Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genotypic evaluation of sugarcane (Saccharum spp. Hybrids) clones for sucrose content in western Kenya

Sugarcane variety development programmes primarily envisage breeding of varieties with high cane yields and high sugar content in specific environmental conditions. Key components associated with sugar yields are tonnes of cane per hectare and sucrose content. A study was undertaken to evaluate 22 introduced sugarcane genotypes with three checks (KEN 83-737, EAK73-335 and D8484) for sucrose content in western Kenya. The experiment was planted in a Latin square design with three replications at three sites namely Sugar Research Institute Kibos, South Nyanza Sugar Company and Mumias Sugar Company. Data was recorded on refractive brix, stalk thickness, fresh cane yield, sucrose content, fibre content, juice purity and sugar yield. Significant differences at (p<0.05) were observed among genotypes for, sugar yields, brix percent cane, pol percent cane, fibre percent cane and juice purity. The effects of locations on quality were significant in all the traits tested (p<0.05). Effects of G×L were not significant for all the quality traits with exception of brix% cane. Significant positive correlations were detected between sucrose content, juice purity and fiber percent cane.7 Genotypes exhibited superiority to check cultivars in quality traits and their genetic potential can be exploited for high sugar production. Key words: Checks, correlations, genotype, location, sugarcane, quality traits.
Personal Bankruptcy, Bank Portfolio Choice and the Macroeconomy

This paper explores the spillover effects from increasing personal bankruptcy protection. Innovatively, the paper shows that the spillover effects can be influenced by the bank portfolio choice. Since a low level of personal bankruptcy protection keeps an insolvent individual liable until her debt is repaid in full, lender's returns on mortgages are less uncertain than returns on other assets ceteris paribus. Risk-averse banks would prefer mortgages over other types of assets such as corporate loans. Corporate lending and thus equilibrium output would fall. In contrary to the popular view that creditor protection smooths credit provision and makes the allocation of resources more efficient, I show that in some cases a low level of personal bankruptcy protection can lead to aggregate consumption losses. Also I show that macroprudential policies (LTV ratios) can successfully complement higher personal bankruptcy protection in ensuring even higher welfare.
PLASMA STEROID CHANGES IN PRE‐TERM LABOUR IN ASSOCIATION WITH SALBUTAMOL INFUSION

Serial measurements of peripheral plasma concentrations of progesterone and oestradiol‐17β were made in 23 women with singleton pregnancies who were given intravenous salbutamol in an attempt to inhibit pre‐term labour. Mean levels of both hormones fell significantly during salbutamol infusion but returned to pre‐treatment levels after therapy was stopped. Plasma human placental lactogen concentrations did not change during salbutamol infusion, suggesting that the fall in steroid hormone levels was unlikely to be an effect of altered uterine or placental blood flow.
Remarkable Application of Serum EBV EBER‐1 in Monitoring Response of Nasopharyngeal Cancer Patients to Salvage Chemotherapy

Abstract: Nineteen consecutive patients with metastatic or recurrent nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) receiving combination chemotherapy were monitored for EBV DNA in their serum. EBV DNA (EBER‐1) concentration in serum was measured before, during, and after chemotherapy. Thirteen patients had additional multiple prechemotherapy readings. There was a significant lead time from first detection of serum EBER‐1 to clinical recurrence in 62% of patients by a mean of 17.4 weeks (range: 8–74.5 weeks; mean = 28.2 weeks if confined to the 8 patients with significant lead time). The median EBER‐1 concentration was significantly higher in those with distant metastasis as compared to those with loco‐regional recurrence only (17,468 vs. 684 pg/mL serum; p= 0.046, Mann‐Whitney U test). Among the 13 patients who responded to chemotherapy, 4 exhibited clinical complete remission (CR) who were only found in the group with EBER‐1 DNA drop to background level, while the magnitude of EBER‐1 drop did not discriminate partial remission (PR) and stable disease (SD) patients clearly. Subsequent profile of EBER‐1 DNA showed concordance with clinical course of either continuous remission or later progression. EBER‐1 DNA in serum can become a useful adjunctive surrogate marker to monitor chemotherapeutic response in NPC patients with distant metastasis or advanced local recurrence.
Phantom Eye

