesia

Setting: Previously, treatment and the results of treatment for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in Indonesia differed significantly between poor and prosperous patients. Poor patients received less individual attention from oncologists and access to parental education and donated chemotherapy was lacking. Intervention: A structured parental education programme for both poor and prosperous parents was introduced in January 2004 to improve access to parental education and donated chemotherapy. The programme consisted of a video presentation, an information booklet, DVD, audiocassette, a statement-of-understanding for donated chemotherapy, and a complaints procedure. Informed consent was also sought. Objective: Our study compared childhood ALL treatment outcome before and after the introduction of the parental education programme. Design: The medical records of 283 children with ALL diagnosed before (1997–2002; n = 164) and after (2004–2006; n = 119) the introduction of the education programme were reviewed. Data on treatment results and parental socioeconomic status were collected. Results: After the introduction of the education programme, treatment refusal decreased (from 14% to 2%) and event-free survival increased (from 13% to 29%) significantly among poor patients. Treatment dropout increased (from 0% to 13%) significantly among prosperous patients. Overall, toxic death (from 23% to 36%) increased significantly, but there was no significant difference in event-free survival. Conclusions: After introduction of the programme, treatment refusal decreased and event-free survival increased significantly among poor families. However, improved knowledge, skills and communication are still required to combat the high rates of toxic death and treatment dropout. Treatment intensity should be accompanied by improved supportive care.
A Guinea Pig Model for the Identification of In Utero Alcohol Exposure Using Fatty Acid Ethyl Esters in Neonatal Hair

Measuring levels of fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) in hair has been a useful way to discriminate between adult heavy and nondrinkers. Extending the use of FAEE into neonatal hair to objectively identify children exposed to alcohol in utero may revolutionize current methods used to diagnose fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Here we confirm for the first time that chronic exposure to alcohol during pregnancy in guinea pigs leads to increased levels of FAEE in both maternal and neonatal hair. The mean cumulative FAEE concentration in exposed maternal samples taken at GD57 was 0.431 ± 0.140 pmol/mg (mean ± SEM); levels observed in corresponding sucrose and water controls were 10-fold lower. Similarly, FAEE concentrations in exposed offspring samples taken at postnatal d 1 (mean cumulative FAEE = 0.491 ± 0.177 pmol/mg) were more than 15-fold higher than control counterparts. Sixty percent of all alcohol-exposed animal samples contained two or more quantifiable FAEE, whereas close to 90% of either water or sucrose control samples did not have more than one quantifiable level of a single FAEE. Results of this study suggest that FAEE in neonatal hair may be useful biomarkers in identifying in utero alcohol exposure and may facilitate the early diagnosis and treatment of FASD.
Group differences in test-taking behaviour: an example from a high-stakes testing program

Abstract This study investigated whether different groups of test-takers vary in their reported test-taking behaviour in a high-stakes test situation. A between-group design (N = 1129) was used to examine whether high and low achievers, as well as females and males, differ in their use of test-taking strategies, and in level of reported test anxiety and motivation. The results showed differences between high and low achievers on a number of test-taking strategies, where high achievers reported using successful strategies to a higher extent. There were also gender differences: females, for example, reported using random guessing to a higher extent than males. Further, low achievers, especially females, reported significantly higher levels of test anxiety than high achievers, and high achievers reported slightly higher levels of motivation when compared to low achievers. To conclude, test-taking behaviour might bring additional variance to test scores, whether or not this is irrelevant variance is discussed.
Loss of Caveolin-1 Polarity Impedes Endothelial Cell Polarization and Directional Movement*

The ability of a cell to move requires the asymmetrical organization of cellular activities. To investigate polarized cellular activity in moving endothelial cells, human endothelial cells were incubated in a Dunn chamber to allow migration toward vascular endothelial growth factor. Immunofluorescent staining with a specific antibody against caveolin-1 revealed that caveolin-1 was concentrated at the rear of moving cells. Similarly, monolayer scraping to induce random cell walk resulted in relocation of caveolin-1 to the cell rear. These results suggest that posterior polarization of caveolin-1 is a common feature both for chemotaxis and chemokinesis. Dual immunofluorescent labeling showed that, during cell spreading, caveolin-1 was compacted in the cell center and excluded from nascent focal contacts along the circular lamellipodium, as revealed by integrin β1 and FAK staining. When cells were migrating, integrin β1 and FAK appeared at polarized lamellipodia, whereas caveolin-1 was found at the posterior of moving cells. Notably, wherever caveolin-1 was polarized, there was a conspicuous absence of lamellipod protrusion. Transmission electron microscopy showed that caveolae, similar to their marker caveolin-1, were located at the cell center during cell spreading or at the cell rear during cell migration. In contrast to its unphosphorylated form, tyrosine-phosphorylated caveolin-1, upon fibronectin stimulation, was associated with the focal complex molecule phosphopaxillin along the lamellipodia of moving cells. Thus, unphosphorylated and phosphorylated caveolin-1 were located at opposite poles during cell migration. Importantly, loss of caveolin-1 polarity by targeted down-regulation of the protein prevented cell polarization and directional movement. Our present results suggest a potential role of caveolin polarity in lamellipod extension and cell migration.
Grain Losses of Wheat as Affected by Different Harvesting and Threshing Techniques

