Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study of Respirable Dust in Ambient Air of Bikaner City and Its Impact on Human Health

Monthly and seasonal analysis of Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM) and Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) was done at industrial, traffic, residential and sensitive locations of Bikaner city. In this study, SPM and RSPM were estimated at 10 representative locations in urban area and one village area for control. The highest level of RSPM (508.0 µg/m ) and SPM (1156.0 µg/m ) was recorded in the month 33 of November and June at Industrial site (Beechwal Industrial Area), respectively. The level of RSPM (368.45 µg/m ) at industrial locations and SPM (987.5 µg/m ) at traffic locations (Kot gate) was highest during 33 the winter season. Highest level of SPM (683.25 µg/m ) was found in summer at industrial location 3 (Karni Industrial Area). The level of pollutants crossed the limits of National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) laid down by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). These pollutants may pose detrimental effect on human health, as exposures to these are associated with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases with increased risk of mortality and morbidity.
Spatial distribution of Cubiceps pauciradiatus (Perciformes: Nomeidae) in the tropical Indian Ocean and its importance in the diet of large pelagic fishes

The bigeye cigarfish (Cubiceps pauciradiatus) is a small pelagic nomeid of the tropical world ocean, often recovered in the stomach contents of top predators such as tunas, billfishes and marine mammals. In the Indian Ocean, a few studies have investigated the biology and the ecology of this species that is one of the most abundant fish of the intermediate trophic levels. In this paper, we investigated the spatial distribution of C. pauciradiatus in the Indian Ocean using pelagic trawl catches carried out between 20uN and 45uS, and the importance of bigeye cigarfish in the diet of 9 piscivorous fishes sampled by different fishing gears in the western part of the Indian Ocean. The highest densities were observed along the eastern coast of Africa and in the Arabian Sea (87 000 individuals per square nautical mile) during the South-West Monsoon and in the eastern part of the Seychelles archipelago (62 200 ind. square nmi) during the North-East Monsoon. Small sized bigeye cigarfish (20-80 mm SL) was a regular and abundant prey (20 to 200 ind. per stomach) for schooling predators exploited by purse seine fishery such as large yellowfin and bigeye tunas chasing prey near the sea surface. Large sized bigeye cigarfish (61-150 mm SL) occurred in small numbers (3 to 20 ind. per stomach) in the stomach contents of swordfish and of large yellowfin and bigeye tunas caught by longline sets at great depths. Large concentrations of bigeye cigarfish occurred in zones of high productivity, and that species constituted seasonally a strong link in the transfer of energy from low to high trophic levels in this part of the Indian Ocean.
Mixture state and size of Asian dust particles collected at southwestern Japan in spring 2000

[1] Atmospheric particles were collected at Kumamoto (32°48′N, 130°45′E), a coastal city in southwestern Japan, during three dust storm events in spring 2000. The elemental composition and size of individual dust particles and their mixture state with sea salt, sulfate, and nitrate were analyzed using electron microscopes and an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer. About 60 ∼ 85% of dust particles were internally mixed with sea salt. Weather records indicated these particles were most probably formed by the collisions and coagulations of dust particles and sea-salt particles. The relative weight ratios of mineral components to sea salt in individual particles showed that the mixtures of particles were dominated by mineral, by sea salt, or by both. Size distributions of the particles segregated by the mixture levels of mineral and sea salt in the three dust storm events were similar and all distributions showed a diameter range of 1 ∼ 8 μm with maximum mode around 3 μm. Out of 1 ∼ 8 μm, dust particles were rarely detected. The combination of dust particles with sea salt caused an increase in size of the dust particles. Therefore the decrease of particle concentrations in the range of diameter >3 μm suggests the critical diameter for dust particle dispersion was possibly around 3 μm and a dust particle might be removed rapidly if it became larger than this scale in the marine atmosphere. Detection of sulfate and nitrate revealed that 91% or more dust particles contained sulfate and 27% or less contained nitrate. The comparisons of the relative weight ratios of sodium, sulfur, and chlorine in mixture particles and in sea-salt particles confirmed previous results that mineral materials could enhance particulate sulfate and nitrate formation and restrain chlorine depletion from the sea-salt components in mixture particles.
Gender Travel Behaviour and Women Mobility Constraints in Ilesa, Nigeria

This paper assessed the gender travel behavior in IIesa, Nigeria. A total of 1,450 copies of a questionnaire were administered to the sampled population in Ilesa, out of which 620 men and 580 women completed the questionnaire. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed for data presentation. The findings revealed that the mean distance traveled to work for men and women differs in the city. Further analysis revealed that more than 70% of the women depend on public transport for their day-to-day transactions. Also, 65% of the men depend on their own personal means of transport to commute to different activity centres in the study area. This implies that men tend to monopolize the personal means of transport available for the entire family. There is a significant relationship between gender travel behavior and trips frequency in the city. The study therefore concluded that there is need to consider gender variation in travel demands, particularly with respect to the design and implementation of urban transport policy so as to improve the accessibility characteristics of women to transport services in Ilesa, Nigeria and in other developing countries of the world as a whole.
Potential of refrigerated marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus used as food for Artemia franciscana

