Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Laboratory Diagnostic Procedures for Human Brucellosis: An Overview of Existing Approaches

Context: Diagnosis of human brucellosis still challenges clinicians and scientists with several considerable aspects, particularly in endemic countries. The current study aimed at reviewing laboratory tests in the diagnosis of human brucellosis. Evidence Acquisition: A literature search was conducted in PubMed, Scopus, Thompson Reuters, and Mesh databases using keywords for articles published until December 2018. Seventy studies were selected for data collection. Results: The current inclusive review included information about the currently used advanced diagnostic tests to confirm the detection of human brucellosis. Conclusions: The article reviewed the methods for the diagnosis of human brucellosis and summarized developments for the future.
Measuring Tiller Development and Mortality in Winter Wheat under Field Conditions

Received 13 July 2018. Accepted 15 Apr. 2019. *Corresponding author (mstilley@ncsu.edu). ABSTRACT Vegetative growth in the form of tillers is crucial in development of wheat (Triticum aestivum L). To better understand wheat development and tiller initiation, a study was conducted using two seeding rates (193 vs. 676 m-2) and two N application timings (single vs. split). Using a detailed marking technique to track leaf and tiller growth, tillers plant-1, rate of leaf appearance tiller-1, phyllochron interval (PI), accumulated heat units, and maximum leaf number (MLN) were measured. Although the timing of tiller initiation did not differ among the two seeding rates, results showed that at the low seeding rate (LSR) the frequency of leaf appearance on each tiller was increased, resulting in tillers having more leaves at decimal growth stage (DGS) 30. At the high seeding rate (HSR), leaf appearance among tillers was reduced, resulting in only fall tillers having enough leaf area to sustain growth from DGS 30 to harvest. The MLN was significantly greater at the LSR compared with the HSR. The MLN for the main stem was greater than those found on Tiller 1, and MLN for Tiller 1 was greater than those found on Tiller 2. There were no significant interactions or main effects involving the timing of N. It is difficult to determine the role that N application timing has on tiller and leaf development since there was not a consistent effect of N timing on PI and no effects of N timing on MLN.
INVESTIGATION OF PRIMARY USER EMULATION ATTACK IN COGNITIVE RADIO NETWORKS

Cognitive radio technology (CR), as a key enabling functionality for the next generation (xG) mobile communication, can remarkably improve the performance of a wireless communication system by being aware of the changes of its surrounding and dynamically modifying its operating parameters to adapt such changes. Recently, the security issues of cognitive radio (CR) networks have drawn more and more research attentions. As the one of attacks against CR system, primary user emulation attack (PUEA) compromises the spectrum sensing of cognitive radio, where a malicious user forestalls vacant channels by impersonating the primary user to prevent other secondary users from accessing the idle frequency bands. In this thesis, we first introduce the background, motivation and advances of cognitive radio technology and summarize the security issues in the cognitive radio networks. After presenting the concept of spectrum sensing as well as its implementation approaches and current challenges, we propose a new cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, considering the existence of PUEA in CR networks. In the proposed scheme, the sensing information of different secondary users is combined at a fusion center and the combining weights are optimized with the objective of maximizing the detection probability of idle channels under the constraint of a required false alarm probability. We also investigate the impact of the channel estimation errors and multiple PUE attackers on the detection probability. Numerical and simulation results illustrate the advantages of the proposed scheme over the conventional maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme in the cooperative spectrum sensing with the existence of PUEA.
Investing in carbon emissions reduction in the EOQ model

Abstract Investment in carbon emissions reduction is an important decision for many firms due to climate change and growing pressures from various stakeholders. In this paper, we examine the problem of jointly determining optimal order quantity and investment in carbon emissions reduction in the EOQ model with a cap-and-price regulation policy, in which the firm is penalised (rewarded) if its carbon footprint is larger (smaller) than a threshold. Cap-and-trade, carbon tax, cap-and-offset, and carbon cap can be viewed as special cases of the cap-and-price policy. The investment reduces the carbons emitted per replenishment and per unit produced. We characterise the optimal solutions and compare different regulations in terms of the firm’s annual total cost and carbon footprint.
Role and use of independent evaluation in development-oriented agricultural research: The case of CGIAR, an agricultural research network