Grain losses of wheat as affected by different harvesting and threshing techniques were studied at Adaptive Research Farm, Vehari during 2010-11. Three methods of harvesting and threshing i.e. i) manual plus thresher ii) reaper plus thresher and iii) combine harvester were used in the study. The data revealed that different harvesting and threshing techniques had considerable impact on grain losses of wheat. The harvesting losses with manual plus thresher and reaper plus thresher at the field level were observed to be 164.37kg ha -1 and 142.93 kg ha -1 accounting for 3.16% and 2.76%, respectively of wheat grain yield. Total grain losses during harvesting and threshing processes with manual plus thresher, reaper plus thresher and combine harvester were 222.63kg ha -1 , 199.41kg ha -1 and 149.87kg ha -1 which were 4.28%, 3.85% and 2.92% of the total yield, respectively. The minimum amount of waste belonged to reaper plus thresher (0.82%) by providing 42.58 kg ha 1 broken grains and inert material in the produce. The cleaning efficiency of combine was a bit poorer (98.90%) as compared to other harvesting and threshing techniques.
Vigabatrin in drug‐resistant partial epilepsy

We treated 75 patients with drug-resistant complex partial seizures and secondarily generalized seizures with vigabatrin as additional therapy for 6 months. Twenty-one patients either showed no benefit from vigabatrin treatment or had side effects. The remaining 54 patients entered into the long-term study. The median monthly seizure frequency decreased from 12.5 at baseline to 3.3 at the 3-month visit, and was 3.9 after 5 years of therapy in 28 patients who continued using the drug after the 5-year period. During 5 years of therapy with vigabatrin, 26 patients have withdrawn from the study because of various reasons: loss of efficacy (14), suspected side effects (5), noncompliance (3), administrative reasons (2), pregnancy (1), and epilepsy surgery (1). In all, 19 patients had a greater than 50% seizure frequency reduction at 5 years, representing 35% of the 54 patients who entered the long-term study, or 25% of the 75 patients who were initially recruited into the efficacy study.
Visual Interaction Networks: Learning a Physics Simulator from Video

From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future state of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains and require direct measurements of the underlying states. We introduce the Visual Interaction Network, a general-purpose model for learning the dynamics of a physical system from raw visual observations. Our model consists of a perceptual front-end based on convolutional neural networks and a dynamics predictor based on interaction networks. Through joint training, the perceptual front-end learns to parse a dynamic visual scene into a set of factored latent object representations. The dynamics predictor learns to roll these states forward in time by computing their interactions and dynamics, producing a predicted physical trajectory of arbitrary length. We found that from just six input video frames the Visual Interaction Network can generate accurate future trajectories of hundreds of time steps on a wide range of physical systems. Our model can also be applied to scenes with invisible objects, inferring their future states from their effects on the visible objects, and can implicitly infer the unknown mass of objects. Our results demonstrate that the perceptual module and the object-based dynamics predictor module can induce factored latent representations that support accurate dynamical predictions. This work opens new opportunities for model-based decision-making and planning from raw sensory observations in complex physical environments.
INCREASED COSTIMULATORY RESPONSES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN KIDNEY ALLOGRAFT RECIPIENTS

Background. The issue of racial differences in immune responses has been seldom investigated, despite the increased incidence of transplant rejection and inferior allograft outcomes in African-Americans (AA). We previously reported significantly increased expression of costimulatory molecules on peripheral blood cells from healthy adult AA compared with Caucasian (CS) volunteers. This report extends the study to pediatric kidney allograft recipients. Methods. Surface antigen expression by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (MNC) from AA and CS transplant patients was determined by flow cytometry, after staining with specific antibodies. In vitro proliferation, in a one-way mixed lymphocyte response (MLR), was measured after stimulation with allogeneic irradiated mononuclear cells. The concentration of cyclosporine (CsA) achieving 50% inhibition (IC50) of in vitro proliferative responses to PHA and OKT3 was calculated. Results. MNC from AA patients were shown to have significantly higher expression of CD80 (CS 5.2%±0.6, AA 9.6%±1.2, P <0.0001) than cells from CS patients. Additionally, the cells from AA transplant recipients proliferated significantly more in an MLR (stimulation index: CS 8±2, AA 25±8, P <0.05), and the CsA IC50 values, during proliferation to PHA and OKT3, were significantly higher in AA compared to CS patients. Conclusions. Although socioeconomic factors and therapeutic compliance are undoubtedly important issues in long-term allograft survival, our data suggest that AA patients mount more vigorous immune responses to antigens. The increased requirement for immunosuppression may be linked to racial variations in costimulatory molecule expression on antigen-presenting cells.
Trienoic Fatty Acids and Plant Tolerance of High Temperature

