Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Climatization for scheduled ripening of caja-manga

Being a climacteric fruit, the caja harvested still green has uneven ripening. Thus, the aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of ripening techniques aiming to promote a uniform ripening and reduction of quality loss in caja-manga fruits. The treatments resulted from the application of four ripening techniques (control, muffled, ethrel, and calcium carbide) and they were evaluated in 5 times, with 3 days intervals, for 12 days (0, 3, 6, 9, and 12 days). The fruits were evaluated physico-chemically with respect to soluble solids, titratable acidity, ratio, firmness, and color. Although, all treatments promoted the fruit ripening, ethrel showed homogenous and consistent fruit characteristics with ripening reactions in 6 days, being considered the best treatment. It showed intense yellow color (85 Hue), weight loss of about 5% compared to other treatments and tissue softening (29 N firmness) and increase in soluble solids (Brix 11°). Key words: Spondias mombin L. , exotic fruits, Ethrel, carbide.
Evaluation of Meat and Egg Traits of Beijing-you Chickens Rotationally Grazing on Chicory Pasture in a Chestnut Forest

Barn and cage-fed chickens have presented several problems, such as high rates of infectious disease and consequent antibiotic abuse, poorer chicken health and welfare, and often poorer meat and egg quality compared with free-range chickens. The poultry agroforestry system is becoming increasingly popular in many poultry farms nowadays. In this study, to evaluate the contribution of poultry agroforestry system to enhance some meat and egg traits of Beijingyou chickens, some indexes of meat and egg qualities, some indexes of slaughter traits, and the feed conversion efficiency were investigated in rotational grazing Beijing-you chickens on chicory (Cichorium intybus L.) pasture (CGRG group) and only free-ranging chickens on bare land without forage (control group) in chestnut forest. Results showed that the live body weight, the dressing weight, the thigh muscle weight, and the breast muscle weight were increased (p<0.05) based on the decrease of 15% feed concentration in the CGRG group relative to the control. Furthermore, compared with the control, the crude ash, the essential amino acid content, and the inosinic acid content were increased (p<0.05), and the crude fat contents were decreased (p<0.05) in the thigh and breast muscles, while the yolk cholesterol and the feed conversion ratio were significantly decreased (p<0.05) in the CGRG group. This study would provide a scientific basis and technological support for the large-scale demonstration and application of rotational grazing chickens on the artificial pasture in forest.
Tax Transparency - an Analysis of the Luxleaks Firms

This paper finds that the firms involved in the Luxembourg Leaks (‘LuxLeaks’) scandal are less transparent measured by the engagement in earnings management, analyst coverage, analyst accuracy, accounting standards and auditor choice. The analysis is based on the LuxLeaks sample and compared to a control group of large multinational companies. The panel dataset covers the years from 2001 to 2015 and comprises 19,109 observations. The LuxLeaks firms appear to engage in higher levels of discretionary earnings management measured by the variability of net income to cash flows from operations and the correlation between cash flows from operations and accruals. The LuxLeaks sample shows a lower analyst coverage, lower willingness to switch to IFRS and a lower Big4 auditor rate. The difference in difference design supports these findings regarding earnings management and the analyst coverage. The analysis concludes that the LuxLeaks firms are less transparent and infers a relation between corporate transparency and the engagement in tax avoidance. The paper aims to establish the relationship between tax avoidance and transparency in order to give guidance for future policy. The research highlights the complex causes and effects of tax management and supports a cost benefit analysis of future tax regulation.
Applicability and integration of plasma sprayed hydroxyapatite coated AO cortical bone screws in equine bone

vii CHAPTER 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Osteology . 2 1.1.1 Equine Cortical Bone . 5 1.2 Fracture biology . 5 1.3 Bone Biology Surrounding Implants and Osseointegration . 7 1.4 Internal fixation using plates and screws . 11 1.5 Biomaterials and general surface characteristics . 13 1.5. 1 Stainless steel . 14 1.5. 2 Hydroxyapatite . 16 1.5. 3 Biomechanical testing . 18 CHAPTER 2 AN IN VITRO ANALYSIS OF TEMPERATURES AND INSERTION TORQUES OF HYDROXYAPATITE COATED AND UNCOATED 5.5 MM AO CORTICAL SCREWS . 22 2.
The Relation of Strategic Human Resource Practices with Firm Performance: Considering the Mediating Role of Resource Based View