Agricultural research oriented towards developmental goals, such as poverty alleviation, better nutrition and environmental sustainability, is challenging for monitoring and evaluation. The causal chains are long, indirect and not well understood. CGIAR, a system of independent agricultural research centres with a mission to agricultural development, has a long history of evaluation and other mechanisms of accountability. The purpose of this article is to analyse the role and utility of independent evaluation in CGIAR over two decades during which the system established a programmatic approach to research and underwent governance changes. The key findings are (i) during the historic period when evaluation of research centres was the primary mechanism of accountability to donors and of improvement of research and management at centres, evaluations were used for their intended purposes and were important for the credibility of CGIAR; (ii) evaluation of programmes in networked systems of institutions revealed challenges related to divided management responsibilities and variance in contribution and performance among partners; (iii) systematic oversight of evaluations and implementation of their recommendations by CGIAR’s highest decision-makers, the donor governance body, has diminished over time thus influencing evaluation effectiveness; and (iv) fragmented, projectized funding has generated parallel accountability mechanisms used by individual donors aside with CGIAR’s centrally designed mechanisms. We conclude that independent evaluation remains a valuable, strategic tool for complementing indicator-based performance management focused on short-term results on one hand and impact assessment of past research on the other hand. It is needed to address qualitative and context-specific aspects of research performance, such as science and research quality and potential for effectiveness.
Analysis of Genetic Parameters of Habanero Pepper (Capsicum chinense Jacq.) in the Yucatan, Mexico

The variability and genetic parameters of seven agronomic characteristics were estimated for 11 genotypes, and high values of the phenotypic coefficient of variation (PCV) of capsaicin content (CC) were obtained. Heritability (h2) was high for yield per plant (YP; 0.98) and CC (0.93). The principal components analysis (PCA) revealed that the first three components explained 94.02% of the total variation; therefore, genotypes with higher YP values and fruit weight (FW) (AKN-08, ASBC-09) were placed in quadrant I. Those with greater CC and lowest YP and FW (MBI-11, RES-05) were placed in quadrant II. The greatest fruit length (RNJ-04) was placed in quadrant III. Those with the greatest number of fruits per plant (NBA-06, RKI-01, RHC-02, RHN-03, NKA-07, and MSB-12) were placed in quadrant IV. The results showed that the genotypes studied comprise an excellent source of genetic material for Habanero pepper improvement programs.
Image processing with ImageJ

Wayne Rasband of NIH has created ImageJ, an open source Java-written program that is now at version 1.31 and is used for many imaging applications, including those that that span the gamut from skin analysis to neuroscience. ImageJ is in the public domain and runs on any operating system (OS). ImageJ is easy to use and can do many imaging manipulations. A very large and knowledgeable group makes up the user community for ImageJ. Topics covered are imaging abilities; cross platform; image formats support as of June 2004; extensions, including macros and plug-ins; and imaging library. NIH reports tens of thousands of downloads at a rate of about 24,000 per month currently. ImageJ can read most of the widely used and significant formats used in biomedical images. Manipulations supported are read/write of image files and operations on separate pixels, image regions, entire images, and volumes (stacks in ImageJ). Basic operations supported include convolution, edge detection, Fourier transform, histogram and particle analyses, editing and color manipulation, and more advanced operations, as well as visualization. For assistance in using ImageJ, users e-mail each other, and the user base is highly knowledgeable and will answer requests on the mailing list. A thorough manual with many examples and illustrations has been written by Tony Collins of the Wright Cell Imaging Facility at Toronto Western Research Institute and is available, along with other listed resources, via the Web.
The behavior of the Mordell-Weil group of elliptic curves

2 3 2 (1) y +a{xy + a3y = x + a2x + a4x + a6, where we assume that at e. Z . The set E(Q) of solutions (x, y) with x , y G Q, together with the point at infinity, forms a finitelygenerated abelian group, the MordellWeil group ofE. It is isomorphic to Z 0 F, where F is finite and where r is the rank of E. The possibilities for the finite group F are completely known [9]. The important question then is to understand the behavior of the rank as E varies over elliptic curves. It is still unknown whether r is unbounded or not. In fact, one opinion is that, in general, an elliptic curve might tend to have the smallest possible rank, namely 0 or 1, compatible with the rank parity predictions of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer [8]. We present evidence that this may not be the case. Published examples [2, 10] of curves of rank > 2 might suggest that such curves are sparsely distributed. Mestre and Oesterlé found the 436 modular elliptic curves of prime conductor up to 13100, using [11]. There were 80 rank 2 curves among the 233 curves of even rank. This proportion of rank 2 curves seemed too large to conform to the conventional wisdom just stated (see also [18, pages 254-255]). We decided to investigate the ranks of elliptic curves in a systematic way, over a significantly larger range.
Road Detection and Centerline Extraction Via Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network U-Net

