Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The cold origin of the warm dust around ε Eridani

Context. The nearby K2 V star e Eridani hosts one known inner planet, an outer Kuiper belt analog, and an inner disk of warm dust. Spitzer/IRS measurements indicate that the warm dust is present at distances as close as a few AU from the star. Its origin is puzzling, since an “asteroid belt” that could produce this dust would be unstable because of the known inner planet. Aims. Here we test a hypothesis that the observed warm dust is generated by collisions in the outer belt and is transported inward by Poynting-Robertson drag and strong stellar winds. Methods. We simulated a steady-state distribution of dust particles outside 10 AU with a collisional code and in the inner region (r < 10 AU) with single-particle numerical integrations. By assuming homogeneous spherical dust grains composed of ice and astrosilicate, we calculated the thermal emission of the dust and compared it with observations. We investigated two different orbital configurations for the inner planet inferred from radial velocity measurements, one with a highly eccentric orbit of e = 0.7 and another one with a moderate eccentricity of e = 0.25. We also produced a simulation without a planet. Results. Our models can reproduce the shape and magnitude of the observed spectral energy distribution from mid-infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, as well as the Spitzer/MIPS radial brightness profiles. The best-fit dust composition includes both water ice and silicates. The results are similar for the two possible planetary orbits and without a planet. Conclusions. The observed warm dust in the e Eridani system can indeed stem from the outer “Kuiper belt” and be transported inward by Poynting-Robertson and stellar wind drag. The inner planet has little effect on the distribution of dust, so that the planetary orbit could not be constrained. Reasonable agreement between the model and observations can only be achieved by relaxing the assumption of purely silicate dust and assuming a mixture of silicate and water ice in comparable amounts.
Aromatase inhibitors in infertile patients: effects on seminal parameters, serum and seminal plasma testosterone levels, and estradiol levels during short-term follow-up

Aim: To evaluate the effects of an aromatase inhibitor (anastrozole) on seminal parameters, and on serum and seminal plasma testosterone/estradiol ratios in infertile patients, as well as to clarify its place among empirical infertility treatment modalities. Patients and Methods: The study included 32 patients with spermatozoa numbering > 5 million/mL in ejaculate and a serum testosterone/estradiol ratio < 0.14. Anastrozole, an aromatase-inhibiting agent, was given (1 mg b.i.d.) and patients were re-evaluated 2 months later based on semen analysis, and measurements of serum and seminal plasma testosterone and estradiol levels. Results: Semen analysis parameters before and after treatment, respectively, were as follows: number of spermatozoa: 12.4 ± 4.1 million/mL and 22.3 ± 5.7 million/mL; motility: 33.4 ± 4.2% and 47.6 ± 7.4%; normal morphology: 5.4 ± 1.3% and 8.9 ± 2.7%. Differences between the values before and after treatment were statistically significant (P < 0.05). Serum testosterone level was 4.1 ± 1.2 ng/mL, estradiol level was 52.1 ± 9.4 pg/mL, and testosterone/estradiol ratio was 0.13 ± 0.03 at the beginning of treatment. These values were 3.2 ± 0.6 ng/mL, 68.4 ± 7.3 pg/mL, and 0.05 ± 0.001, respectively, in seminal plasma. Following 2 months of anastrozole treatment, testosterone and estradiol levels, and the testosterone/estradiol ratio showed statistically significant changes in serum and seminal plasma. While testosterone levels significantly increased, estradiol levels decreased (serum pT = 0.001, pE2 = 0.001; seminal plasma pT = 0.001, pE2 = 0.001). Conclusion: Aromatase inhibitors are a potential treatment method for infertile male patients with increased plasma estradiol levels and decreased plasma testosterone/estradiol ratios.
Helpful Aspects of the Therapeutic Relationship in Integrative Psychotherapy

This article describes a qualitative study of helpful aspects of the therapeutic relationship in Integrative Psychotherapy. Participants of the study were sixteen clients who were in the process of Integrative Psychotherapy for at least a year. Participants were interviewed with the adapted version of the Change Interview (Elliott, 1999), which involves a semi-structured empathic exploration of the client's experience in therapy. The analysis of the clients’ experience of Integrative Psychotherapy revealed six categories of helpful aspects of therapeutic relationship: the therapist’s empathic attunement, the therapist’s acceptance, the match between the client and the therapist, feelings of trust and safety, feeling of connection, and experience of a new relational experience. Based on results of the research, we developed a model of the healing relationship in integrative psychotherapy. This model describes the interrelatedness of these six helpful aspects of the therapeutic relationship. The categories of empathic attunement and acceptance proved to be the most important categories relating to the therapist’s contribution to the healing therapeutic relationship. Clients described that the therapist’s empathic attunement and acceptance influenced the development of safety and trust, feelings of connection and promotion of new relational experiences. The results of this study are discussed in relation to the theories of Integrative Psychotherapy and research regarding the therapeutic relationship in psychotherapy.
Forecasting implied volatility in foreign exchange markets: a functional time series approach