This paper is a conceptual study exploring the rela tionship of strategic human resource management (SHRM) practice s (those tools used to manage the human capital pool) and firm per formance behaving the resource based view (RBV) approach in the firm. In this field, the mediating role of organizational culture is also ta ken into account (Bowen and Ostroff, 2004). However, the role of resource- based view has not received much attention. SHRM practices classificat ion of this paper is a new development that makes it more convenient for t he organizations to evaluate their practices. It elaborates that the n on-financial measurements are as important as the financial ones in the process of evaluating firm performance.
Analysis of the Responsiveness of Non-Oil Exports to Fiscal and Monetary Policy Actions

The paper aims to examine the responsiveness of non-oil exports to monetary and fiscal policy actions and to ascertain if there is any significant difference in the response of non-oil exports to fiscal and monetary policy actions. Adopting the partial determination model, the paper found that there ismonetary-fiscal policy interaction effect in the short-run but the effect became undefined in the long-run. It was also revealed that the response of non-oil exports is dominated by fiscal policy actions than the responses to monetary policy. Also monetary policy influences are temporary whereas the fiscal policy effect seems permanent. In this regard, it will be more appropriate to place greater reliance on fiscal policy form of stabilization action. The adoption of mixed monetary-fiscal policy is also recommended. This is because, mixed monetary-fiscal policy actions operates more quickly and expand non-oil exports within a short while. Though, the interaction effect is undefined in the long run, it is appropriate to stimulate non-oil export in the short-run.
New interactions in a mammalian community : introduced lagomorphs sustain native carnivores in the Andes of central Chile.

8 INTRODUCTION . 9 Hypothesis . 13 Objectives. 13 METHODS . 14 1. Study area . 14 2. Field surveys . 16 Assessing the diet of native carnivores . 16 Camera trap survey design. 17 3. Data analyses . 18 Daily activity pattern overlaps . 18 Hierarchical modelling . 18 RESULTS . 27 Diet of native carnivores . 27 Camera trap general results . 30 Daily activity pattern overlaps . 30 Models results . 33 Guanaco . 33 Hare . 33 Rabbit . 34 Culpeo Fox . 34 Puma . 35 Summary figures . 36 DISCUSSION . 38 RESUMEN . 64 REFERENCES . 66 APPENDICES . 76
Thiamin Requirement of Nile Tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus

Juvenile Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus, were fed to apparent satiation twice daily with purified diets containing 0, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0, 8.0, and 16.0 mg/kg and 0, 2.0, 4.0, 8.0, 16.0, and 32.0 mg/kg of thiamin in separate 14- and 8-wk trials (Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Fish fed the diet devoid of thiamin developed neurological disorders, anorexia, reduced growth, and feed efficiency and increased mortality (Experiment 2 only) within 4‐6 and 8‐10 wk for Experiments 2 and 1, respectively. Low red blood cell count (RBC) and hematocrit (Ht) were observed in fish fed the thiamin-deficient diet. Serum pyruvate was elevated in fish fed the thiamin unsupplemented diet. Serum lactate was not affected by dietary thiamin levels. Whole body protein was unaffected by dietary levels of thiamin. Body moisture and ash increased whereas body lipid decreased in fish fed the thiamin unsupplemented diets. None of these abnormalities were observed in fish fed the thiamin-supplemented diets. Using the response curves determined by PROC NLMIXED to estimate dietary thiamin levels required for various response variables, a dietary thiamin level of 3.5 mg/kg diet was adequate for optimum growth, feed intake and efficiency, survival, prevention of neurological symptoms, and maintaining normal levels of RBC, Ht, serum pyruvate, and proximate body composition.
Study on the Major Dairy Cows Reproductive Problems in and Around Gondar Town, Northwest Ethiopia