Road information extraction based on aerial images is a critical task for many applications, and it has attracted considerable attention from researchers in the field of remote sensing. The problem is mainly composed of two subtasks, namely, road detection and centerline extraction. Most of the previous studies rely on multistage-based learning methods to solve the problem. However, these approaches may suffer from the well-known problem of propagation errors. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model, recurrent convolution neural network U-Net (RCNN-UNet), to tackle the aforementioned problem. Our proposed RCNN-UNet has three distinct advantages. First, the end-to-end deep learning scheme eliminates the propagation errors. Second, a carefully designed RCNN unit is leveraged to build our deep learning architecture, which can better exploit the spatial context and the rich low-level visual features. Thereby, it alleviates the detection problems caused by noises, occlusions, and complex backgrounds of roads. Third, as the tasks of road detection and centerline extraction are strongly correlated, a multitask learning scheme is designed so that two predictors can be simultaneously trained to improve both effectiveness and efficiency. Extensive experiments were carried out based on two publicly available benchmark data sets, and nine state-of-the-art baselines were used in a comparative evaluation. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed RCNN-UNet model for both the road detection and the centerline extraction tasks.
List-rationalizable choice∗

A choice function is list rational(izable), if there is a fixed list such that for each choice set, successive comparison of the alternatives by following the list retrieves the chosen alternative. We extend the formulation of list rationality to stochastic choice setup. We say two alternatives are related if the stochastic path independence condition is violated between these alternatives. We show that a random choice function is list rational if and only if this relation is acyclic. Our characterization for deterministic choice functions follows as a corollary. By using this characterization, we relate list rationality to two-stage choice procedures. J.E. L. codes: D01
Nandrolone effects on men’s semen parameters in Erbil city

Background and objective: Anabolic androgenic steroids are synthetic compounds based on the structure of testosterone, and are used to treat various conditions such as reproductive system dysfunction. High doses of anabolic androgenic steroids and exercise influence the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis, which can, in turn, affect testicular apoptosis. This study aimed to investigate the influence of anabolic androgenic steroids on semen parameters in bodybuilders (heavy exercise) in Erbil city. Methods: Semen specimens and serum were collected from 150 which divided into three groups; each consists of 50 men. The control group (A) didn't practice exercise so didn't receive nandrolone. The exercise group (B) who practice daily without taking nandrolone. The exercise and treated group (C) who practice exercise and had been using nandrolone (200 mg- wk-1, intramuscularly) for at least three months. Smear prepared by methyline blue stain and assessment of semen volume, sperm morphology, sperm concentration ,motility were carried out . Serum levels of follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, and testosterone were also carried out. Results: There was no difference in the semen volume within three groups. Sperm concentration and the percentage of sperm motility in the group C was significantly lower (P <0.001) than that in the other groups. A significantly increased percentage of sperm with the tapered head was found in the group C. Our results also demonstrated a significant decrease in testosterone and follicle-stimulating hormone in the group C compared to group A and B. Conclusion: Users of anabolic-androgenic steroids have sperm with abnormal shape, especially tapered head, and low concentration of sperm with sluggish motility attributing to infertility.
Spider webs, stable isotopes and molecular gut content analysis: Multiple lines of evidence support trophic niche differentiation in a community of Hawaiian spiders

Adaptive radiations are typically characterized by niche partitioning among their constituent species. Trophic niche partitioning is particularly important in predatory animals, which rely on limited food resources for survival. We test for trophic niche partitioning in an adaptive radiation of Hawaiian Tetragnatha spiders, which have diversified in situ on the Hawaiian Islands. We focus on a community of nine species belonging to two different clades, one web‐building and the other actively hunting, which co‐occur in wet forest on East Maui. We hypothesize that trophic niches differ significantly both: (a) among species within a clade, indicating food resource partitioning, and (b) between the two clades, corresponding to their differences in foraging strategy. To assess niches of the spider species, we measure: (a) web architecture, the structure of the hunting tool, and (b) site choice, the physical placement of the web in the habitat. We then test whether differences in these parameters translate into meaningful differences in trophic niche by measuring (c) stable isotope signatures of carbon and nitrogen in the spiders’ tissues, and (d) gut content of spiders based on metabarcoding data. We find significant interspecific differences in web architecture and site choice. Importantly, these differences are reflected in stable isotope signatures among the five web‐building species, as well as significant isotopic differences between web‐builders and active hunters. Gut content data also show interspecific and inter‐clade differences. Pairwise overlaps of web architecture between species are positively correlated with overlaps of isotopic signature. Our results reveal trophic niche partitioning among species within each clade, as well as between the web‐building and actively hunting clades. Based on the correlation between web architecture and stable isotopes, it appears that the isotopic signatures of spiders’ tissues are influenced by architectural differences among their webs. Our findings indicate an important link between web structure, microhabitat preference and diet in the Hawaiian Tetragnatha. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
Integration of PEG 400 into a self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery system improves drug loading capacity and nasal mucosa permeability and prolongs the survival of rats with malignant brain tumors