ABSTRACT We utilise novel functional time series (FTS) techniques to characterise and forecast implied volatility in foreign exchange markets. In particular, we examine the daily implied volatility curves of FX options, namely; Euro/United States Dollar, Euro/British Pound, and Euro/Japanese Yen. The FTS model is shown to produce both realistic and plausible implied volatility shapes that closely match empirical data during the volatile 2006–2013 period. Furthermore, the FTS model significantly outperforms implied volatility forecasts produced by traditionally employed parametric models. The evaluation is performed under both in-sample and out-of-sample testing frameworks with our findings shown to be robust across various currencies, moneyness segments, contract maturities, forecasting horizons, and out-of-sample window lengths. The economic significance of the results is highlighted through the implementation of a simple trading strategy.
Health and Safety Perception of Construction Workers in Saudi Arabia

Abstract Construction is a high-risk industry due to the high rates of accidents/fatalities recorded annually in various countries. Health and safety (HS) is a major concern of the construction industry. More so, for developing countries where HS cultures are yet to become fully established. In such situations, the perception of construction workers is a viable approach to assess the performance of HS. This study investigated the HS conditions in Saudi Arabian construction sites from the perspective of construction labor. The study employed a questionnaire comprised of 50 issues related to safety and health from an employee’s perspective, on a 1-5 Likert scale of agreement. Responses were obtained from 196 construction workers in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Results from the study showed that the crucial issues identified include: lack of communication between front-line supervisors and construction labor, less priority for safety compared to productivity; lack of employee-engagement in developing safety policies; poor morale and lack of motivation amongst workers; and un-tested emergency response procedures. Thus, the study suggests that addressing such issues will allow for improved safety performance in the Saudi Arabian construction industry.
The Dog-And-Rabbit Chase Problem as an Exercise in Introductory Kinematics

The purpose of this article is to present a simple solution of the classic dog-and-rabbit chase problem which emphasizes the use of concepts of elementary kinematics and, therefore, can be used in introductory mechanics course. The article is based on the teaching experience of introductory mechanics course at Novosibirsk State University for first year physics students which are just beginning to use advanced mathematical methods in physics problems.
Nephroureterectomy versus pyeloplasty for giant hydronephrosis in children with upper urinary tract obstruction; perspectives from a tertiary health facility in Southern Nigeria

Background: Unrecognized or neglected cases of obstructed upper urinary tract in children can cause marked dilatation and structural damage to the ureters and kidney/s. In our region, many of such unrecognized obstructions result in giant hydronephrosis with resultant poor outcomes of pyeloplasty. We present our perspective of such giant hydronephrosis and make a case for straight nephroureterectomy rather than pyeloplasty which has been our standard treatment.Methods: This is a review of cases of congenital upper urinary tract obstruction with giant hydroureteronephrosis seen in children in our practice between March 2008 and February 2017. Case notes of patients who were managed within the period were retrieved to extract relevant data. Data obtained included the biodata, presenting features, dimension of renal pelvis and ureter at imaging and intraoperatively, treatment offered, outcome as at one-year follow-up. Results were subjected to simple statistical analysis.Results: There were 39 patients and they comprised 22 (56.4%) males and 17 (43.6%) females. Their age range was 3 to 14 years with a mean of 7 years. The most consistent clinical feature was abdominal distension. Five (12.8%) patients had abnormality of renal function preoperatively. The obstruction was unilateral in 30 (76.9%) cases and bilateral in 9 (23.1%) cases giving a total of 48 obstructions. All the patients were operated on. Complications encountered were mostly related to patients in whom we performed pyeloplasty. There were three mortalities related to sepsis and end stage renal disease.Conclusions: Upper urinary tract obstruction is often recognized late in our practice. Abdominal swelling is a common presenting feature of upper urinary tract obstruction in our practice. It appears that in unilateral cases, nephroureterectomy is a safer and more effective treatment option than pyeloplasty in such late cases with giant hydronephrosis. There is need for a well-designed prospective study to evaluate the option of nephroureterctomy in these cases.
Delays and Cost Overruns in Infrastructure Projects: Extent, Causes and Remedies

This study, based on a large dataset of 894 projects from 17 infrastructure sectors, attempts to answer certain important questions on time and cost overruns in publicly-funded infrastructure projects: How common and how large are the overruns? What are the essential causes? Are contractual and institutional failures among the significant causes? What are the policy implications for planning, development and implementation of infrastructure projects? Among other results of an econometric analysis, the study shows that the contractual and institutional failures are economically and statistically significant causes behind cost and time overruns.
Nesting ecology of the Painted Stork Mycteria leucocephala at Sultanpur National Park, Haryana, India