The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus after refrigerated storage (4°C) and examine its potential as food for Artemia franciscana . Non-axenic semicontinuous cultures of S. elongatus were maintained at 4°C for 8 weeks. In our bioassay, we fed A. franciscana with refrigerated S. elongatus and fresh cultures of the diatom Chaetoceros muelleri as a control. The S. elongatus cultures could be refrigerated for up to 8 weeks without loss of its viability or alteration in its growth rate, cell size, and proximate composition. Fresh and eight week-refrigerated cultures of S. elongatus were similar with regard to fatty acid profiles. Significant differences in fatty acid profiles were found between refrigerated S. elongatus and fresh C. muelleri cultures. Vibrio bacteria were not detected in any of the S. elongatus cultures (fresh or refrigerated) or fresh cultures C. muelleri . This work demonstrated that refrigerated S. elongatus can be used to feed A. franciscana , maintaining similar growth rates and proximate composition compared with fresh C. muelleri cultures as feed. Thus, S. elongatus has potential aquaculture use as feed for A. franciscana .
Impact of climate change on the potential distribution of Mediterranean pines

The impact of climate change on the potential distribution of four Mediterranean pine species - Pinus brutia Ten. , Pinus halepensis Mill. , Pinus pinaster Aiton, and Pinus pinea L. - was studied by the Climate Envelope Model (CEM) to examine whether these species are suitable for the use as ornamental plants without frost protection in the Carpathian Basin. The model was supported by EUFORGEN digital area database (distribution maps), ESRI ArcGIS 10 software's Spatial Analyst module (modeling environment), PAST (calibration of the model with statistical method), and REMO regional climate model (climatic data). The climate data were available in a 25 km resolution grid for the reference period (1961-1990) and two future periods (2011-2040, 2041-2070). The regional climate model was based on the IPCC SRES A1B scenario. While the potential distribution of P. brutia was not predicted to expand remarkably, an explicit shift of the distribution of the other three species was shown. Northwestern African distribution segments seem to become abandoned in the future. Current distribution of P. brutia may be highly endangered by the climate change. P. halepensis in the southern part and P. pinaster in the western part of the Carpathian Basin may find suitable climatic conditions in the period of 2041-2070.
How well do people in autarky protect food consumption? Panel evidence from foragers and farmers in the Bolivian Amazon

The ability of rural people to protect their food consumption matters because it captures their economic vulnerability. How well do people in highly autarkic economies protect consumption from income shocks and does protection work equally well for girls, boys, women, and men? We answer the queries with a 5-quarter panel (156 adults, 169 children) from a foraging-farming society in the Bolivian Amazon. We estimate whether quarterly changes in the log of consumption correlate with quarterly changes in the log of cash income while controlling for taste shifters and covariant shocks. We use weather variables to instrument for income and anthropometric indices of short-run nutritional status to proxy for food consumption. 60% of households experienced income shocks. Households had a thin safety cushion to cope with shocks and used only one strategy to smooth income. We find that child consumption is fully protected from income growth and works equally well for girls and boys, but adult consumption is not as well protected. Estimates of income elasticities of consumption fell toward the lower range of estimates from previous studies. We end by discussing the anomaly of almost perfect consumption smoothing despite self-reported weak safety nets to protect income and consumption.
Extracting Speaker-Specific Information with a Deep Neural Architecture

It is well known that interference among various information components conveyed in speech, such as linguistic and speaker-specific information (SSI), hinders either speaker or speech recognition system from yielding a better performance. In this paper, we present a deep neural architecture (DNA) especially for extracting SSI via learning from Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), a speech representation commonly used in speech information processing, to facilitate speaker recognition. For learning speaker-specific characteristics, we propose a novel multi-objective loss function towards intrinsic SSI extraction along with a minimal information loss based on first- and second-order speaker-dependent statistics in a high-level yet abstract representation space. For training our DNA, we adopt a two-stage hybrid learning strategy, i.e., unsupervised greedy layer-wise learning to initialize parameters and supervised discriminative learning for an optimal solution in terms of our proposed loss function. By using several Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) benchmark and multi-lingual speech corpora of different variabilities with cross-corpora and cross- language experimental protocols, we investigate the importance of both architecture depth and training data in our DNA learning for SSI extraction. Also we demonstrate extracted SSI by vowel distribution visualization. In comparison to start-of-the-art techniques, experimental results suggest that, incorporated into a simple speaker modeling technique, our generic speaker-specific representations are robust against various mismatches ranging from channels to spoken languages and hence lead to the favorable performance in various speaker recognition tasks.
Wave Interactions for the Pressure Gradient Equations