A cross sectional study was conducted commencing from October 2014 to April 2015 in urban and peri-urban areas of Gondar town, of the Amhara National Regional State of Ethiopia to identify the major reproductive problems in dairy cows. A total of 401 dairy cows were examined for the major reproductive problems by classifying the methods of studying as questionnaire survey and regular follow up. Owner of 401 cows from 80 dairy farms and small holder farmers (households) were questioned for the major reproductive problems and found 100 (24.9%) affected animals and again from 401 dairy cows owner of 100 cows from 15 dairy farms and small holder farmers (households) were regularly followed and out of them 37 (37.0%) have at least one of the reproductive problems. The questionnaire survey of reproductive problems according to their relative importance were 24 (6.0%) anestrous, 18 (4.5%) repeat breeder,16 (4.0%) endometritis, 15 (3.7%) dystocia, 11 (2.7%) abortion, 8 (2.0%) mixed cases and 7 (1.7%) retained fetal membrane (RFM). Parallel to questionnaire survey regular follow up study was takes place on 100 dairy cows from 15 dairy farms and small holder farmers (households) and out of them 7 (7.0%) anestrous, 6 (6.0%) abortion, 6 (6.0%) dystocia, 6 (6.0%) endometritis, 5 (5.0%) RFM, 4 (4.0%) mixed cases, and 3 (3.0%) was repeat breeders. SPSS version 20 was used for chi-square test and p 0.05), between the two study methodology within the reproductive problems. This particular study indicates that an reproductive problem, which includes anoestrus, RFM, abortion, dystocia, endometritis and repeat breeding, were one of the major factor for the low fertilizing ability of dairy cows in urban and peri-urban area of Gondar town. Therefore, the dairy breeders should be providing additional feed to fulfill nutritional requirement of animal, improving cleanness and feeding practice of the animal.
Cyclic Changes of the Sun’s Seismic Radius

The questions asking whether the Sun shrinks with the solar activity and what causes this have been a subject of debate. Helioseismology provides a means to measure with high precision the radial displacement of subsurface layers, the so-called “seismic radius,” through the analysis of oscillation frequencies of surface gravity (f) modes. Here, we present results of a new analysis of 21 years of helioseismology data from two space missions, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which allow us to resolve previous uncertainties and compare variations of the seismic radius in two solar cycles. After removing the f-mode frequency changes associated with the surface activity, we find that the mean seismic radius is reduced by 1–2 km during the solar maxima and that most significant variations of the solar radius occur beneath the visible surface of the Sun at a depth of about 5 ± 2 Mm, where the radius is reduced by 5–8 km. These variations can be interpreted as changes in the solar subsurface structure caused by the predominately vertical ∼10 kG magnetic field.
The Social Side of the Pathways Model: Examining the Mediation of Social Support on the Relationship between Psychopathology and Problem Gambling

This study uses a large representative sample of gamblers in the Canadian province of Quebec to examine the relationship between social support and psychopathologies commonly associated with gambling problems. Generalized linear modeling is applied to the 2008 Canadian Community Health Survey to find that social support mediates the relationship between mood disorders and problems that a person experiences as a result of gambling. These findings are discussed in the context of developing a framework that understands the features of social support in relation to psychopathological predictors of gambling problems. The study concludes that prominent psychopathological predictors of problem gambling are best understood in the respective contexts of the social environments in which they are found.
Forecasting animal migration using SARIMAX: an efficient means of reducing silver eel mortality caused by turbines