The Painted Stork Mycteria leucocephala is a prominent species of Indian heronries and wetlands. Given that this stork is listed as Near Threatened (BirdLife International 2001), it is worrying that its nesting ecology, especially the factors affecting nesting success, is poorly understood. While a relationship between rainfall and nesting intensity has long been known (e.g. Ali and Ripley 1987), this has not been investigated in detail. Previous observations have also indicated that many more individuals are present at colonies at the beginning of the breeding season than actually breed (Ali and Vijayan 1983), but this phenomenon has not been investigated further. To address these issues, we studied reproductive output, causes of nest failure, the number of adults in nesting colonies, and factors associated with yearly variation in nesting densities of the Painted Stork at Sultanpur National Park (henceforth Sultanpur), in Haryana, India.
Multivariate analysis of morphometric traits of three different indigenous cattle populations from North East states of India.

In the present study an attempt has been made to differentiate three cattle populations of North East states of India i.e. Tripura, Mizoram and Manipur based on morphometric traits, using canonical discriminant analysis to see whether they are similar or distinct. Data consisted of eight different morphometric traits of 383 indigenous cows from Tripura (136), Mizoram (71) and Manipur (176). Morphometric traits included body length, height at withers, heart girth, paunch girth, face length, ear length, horn length and tail length without switch. All the morphometric traits under study differ significantly in these populations except horn length. All the traits, values were lower in Tripura cows than that of Mizoram and Manipur cows. The stepwise discriminant analysis showed that height at withers, body length, ear length, tail length without switch, paunch girth and face length were the most discriminating traits in these three cattle populations. The pair wise Mahalanobis distances between Tripura and Mizoram, Tripura and Manipur and Mizoram and Manipur were 9.72578, 5.72089 and 4.65239, respectively, and significant. The dendogram showed that there are two clusters; cluster one includes Manipur and Mizoram cows and cluster two Tripura cows those are clearly separated from cluster one. The Individual assignment of different cattle populations by the cross-validation classification revealed 84.13% of Tripura cows, 82.09% of Mizoram cows and 79.87% Manipur cows were assigned correctly into their respective population. Based on the present study we cannot conclude that they are three different distinct breeds. However, the present information on the three cattle populations could therefore be exploited in designing appropriate strategies for their management and conservation.
KICK IMPACT CHARACTERISTICS FOR DIFFERENT RUGBY LEAGUE KICKS

Kicking is becoming increasingly important in rugby league and one of the most important aspects of kicking is the nature of impact. This study examined impact characteristics for five rugby league kicks – the goalshot, the punt kick, the dropkick, the grubber and the ‘bomb’. Seven elite players performed these kicks while being videoed (6000Hz). Digitised data of nine points (five on the kick leg, four on the ball) were used to quantify parameters near and during impact. Rugby league kicks produced a smaller time in contact and a larger amount of work compared to kicks in other sports. Differences also existed between the five types of rugby league kick tested in terms of ball to foot ratio and foot and ball positioning at impact. These differences between kicks within the same sport highlight the need to evaluate different kick types separately within a sport.
A Study of Possible Ground-Motion Amplification at the Coyote Lake Dam, California

The abutment site at the Coyote Lake Dam recorded an unusually large peak acceleration of 1.29g during the 1984 Morgan Hill earthquake. Following this earthquake another strong-motion station was installed about 700 m downstream from the abutment station. We study all events (seven) recorded on these stations, using ratios of peak accelerations, spectral ratios, and particle motion polarization (using holograms) to investigate the relative ground motion at the two sites. We find that in all but one case the motion at the abutment site is larger than the downstream site over a broad frequency band. The polarizations are similar for the two sites for a given event, but can vary from one event to another. This suggests that the dam itself is not strongly influencing the records. Although we can be sure that the relative motion is usually larger at the abutment site, we cannot conclude that there is anom- alous site amplification at the abutment site. The downstream site could have lower- than-usual near-surface amplifications. On the other hand, the geology near the abut- ment site is extremely complex and includes fault slivers, with rapid lateral changes in materials and presumably seismic velocities. For this reason alone, the abutment site should not be considered a normal free-field site.
Implementation of VLBI Near-Field Delay Models in the c5++ Analysis Software

We describe the implementation of two near-field delay models in the c5++ analysis software. The motivation for this work is to allow the calculation of a priori delay information for the correlation of VLBI raw observations of near-field targets and to prepare for the analysis of VLBI data of near-field objects. The software is tested by correlating VLBI observations of the Chinese Chang’E lunar lander on the Onsala– Wettzell baseline.
Psychometric measurement and information retrieval