We prospectively evaluated the frequency, time-course and predisposing factors of phantom eye syndrome in 53 patients who underwent surgical eye amputation to cure ocular cancer. Before surgery, patients were classified as Group 1 (n=25) if they had no history of headache or Group II (n=28) if they were headache sufferers. Three clinical patterns were distinguished: phantom pain, non-painful phantom phenomena and photopsias. Their symptoms developed 7 days to 6 months after surgery, with peak incidence after 6 months (photopsia 43%; phantom pain 28%; non-painful phantom phenomena 62%). Phantom eye syndrome was more common in headache sufferers than in non-headache subjects. Headache sufferers were more prone to phantom pain, but more so to non-painful phenomena and photopsias. These findings are in accord with our previous results indicating that prima y headache sufferers are prone to phantom tooth pain.
CEO Option Compensation Can Be a Bad Option: Evidence from Product Market Relationships

The existing literature is ambiguous about the impact of executive option-based compensation on firm performance. We find that option-based pay significantly undercuts the firm performance in the presence of important stakeholders, namely major customers. Following import tariff cuts, which represent exogenous shocks to existing customer relationships, we show that firms with large customers reduce CEO option-based compensation. Further, we find that firm performance improves and pre-existing major customer relationships strengthen following the reduction in CEO option compensation. Overall, this study provides insights into how firms with important stakeholders can shape the costs and benefits of governance practices.
Organizational Culture and Employee Morale: A Public Sector Enterprise Experience

Organizational culture is the collective behavior of employees who form the core of an organization. It is shaped by organization values, visions, norms, working language, systems, and symbol. It also includes beliefs and habits of employees. Employee morale describes the overall outlook, attitude, satisfaction, and confidence that employees feel at work. When employees are positive about their work environment and believe that they can meet their most important needs at work, their employee morale gets boosted up. Such a positive morale can lead to better organizational performance. But when employees are negative and unhappy about their workplace and feel that their work is not appreciated, their employee morale becomes negative or low. If the morale of the employees is low, the productivity of the company will be affected as employees will not be able to meet their goals. The prevailing culture in an organization can have an impact on the morale of the employees. The study was conducted in order to find out the Impact of Organizational culture on employee morale. From this study it was found that the culture existing in public sector undertakings is bureaucratic culture and the morale of the employees is low. But on further analysis it becomes clear that level of bureaucratic culture has no effect on employee morale. Results also pointed that employee morale vary among male and female employees. Level of morale was found to be more for male employees than their female counterparts.
Tiered Pricing for Volume and Priority: Three Problems at the Intersection of Marketing and Operational Policies

Tiered Pricing for Volume and Priority: Three Problems at the Intersection of Marketing and Operational Policies Michael Pavlin Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management University of Toronto 2012 This thesis addresses three problems where a focal agent’s operational policies (inventory and capacity allocation) interact with marketing decisions. The first chapter studies how wholesale all-unit discounts may lead to products being shifted from authorized retailers to discounted gray market channels. Such discounts lead to discontinuous order-costs which may induce buyers to order up to a threshold where they receive a greater discount. The buyer in this chapter is a reseller who makes purchasing decisions while taking into account inventory holding costs, how their resale price affects consumer demand and whether or not they divert inventory to the gray market. I analyze factors which determine how the reseller balances between lowering resale prices and diverting to the gray market, both of which lower costs by shortening the time inventory is held. Modelling the decisions as a Stackelberg game, the welfare of the authorized channel participants is analyzed. Of import, consumer welfare may decrease if a gray market emerges when holding costs are low. In the latter two chapters, the supplier sells a congested service. For example, this supplier may be a courier facing stochastic buyer arrivals. Buyers vary in their value for the service and how patient they are, so the supplier may improve outcomes by providing a menu of delay levels and prices. The system is modelled as a priority queue where congestion constrains the arrival rates at each delay level. In the first study, the supplier has aggregate market data. I model the problem as an ii optimization subject to incentive and congestion constraints. The novel contributions include a precise description of the optimal menu as a function of the supplier’s capacity (the rate at which buyers can be served). Findings include existence of distinct capacity regions where the supplier utilizes service pooling and strategic delay. In the final chapter the related welfare maximization problem is considered. Sufficient conditions for optimal pricing are derived which depend only on operational information: the current revenue must be equal to the best-case revenue subject to current prices and congestion constraints. An associated performance measure is shown to bound deviation from maximum welfare and is used as a heuristic within an adaptive pricing protocol. This protocol is shown to converge to near welfare maximizing outcomes.
PENGARUH PRODUK BANK SYARIAH TERHADAP MINAT MENABUNG DENGAN PERSEPSI MASYARAKAT SEBAGAI VARIABEL MODERATING DI PATI