Introduction: Kolliphor® EL (K-EL) is among the most useful surfactants in the preparation of emulsions. However, it is associated with low hydrophobic drug loading in the resulting emulsified formulation. Methods: In this study, a formulation for intranasal administration of butylidenephthalide (Bdph), a candidate drug against glioblastoma (GBM), was prepared. Physical characteristics of the formulation such as particle size, zeta potential, conductivity, and viscosity were assessed, as well as its cytotoxicity and permeability, in order to optimize the formulation and improve its drug loading capacity. Results: The optimized formulation involved the integration of polyethylene glycol 400 (PEG 400) in K-EL to encapsulate Bdph dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), and it exhibited higher drug loading capacity and drug solubility in water than the old formulation, which did not contain PEG 400. Incorporation of PEG 400 as a co-surfactant increased Bdph loading capacity to up to 50% (v/v), even in formulations using Kolliphor® HS 15 (K-HS15) as a surfactant, which is less compatible with Bdph than K-EL. The optimized Bdph formulation presented 5- and 2.5-fold higher permeability and cytotoxicity, respectively, in human GBM than stock Bdph. This could be attributed to the high drug loading capacity and the high polarity index due to DMSO, which increases the compatibility between the drug and the cell. Rats bearing a brain glioma treated with 160 mg/kg intranasal emulsified Bdph had a mean survival of 37 days, which is the same survival time achieved by treatment with 320 mg/kg stock Bdph. This implies that the optimized emulsified formulation required only half the Bdph dose to achieve an efficacy similar to that of stock Bdph in the treatment of animals with malignant brain tumor.
Biochemical Changes during Plantlet Regeneration in Two Accessions of Mucuna pruriens

The genus Mucuna is an important medicinal herb and is extensively used in traditional Indian systems of medicine for various ailments. In vitro culture technique provides an alternative to plant propagation and germplasm conservation. Our aim was to study the biochemical changes occurring during regeneration of shoots (plantlets) from explants of two accessions of Mucuna pruriens, by monitoring the efficiency of nitrogen utilization and changes in levels of some hydrolytic enzymes. A rapid micropropagation system was developed using Murashige and Skoog's (MS) medium supplemented with BAP and IAA combined. In both the accessions, 3.0mg l-1 6-BAP, in combination with 0.2mg l-1 IAA, induced shoot buds and shoot elongation; however for multiple-shoot induction, a slightly higher concentration of cytokinin, i.e., 3.5mg l-16-BAP, in combination with 0.2mg l-1 IAA, was required. Results of the present study confirm an active growth of explants revealed by nitrate assimilation enzymes and hydrolytic enzymes. It is concluded that medium composition, growth regulator combination and culture incubation conditions are all vital in both the accessions of Mucuna pruriens for induction of in vitro plant regeneration.
Advances in computational morphodynamics using the International River Interface Cooperative (iRIC) software

Results from computational morphodynamics modeling of coupled flow–bed–sediment systems are described for 10 applications as a review of recent advances in the field. Each of these applications is drawn from solvers included in the public‐domain International River Interface Cooperative (iRIC) software package. For mesoscale river features such as bars, predictions of alternate and higher mode river bars are shown for flows with equilibrium sediment supply and for a single case of oversupplied sediment. For microscale bed features such as bedforms, computational results are shown for the development and evolution of two‐dimensional bedforms using a simple closure‐based two‐dimensional model, for two‐ and three‐dimensional ripples and dunes using a three‐dimensional large‐eddy simulation flow model coupled to a physics‐based particle transport model, and for the development of bed streaks using a three‐dimensional unsteady Reynolds‐averaged Navier–Stokes solver with a simple sediment‐transport treatment. Finally, macroscale or channel evolution treatments are used to examine the temporal development of meandering channels, a failure model for cantilevered banks, the effect of bank vegetation on channel width, the development of channel networks in tidal systems, and the evolution of bedrock channels. In all examples, computational morphodynamics results from iRIC solvers compare well to observations of natural bed morphology. For each of the three scales investigated here, brief suggestions for future work and potential research directions are offered. © 2019 The Authors Earth Surface Processes and Landforms Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
ERP Effects of masked orthographic neighbour priming in deaf readers

ABSTRACT In masked priming studies with hearing readers, neighbouring words (e.g. wine, vine) compete through lateral inhibition. Here, we asked whether lateral inhibition also characterises visual word recognition in deaf readers and whether the neural signature of this competition is the same as for hearing readers. Only real words have lexical representations that engage in lateral inhibition. Therefore, we compared processing of target words following neighbouring prime words (e.g. wine-VINE) and pseudowords (e.g. bine-VINE). Targets following prime words elicited larger amplitude N400s and slower lexical decision responses, indicating more effortful processing due to lateral inhibition. Although these effects went in the same direction for hearing and deaf readers, the distribution of the N400 effect differed. We associate the more anterior effect in hearing readers with stronger co-activation of, and competition among, phonological representations. Thus, deaf readers use lexical competition to recognise visual words, but it is primarily restricted to orthographic representations.