Hydroelectric power plants are often considered a major cause of mortality for migra- tory fish. The endangered status of European eels Anguilla anguilla forces managers to make efforts to reduce this mortality. Among the mitigation measures used, turbine shutdowns appear to be an efficient method, but they involve a substantial financial loss for hydropower producers. To optimise the use of turbine shutdowns, the present study aimed to provide a precise but simple forecast of the migration peaks of migrant silver eels. We first developed a model to forecast silver eel migration using SARIMAX models and real biological data of silver eel migration from 2 fish- ing sites in Brittany (north-western France). This model combines exogenous covariates and past biological data to forecast future migrations. We then evaluated this model with several years of biological data from the same trap sites, based on the decision criterion that turbines should be shut down when the number of silver eels forecasted by our model represents >10% of the mean annual number of migrants. This model would have served to save 90 and 70% of eels on the Oir and Scorff Rivers, respectively, with only 3.3 to 5.6 turbine shutdowns per year on average. Initial shutdowns would have lasted 1 wk, but this study also showed that the duration of turbine shut- downs could be reduced to 2 d without a significant decrease in efficiency. SARIMAX models reduce the influence of exogenous factors in forecasting outcomes, these being the most variable factors in the current context of climate change. This model appears to be a powerful tool for eco- logical forecasting of endangered species in the context of global warming.
Learning temporal features of facial action units using deep learning

Facial expressions are an important aspect of human life and research on this topic has led to real-world technological applications. The task of recognizing facial states is involved in a collection of challenging tasks that include assisting elders and babies, as well as enhancing pedagogical exercises. Unlike categorizing faces into emotions, the Facial Action Coding System encode ambiguous expressions by analyzing small differences in the face based on muscle movements called action units. By analyzing action unit co-occurrences, human coders can virtually create any anatomically possible facial scenario that is independent of interpretation and can be used as a tool for higher-level decision processes. The automatic detection of action units in videos has recently become an interesting topic for the deep learning community since models of this area have dramatically improved the performance in imagerelated tasks. The state-of-the-art proposals in the benchmark database FERA17 are currently vanilla implementations of convolutional neural networks that model the occurrence of action units by ignoring their temporal features. However, rather than being like a single snapshot, the occurrence of independent facial movements changes over time in response to information dynamically gathered from the environment, thus these deep models cannot completely capture the complex dynamic context involved in their occurrence. Researchers have engineered other deep learning methods that possess the ability to learn features across sequences of images. These procedures can be grouped into three categories, 1) methods that extend image-based architectures by using aggregation methods, or 2) recurrent units, and 3) methods that are able to process spatiotemporal features natively. They all offer the possibility of capturing AU dynamics and enhance their detection. However, their study has been frequently overlooked by the facial expression recognition community, particularly for AU occurrence detection, and up to these days, it is unclear whether deep learning models that incorporate temporal features can indeed outperform those who do not. This work analyzes the effects of incrementally adding temporal capabilities to the spatial model ResNet50 on predicting the occurrence of a single action unit of the FERA17 database. Configurations evaluated include inflating the kernels in the model to create a 3dimensional version of ResNet50, adding a recurrent layer to encode long-term dependencies, and including the dense optical flow representation of two consecutive periods of time. Results show that adding recurrent units to a spatial model out-performs other temporal paradigms and the baseline ResNet50 by 7.4% considering the F1 score. The discoveries placed in this thesis can be utilized to better define deep learning initial implementations for projects related to facial expression recognition. Knowing the extent to which each temporal paradigm can effectively capture the dynamics inherent to AU occurrence, future research projects can be improved.
Megavoltage Radiosensitization of Gold Nanoparticles on a Glioblastoma Cancer Cell Line Using a Clinical Platform