This study aimed to know the products of Sharia Banks, especially in Kota Pati district toward the interest of saving money by using the public perception as moderating. This research used descriptive quantitative method with populations Islamic Banking (BRI Syariah, BNI Syariah, Mandiri Syariah, Bank Jateng Syariah, Bank Muamalat) in Kota Pati district. The samples were the people who made transactions in Syaria Conventional Banks totaling 100 respondents taken using quota sampling technique. Methods of data analysis used MRA (Moderating Regresion Analysis) test. The results of this study showed that the products of existing Islamic banks in microfinance particularly in Kota Pati distrcit has impacts on people. It proves that the products (savings) of microfinance have benefits for customers. While the public perception can be moderating variables because the public banks can give education to the society that their products are free from usury.
A pose pruning driven solution to pose feature GraphSLAM

To build consistent feature-based map for the environment, GraphSLAM forms the graph using the collected information, with poses of robot and features being nodes while the odometry and observations being binary edges (edge links to two nodes). As the number of kept nodes grows unboundedly while robot moves, this method will become intractable for long-duration operation. In this paper, we propose a pose pruning-driven solution for pose feature Simultaneous localization and mapping by relating the size of graph to the size of map instead of the length of trajectory. It consists of two steps: (1) An online pose pruning algorithm that can select a pose to be pruned based on the contribution of the pose. Different from conventional methods considering the spatial distance between poses, the contribution is based on the feature observations of poses, taking mapping into consideration. (2) An edge generation algorithm that can build new consistent binary edges from -nary edge (edge links to nodes) induced by marginalizing the pruned pose. The type of new edges remains invariant (i.e. they are either odometry or pose to feature observations), so no extra change is required to be made on the GraphSLAM optimizer, making the proposed solution modular. In the experiment, we first employ this system on simulation data-sets to show how it works. Then the large-scale data-sets: DLR, Victoria Park, and CityTrees10000 are used to evaluate its performance.
Using a Market Basket to Explore Regional Food Systems

The market basket chosen for the Enhancing Food Security in the Northeast (EFSNE) project was one of its major tools, as its contents served as the subject of a variety of analyses across the research teams. The interdisciplinary systems project studied multiple components of food systems in the Northeast region. One of the team members’ first collaborative exercises was the choice of the eight items representing the major food groups, includ­ing different processed forms of food and healthier versions of several. This article summarizes the information gathered on the market basket items, including (1) some salient data describing the state of each food item’s industry; (2) the current regional-self-reliance production level; (3) consu­mer purchases of these items in the Northeast utilizing secondary data sources and data gathered in project intercept surveys; (4) store inventories, including prices and where the food is produced or manufactured; (5) the percentage of the market basket food that is produced regionally, as well as the regional economic value-added percentage; (6) models of six of the foods predicting the effect on production and supply chains of changes in the system, such as increased demand and environ­mental changes; and (7) foodprints for each food. Market baskets are frequently used instruments in food environment and cost studies. Using market baskets in EFSNE allowed the teams to aggregate and interconnect data from multiple analyses done by researchers from multiple disciplines to tell a rich story about a specific set of foods, their supply chains, and the future opportunities to enhance their production and distribution in the region.
Gene-rich large deletions are overrepresented in POAG patients of Indian and Caucasian origins.