The chloroplast membrane of higher plants contains an unusually high concentration of trienoic fatty acids. Plants grown in colder temperatures have a higher content of trienoic fatty acids. Transgenic tobacco plants in which the gene encoding chloroplast omega-3 fatty acid desaturase, which synthesizes trienoic fatty acids, was silenced contained a lower level of trienoic fatty acids than wild-type plants and were better able to acclimate to higher temperatures.
Does Fair Value Reporting Affect Risk Management? International Survey Evidence

We survey CFOs of public and private firms from 36 countries to examine whether and why firms from around the world altered their risk management policies when fair value reporting standards for derivatives were introduced, a substantial fraction of firms (42%) state that their risk management policies have been materially affected by fair value reporting. Firms are more likely to be affected by fair value reporting if they seek to use risk management to reduce the volatility of earnings relative to cash flows and if they operate in countries with low disclosure standards. Further, firms significantly reduced the use of non-linear options contracts as a result of the regulations, but did not significantly change their use of linear derivative contracts. Finally, while most firms in our sample do not use derivatives to take active positions (speculate), those who do are more likely to be affected by fair value reporting. Taken together, our evidence shows that requirements to report derivatives at fair values have had a material impact on derivative use; while speculative activities have been reduced, sound hedging strategies have been compromised as well.
Phase Transitions in Connectionist Models Having Rapidly Varying Connection Strengths

A phase transition in a connectionist model refers to a qualitative change in the model's behavior as parameters determining the spread of activation (gain, decay rate, etc.) pass through certain critical values. As connectionist methods have been increasingly adopted to model various problems in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, there has been an increased need to understand and predict these phase transitions to assure meaningful model behavior. This paper extends previous results on phase transitions to encompass a class of connectionist models having rapidly varying connection strengths (fast weights). Phase transitions are predicted theoretically and then verified through a series of computer simulations. These results broaden the range of connectionist models for which phase transitions are identified and lay the foundation for future studies comparing models with rapidly varying and slowly varying connection strengths.
Knockout mutants of Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae serotype 1 that are devoid of RTX toxins do not activate or kill porcine neutrophils

The Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae RTX-toxins ApxI, ApxII, and ApxIII are important virulence factors of this swine pathogen. It is hypothesized that the Apx toxins are deleterious to defense cells of the host, enabling the bacterium to infect the host. To confirm this, we studied the effect on porcine polymorphonuclear neutrophils of mutant strains of A. pleuropneumoniae that were devoid of Apx toxins. For this purpose, we developed a system for targeted mutagenesis of A. pleuropneumoniae based on the conditionally replicating plasmid pVE6063 and insertional mutagenesis by homologous recombination. Employing this system on the reference strain of serotype 1, a strain that secretes ApxI and ApxII, we generated mutant strains that were devoid of ApxI and/or ApxII. We compared the ability of the parent strain and the mutant strains to provoke an oxidative burst in porcine neutrophils and to kill these cells. The parent strain and mutants that secreted either ApxI or ApxII provoked an oxidative burst and killed the neutrophils, whereas mutant strains that were devoid of ApxI and ApxII did not. These experiments indicate the importance of ApxI and ApxII to these profound effects on neutrophils and emphasize the importance of ApxI and ApxII in pathogenesis.
Workspace control of a wheel-legged mobile robot for gyrating locomotion with movable leg

We discuss motion generation problems of a wheel-legged mobile robot (WLMR) with movable legs. We consider and solve two problems of inverse kinematics of WLMRs. The first problem occurs in the generation of steering commands for WLMRs, which is due to the mechanism of the structure of the wheels. In general, inverse kinematics for WLMRs are applied in the velocity level. However, in our case, it is not possible to generate the proper steering motion. To solve this problem, we show that for WLMRs, the application of inverse kinematics in the acceleration level is effective. The second problem addressed is a singularity problem that occurs when controlling the contact point of legs during the wheeled locomotion of the WLMR. We show that this singularity problem can be avoided by utilizing the redundancy present in the wheel-leg mechanism. Finally, the effectiveness of our motion generation schemes is validated by conducting precise, three-dimensional simulations.
Fast Feature Fool: A data independent approach to universal adversarial perturbations

State-of-the-art object recognition Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are shown to be fooled by image agnostic perturbations, called universal adversarial perturbations. It is also observed that these perturbations generalize across multiple networks trained on the same target data. However, these algorithms require training data on which the CNNs were trained and compute adversarial perturbations via complex optimization. The fooling performance of these approaches is directly proportional to the amount of available training data. This makes them unsuitable for practical attacks since its unreasonable for an attacker to have access to the training data. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel data independent approach to generate image agnostic perturbations for a range of CNNs trained for object recognition. We further show that these perturbations are transferable across multiple network architectures trained either on same or different data. In the absence of data, our method generates universal adversarial perturbations efficiently via fooling the features learned at multiple layers thereby causing CNNs to misclassify. Experiments demonstrate impressive fooling rates and surprising transferability for the proposed universal perturbations generated without any training data.