Gold nanoparticles (GNPs) have demonstrated significant dose enhancement with kilovoltage (kV) X-rays; however, recent studies have shown inconsistent findings with megavoltage (MV) X-rays. We propose to evaluate the radiosensitization effect on U87 glioblastoma (GBM) cells in the presence of 42 nm GNPs and irradiated with a clinical 6 MV photon beam. Cytotoxicity and radiosensitization were measured using MTS and clonogenic cellular radiation sensitivity assays, respectively. The sensitization enhancement ratio was calculated for 2 Gy (SER2Gy) with GNP (100 μg/mL). Dark field and MTS assays revealed high co-localization and good biocompatibility of the GNPs with GBM cells. A significant sensitization enhancement of 1.45 (p = 0.001) was observed with GNP 100 μg/mL. Similarly, at 6 Gy, there was significant difference in the survival fraction between the GBM alone group (mean (M) = 0.26, standard deviation (SD) = 0.008) and the GBM plus GNP group (M = 0.07, SD = 0.05, p = 0.03). GNPs enabled radiosensitization in U87 GBM cells at 2 Gy when irradiated using a clinical platform. In addition to the potential clinical utility of GNPs, these studies demonstrate the effectiveness of a robust and easy to standardize an in-vitro model that can be employed for future studies involving metal nanoparticle plus irradiation.
The Impact of School Inputs on Student Performance: An Empirical Study of Private Schools in the UK

In this article, we report the results of an empirical study of the impact of school inputs on pupils’ performance in private (independent) schools in the United Kingdom. We use a new school-level panel dataset constructed from information provided by the Independent Schools Information Service (ISIS). We show a consistent negative relationship between the pupil-teacher ratio at a school and the average examination results at that school. Our estimates indicate that the relationship persists even when we are estimating ‘addedvalue’ models conditional on previous exam results. The results are noteworthy in comparison with studies for the state sector, relatively few of which have found a consistent and significant effect.
The Prevalence of Skin Disorders in Type-2 Diabetic Patients

Objective: Little information is available about the prevalence of skin disorders among type-2 diabetic patients. The aim of our study was to evaluate the frequency of dermatologic disorders in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus. Subjects and Methods: One hundred and fifty-one type-2 diabetic patients (106 women and 45 men) attending an outpatient clinic were included in this study. All patients were then asked about any skin problems they might have and subsequently all were examined, regardless of their response. A total of 36 dermatologic disease entities were categorized. Information regarding age, sex, and the presenting disorders was recorded. Results: The overall prevalence of one or more identifiable/apparent skin conditions was 85.4%. The most common skin conditions were infections (31.7%) (mostly mycoses), non-Candidal intertrigo (20.5%), eczemas (15.2%) (mostly neurodermatitis), psoriasis (11.2%), diabetic dermopathy (11.2%), and prurigo (9.9%). According to sex, there was no significant difference in the prevalence of skin disorders. Conclusion: This study shows that skin conditions are common in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus. Therefore, frequent dermatologic evaluation of these diabetic patients is warranted.
STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING OF INFORMATION REVEALED IN THE PROFILE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES - REVIEWING AND EXAMINING FACEBOOK, TWITTER, LINKEDIN, GOOGLE PLUS AND MYSPACE

This paper examined the usage of social networking sites by students in a private institute of business located in Auckland, New Zealand. In this respect two main areas are focused. First, this study aims to see if students who have enrolled in their postgraduate studies are using multiple social networking sites. Previous literature claimed that social networking sites such as Facebook is the most popular sites among students as compared to other sites such as Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. This study revealed that apart from Facebook, students are also keen to use Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace. In this respect all five social networking sites are investigated. The second area of this study is to understand how these sites allow users to create their profile and the common features that allow them to reveal and share information with other participants. Results show that students are active users of their respective SNS and disclose information on their profile to show their sense of visibility to their circle of friends. Some common features in the profile of social networking sites are email address, date of birth and qualifications. They are frequently used by students. The least important features are physical address and workplace address. This study provide insight to understanding the growing trends in using different social networking sites among students and the availability of online presence.