In this paper, we solve the Riemann problem for a coupled hyperbolic system of conservation laws, which arises as an intermediate model in the flux splitting method for the computation of Euler equations in gasdynamics. We study the properties of solutions involving shock and rarefaction waves, and establish their existence and uniqueness. We present numerical examples for different initial data, and finally discuss all possible elementary wave interactions; it is noticed that in certain cases the resulting wave pattern after interaction is substantially different from that which arises in isentropic gasdynamics.
A transferrable change in preferences of floral patterns by bumblebees through reward reversal - eScholarship

This study examines the use behavioral transfer across perceptually similar stimuli in bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) and addresses whether foraging judgments about a floral stimulus can change in a way that contradicts direct previous experience with that stimulus. Twenty bees from each of four colonies underwent discrimination training of stimuli placed in a radial maze. Bees were trained to discriminate between two corresponding object and photograph pairs of artificial flowers, where one object and its corresponding photo were rewarding, while another object and its corresponding photo were unrewarding. Following discrimination training, one stimulus from each pair (either the object or the photo) was removed. The predictive reward values of the remaining stimuli were either switched for one group or stayed the same for another. Subsequent testing on the removed stimuli revealed foraging preferences to shift based on experience with the other stimulus in the group. For instance, bees treated a previously unrewarding object as rewarding after learning that the corresponding photograph had become rewarding. Foraging decisions depend not only on previous experience with stimuli, but also category membership.
A quantitative lower bound for the greatest prime factor of $(ab+1)(bc+1)(ca+1)$

as a tends to infinity. Partial results have been obtained by Győry & Sárközy [7], Stewart & Tijdeman [11] and Bugeaud [3]. Very recently, Corvaja & Zannier [4] and, independently and simultaneously, Hernández & Luca [9] applied the Schmidt Subspace Theorem to give a positive answer to the above-mentioned conjecture. Actually, a stronger result is proved in [4], namely that the greatest prime factor of (ab + 1)(ac + 1) tends to infinity as the maximum of the pairwise distinct positive integers a, b and c goes to infinity. There are two natural extensions of such a result. First, one can search for an effective lower bound for P ((ab + 1)(bc + 1)(ca + 1)) in terms of max{a, b, c}. This has been achieved, under additional assumptions on a, b and c, in [11] and in [3]. Second, given a finite set A of triples (a, b, c), one can aim at establishing a lower bound for P ( ∏ (ab+1)(bc+1)(ca+1)), where the product is taken over all the triples in A, in terms of the cardinality of A. This question has been considered in [7], where some partial results were obtained, which have motivated the following conjecture. Throughout the present paper, we denote by |S| the cardinality of a finite set S. Conjecture (Győry and Sárközy). Let A be a finite set of cardinality at least two of triples (a, b, c) of pairwise distinct integers. Then there exists
INVENTING HUMOUR ADVERTISING AS A COMPETITIVE PARADIGM IN THE NIGERIAN GSM INDUSTRY

The aim of this study is to investigate the advent and growing popularity of humor advertising as a competitive tool for influencing the buying behavior of consumers of GSM services in Nigeria. Following the liberalization of the industry in 2001, there has been an upsurge in the competition among the licensed operators of the industry with a view to gaining significant market share. As a means of pushing a product/service into the consciousness of existing and prospective consumers advertising works on their attention, liking and persuasion to purchase a product/service. Humor advertising has been reported in the literature as a successful means of gaining consumers’ attention, liking, persuasion and action. Primary research method was adopted through the use of questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed to identify the relationship between demographic variables such as age, sex, and education on the effectiveness of humor advertising on consumer buying behavior. A random sample of 100 respondents was selected using multistage sampling procedure. Out of the 100 copies of the questionnaire distributed, 92 (92%) were retrieved. Data gathered were analyzed with the use of tables, charts, percentages and a few inferential statistics including correlation coefficient. Results show that humorous adverts can be used effectively to create affection towards the advertised product/service even in the developing economies like N igeria. Results also show that gender can significantly influence humor advertising as women appear more likely to be persuaded by humor adverts than men.
Diversification Strategies and Firm Performance: A Sample Selection Approach