Bien que l'application des methodes de psychometrie a l'etude scientifique de la recherche d'information, n'ait pas suivi l'evolution de leur domaine privilegie d'application qu'est la psychophysique, la contribution initiale est un article de John Swets de 1963. Le point est d'abord fait sur l'origine et le developpement des psychometries, a travers les etudes publiees, puis un etat de la question sur leur application a la recherche documentaire
Adoption of new seed varieties under production risk: an application to rice in Iran

This paper focuses on linkage between new rice seed varieties and production risk and also factors affecting adoption of these varieties in Iran. Farm-level data were collected from a sample of 154 rice farms located in two major districts of Fars province in Southern Iran for 2001-02. The risk-premium associated with the use of seed is estimated following by analyzing a moment-based production risk approach. The results show that the risk premium increases with new seed varieties in the lack of appropriate production conditions implying that new seed varieties is a riskincreasing input and involves a higher cost of risk. However, under suitable production conditions, the cultivation of new rice varieties on average ensures greater yield and at the same time involves less risk as measured by the risk premium. Also, results indicate that the farmer-specific relative risk premium proxies for the risk attitudes of each farmer have negative and significant effect on the decision to adopt new seed varieties. Therefore, farmers that are more riskaverse with respect to their use of seed are less likely to adopt new seed varieties and allow them to decrease their production risk arising from seed requirements.
Heart Sound Reduction in Lung Sounds by Spectrogram

Adaptive Filtering is an accepted method to intelligently remove the heart sound from the lung sounds. However the drawback of the adaptive noise canceling scheme is the need of a reference signal that is exactly in the same time alignment as the interfer- ence signal in the primary signal. In this work an effective and easy method based on Spectrogram is presented to automatically generate a reference signal from the lung sound signal. Adaptive Noise Cancela- tion with Recursive Least Square (RLS-ANC) method is used to filter out the heart sound from lung sound.
Shear strength of reinforced recycled aggregate concrete beams without shear reinforcements

AbstractAs the demand for sustainable construction materials has risen over recent years, researchers have conducted several studies to expand the practical application of recycled construction materials, such as recycled aggregate. The author’s previous research shows the potential application of recycled aggregate over a broad range of structural member types. This paper continues the earlier work and investigates the shear behaviour of reinforced recycled aggregate concrete beams without shear reinforcement using findings from the author’s previous research. The variables in the test program are replacement rate (0%, 30%, 60%, and 100%) of recycled aggregate and shear span-to-depth ratio (2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0). This work compares the experimental results with results obtained using current code equations found in American Concrete Institute (ACI) 318 (2014) and equations proposed in the literature. This research has found that the current code equations can adequately predict the shear strength .
Cloning and characterization of a putative transcription factor induced by abiotic stress in Zea mays

bZIP transcription factors have been reported to play important roles in plant responses to abiotic stresses. Here, we reported the cloning and characterization of a putative bZIP transcription factor (ZmbZIP17) from maize inbred line Han21, which is up-regulated by drought treatment. The open reading frame sequence of ZmbZIP17 was obtained by using 5’RACE and RT-PCR. Sequence analysis showed that ZmbZIP17 encodes a polypeptide of 563 amino acids with predicted molecular mass of 59.8 kDa and pI of 5.6. Southern blot analysis showed that ZmbZIP17 exists as a single copy gene in maize genome. Subcellular localization of ZmbZIP17 was identified in nucleus. The results of real-time PCR analysis indicated that ZmbZIP17 was up-regulated by drought, heat, ABA and NaCl stress immediately, which suggested that ZmbZIP17 is an early stage responsive gene to various abiotic stresses. The result also showed that ZmbZIP17 expressed much higher in leaves than in other organs in maize seedlings.
Importance of Habitat Area and Landscape Context for Species Richness of Bees and Wasps in Fragmented Orchard Meadows

Abstract: I investigated how habitat area, habitat connectivity, and landscape context affect the species richness and abundance of trap‐nesting bees, wasps, and their natural enemies. The research was done on 45 orchard meadows ranging in size from 0.08 to 5.8 ha and differing in habitat connectivity and the surrounding landscape matrix. Effects of the surrounding landscape matrix were restricted to circles with a radius of 250 m. Only the species richness of natural enemies increased with landscape diversity in the surrounding matrix. Population densities of bees increased with habitat connectivity. Total species richness and species richness of bees, eumenid wasps, and natural enemies significantly increased with habitat area. Significant species‐area relationships existed for insect groups but not for plants, thereby confirming the hypothesis that higher trophic levels are more affected by habitat fragmentation than lower trophic levels. The slope of species‐area relationships was steeper for mutualistic bees than for predatory wasps and natural enemies. In contrast to expectations, the rate of parasitism did not depend on habitat area but only on the local and regional abundance of hosts. My results suggest that the area and connectivity of habitat fragments is most important for the conservation of habitat specialists, whereas generalists may profit from a diverse surrounding landscape matrix.