PURPOSE Large copy number variations (CNV) can contribute to increased burden for neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, we analyzed the genome-wide burden of large CNVs > 100 kb in primary open angle glaucoma (POAG), a neurodegenerative disease of the eye that is the largest cause of irreversible blindness. METHODS Genome-wide analysis of CNVs > 100 kb were analyzed in a total of 1720 individuals, including an Indian cohort (347 POAG cases and 345 controls) and a Caucasian cohort (624 cases and 404 controls). All the CNV data were obtained from experiments performed on Illumina 660W-Quad (infinium) arrays. RESULTS We observed that for both the populations CNVs > 1 Mb was significantly enriched for gene-rich regions unique to the POAG cases (P < 10(-11)). In the Indian cohort CNVs > 1 Mb (39 calls) in patients influenced 125 genes while in controls 31 such CNVs influenced only 5 genes with no overlap. In both cohorts we observed 1.9-fold gene enrichment in patients for deletions compared to duplications, while such a bias was not observed in controls (0.3-fold). Overall duplications > 1 Mb were more than deletions (Del/Dup = 0.82) confirming that the enrichment of gene-rich deletions in patients was associated with the disease. Of the 39 CNVs > 1 Mb from Indian patients, 28 (72%) also were implicated in other neurodegenerative disorders, like autism, schizophrenia, sensorineural hearing loss, and so forth. We found one large duplication encompassing CNTN4 gene in Indian and Caucasian POAG patients that was absent in the controls. CONCLUSIONS To our knowledge, our study is the first report on large CNV bias for gene-rich regions in glaucomatous neurodegeneration, implicating its impact across populations of contrasting ethnicities. We identified CNTN4 as a novel candidate gene for POAG.
Endoxifen and Other Metabolites of Tamoxifen Inhibit Human Hydroxysteroid Sulfotransferase 2 A 1 ( hSULT 2 A 1 ) s

Although tamoxifen is a successful agent for treatment and prevention of estrogen-dependent breast cancer, its use has been limited by the low incidence of endometrial cancer. Human hydroxysteroid sulfotransferase 2A1 (hSULT2A1) catalyzes the formation of an a-sulfooxy metabolite of tamoxifen that is reactive toward DNA, and this has been implicated in its carcinogenicity. Also, hSULT2A1 functions in the metabolism of steroid hormones such as dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and pregnenolone (PREG). These roles of hSULT2A1 in steroid hormone metabolism and in generating a reactive metabolite of tamoxifen led us to examine its interactions with tamoxifen and several of its major metabolites. We hypothesized that metabolites of tamoxifen may regulate the catalytic activity of hSULT2A1, either through direct inhibition or through serving as alternate substrates for the enzyme. We found that 4-hydroxy-N-desmethyltamoxifen (endoxifen) is a potent inhibitor of hSULT2A1-catalyzed sulfation of PREG and DHEA, with Ki values of 3.5 and 2.8 mM, respectively. In the hSULT2A1catalyzed sulfation of PREG, 4-hydroxytamoxifen (4-OHTAM) and N-desmethyltamoxifen (N-desTAM) exhibited Ki values of 12.7 and 9.8 mM, respectively, whereas corresponding Ki values of 19.4 and 17.2 mM were observed with DHEA as substrate. A Ki value of 9.1 mM was observed for tamoxifen-N-oxide with DHEA as substrate, and this increased to 16.9 mM for the hSULT2A1-catalyzed sulfation of PREG. Three metabolites were substrates for hSULT2A1, with relative sulfation rates of 4-OHTAM > N-desTAM > > endoxifen. These results may be useful in interpreting ongoing clinical trials of endoxifen and in improving the design of related molecules.
Perceived Service Quality and Loyalty of Fitness Centers' Customers: Segmenting Members Through Their Exercise Motives