This paper is based upon the assumption that firm profitability is determined by its degree of diversification which in turn is strongly related to the antecedent decision to carry out diversification activities. This calls for an empirical approach that permits the joint analysis of the three interrelated and consecutive stages of the overall diversification process: diversification decision, degree of diversification, and outcome of diversification. We apply parametric and semiparametric approaches to control for sample selection and endogeneity of diversification decision in both static and dynamic models. After controlling for industry fixed-effects, empirical evidence from firm-level data shows that diversification has a curvilinear effect on profitability: it improves firms’ profit up to a point, after which a further increase in diversification is associated with declining performance. This implies that firms should consider optimal levels of product diversification when they expand product offerings beyond their core business. Other worth-noting findings include: (i) factors stimulating firms to diversify do not necessarily encourage them to extend their diversification strategy; (ii) firms which are endowed with highly skilled human capital are likely to successfully exploit diversification as an engine of growth; (iii) while industry performance does not influence profitability of firms, it impacts their diversification decision and degree.
Prevalence, Utilization and Conservation Strategies for Non-Timber Forest Products in South western Zone of Nigeria

The study was carried out to investigate the prevalence and utilization of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) plant species in Omo and Shasha Forest Reserves, Southwestern Nigeria. Data were obtained through the use of structured questionnaires administered to households in forest communities. To complement information from the household survey, focus group discussions (FGDs) were also carried out in each of the sampled communities. In-depth interview (IDI) of forestry staff was further used to supplement the information collected. A simple random sampling technique was employed for the study. In Omo Forest Reserve (OFR), a total of seventy five species distributed in forty three families were recorded, while fifty six species in thirty one families were documented in Shasha Forest Reserve (SFR). Local end-uses of NTFPs include food and food supplements, snacks/sweeteners, wrapping leaves, soup and spices, beverages, dental care supplies, washing tools, roofing/construction materials, medicine and traditional rites items. While access to these resources is important to guarantee the socio-economic well being of the forest dwellers and communities, their sustainable management has not been taken seriously by policy makers thereby contributing to reduction of biodiversity and gradual but irretrievable loss of indigenous knowledge on the uses of most species. To ensure the sustainable utilization of NTFPs in these and similar tropical forest environments therefore, a number of conservation approaches are proposed.
Down-regulation of GST and CAT gene expression by methanolic extract of Nigella sativa seed in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells

The anti-oxidant effect of Nigella sativa (NS) on human Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (PBMCs) on a PHA (phytohemagglutinin) and a non-PHA stimulated proliferation were tested using SYBR Green based Real Time PCR analysis for antioxidant enzyme’s gene expression [glutathione-stransferase (GST) and catalase (CAT)]. Cells isolated from human PBMCs were treated with methanolic extract of NS for 48 h in two separate environments (PHA and non-PHA stimulated). The results obtained indicate that extracts from NS had down regulation effect. GST was down regulated to 1 and 1.5 fold after exposure to 2.5 µg/L NS extract for 48 h in PHA stimulated cells compared to respective controls whereas it decreased to 4 and 2 fold at dose of 5 µg/L in non-PHA stimulated cells compared to respective controls. Similarly, CAT was down regulated to 2 and 6 fold after exposure to 2.5 µg/L NS extract for 48 h whereas, it decreased to 4 and 2 fold at dose of 5 µg/L in PHA and non-PHA stimulated cells compared to respective controls. This in-vitro study reveals the effects of NS plant extract on GST and CAT gene expression in human PBMCs.
Magnetospheric accretion on the fully convective classical T Tauri star DN Tau

We report here results of spectropolarimetric observations of the classical T Tauri star DN Tau carried out (at 2 epochs) with ESPaDOnS at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope within the ‘Magnetic Protostars and Planets’ programme. We infer that DN Tau, with a photospheric temperature of 3,950±50 K, a luminosity of 0.8±0.2 L⊙ and a rotation period of 6.32 d, is a ≃2 Myr-old fully-convective 0.65 ± 0.05 M⊙ star with a radius of 1.9 ± 0.2 R⊙, viewed at an inclination of 35 ± 10 ◦ . Clear circularly-polarized Zeeman signatures are detected in both photospheric and accretion-powered emission lines, probing longitudinal fields of up to 1.8 kG (in the He i D3 accretion proxy). Rotational modulation of Zeeman signatures, detected both in photospheric and accretion lines, is different between our 2 runs, providing further evidence that fields of cTTSs are generated by non-stationary dynamos. Using tomographic imaging, we reconstruct maps of the large-scale field, of the photospheric brightness and of the accretion-powered emission at the surface of DN Tau at both epochs. We find that the magnetic topology is mostly poloidal, and largely axisymmetric, with an octupolar component (of polar strength 0.6–0.8 kG) 1.5–2.0× larger than the dipolar component (of polar strength ≃0.3–0.5 kG). DN Tau features dominantly poleward accretion at both epochs. The large-scale dipole component of DN Tau is however too weak to disrupt the surrounding accretion disc further than 65–90% of the corotation radius (at which the disc Keplerian period matches the stellar rotation period), suggesting that DN Tau is already spinning up despite being fully convective.