ABSTRACT The present study aimed to segment fitness centers' members through their exercise motives and further profile them according to their perceptions of service quality and loyalty. Participants (N = 378) filled in a questionnaire measuring: (a) exercise motives, (through the translated-into-Greek EMI-2), (b) service quality, and (c) psychological commitment. An exploratory factor analysis of the motivation scale revealed nine factors. A cluster analysis categorized these factors into five segments that statistically different evaluated service quality and psychological commitment. The marketing implications of results are discussed.
Involvement of Pf155/RESA and cross-reactive antigens in Plasmodium falciparum merozoite invasion in vitro

Lines of Plasmodium falciparum FCR3 either expressing or not expressing the blood-stage antigen Pf155/RESA were used to analyze the possible involvement of this antigen in the merozoite invasion process in vitro. Antibodies from human sera, affinity purified on synthetic peptides corresponding to C-terminal repeated sequences in Pf155/RESA, were shown to inhibit merozoite invasion of both types of parasites with similar efficiency. Reversal of the invasion inhibition by fusion proteins containing repeated sequences of Pf155/RESA but not of the cross-reactive antigens Ag332 and Pf11.1 indicated that the inhibitory antibodies had similar target antigens in both Pf155/RESA+ and Pf155/RESA- parasites that involved cross-reacting epitopes present in Pf155/RESA. Rabbit antibodies specific for Pf155/RESA repeats inhibited merozoite invasion of Pf155/RESA expressing parasites efficiently but had no or very small effect on the invasion of Pf155/RESA-deficient parasites. In contrast, rabbit antibodies specific for Ag332 repeats as well as human antibodies affinity purified on synthetic Ag332 peptides inhibited merozoite invasion of both types of parasites with high efficiency. A similar inhibition pattern was seen with the human monoclonal antibody 33G2, which has specificity for Ag332 but also cross-reacts with Pf155/RESA and Pf11.1. Taken together, our data suggest that Pf155/RESA and related cross-reactive antigens as well as Ag332 are involved in the merozoite invasion process and may constitute targets for invasion inhibitory antibodies.
Extreme college drinking and alcohol-related injury risk.

BACKGROUND Despite the enormous burden of alcohol-related injuries, the direct connection between college drinking and physical injury has not been well understood. The goal of this study was to assess the connection between alcohol consumption levels and college alcohol-related injury risk. METHODS A total of 12,900 college students seeking routine care in 5 college health clinics completed a general Health Screening Survey. Of these, 2,090 students exceeded at-risk alcohol use levels and participated in a face-to-face interview to determine eligibility for a brief alcohol intervention trial. The eligibility interview assessed past 28-day alcohol use and alcohol-related injuries in the past 6 months. Risk of alcohol-related injury was compared across daily drinking quantities and frequencies. Logistic regression analysis and the Bayesian Information Criterion were applied to compute the odds of alcohol-related injury based on daily drinking totals after adjusting for age, race, site, body weight, and sensation seeking. RESULTS Male college students in the study were 19% more likely (95% CI: 1.12-1.26) to suffer an alcohol-related injury with each additional day of consuming 8 or more drinks. Injury risks among males increased marginally with each day of consuming 5 to 7 drinks (odds ratio = 1.03, 95% CI: 0.94-1.13). Female participants were 10% more likely (95% CI: 1.04-1.16) to suffer an alcohol-related injury with each additional day of drinking 5 or more drinks. Males (OR = 1.69, 95% CI: 1.14-2.50) and females (OR = 1.81, 95% CI: 1.27-2.57) with higher sensation-seeking scores were more likely to suffer alcohol-related injuries. CONCLUSIONS College health clinics may want to focus limited alcohol injury prevention resources on students who frequently engage in extreme drinking, defined in this study as 8+M/5+F drinks per day, and score high on sensation-seeking disposition.