Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plant functional diversity increases grassland productivity-related water vapor fluxes: an Ecotron and modeling approach.

The impact of species richness and functional diversity of plants on ecosystem water vapor fluxes has been little investigated. To address this knowledge gap, we combined a lysimeter setup in a controlled environment facility (Ecotron) with large ecosystem samples/monoliths originating from a long-term biodiversity experiment (The Jena Experiment) and a modeling approach. Our goals were (1) quantifying the impact of plant species richness (four vs. 16 species) on day- and nighttime ecosystem water vapor fluxes; (2) partitioning ecosystem evapotranspiration into evaporation and plant transpiration using the Shuttleworth and Wallace (SW) energy partitioning model; and (3) identifying the most parsimonious predictors of water vapor fluxes using plant functional-trait-based metrics such as functional diversity and community weighted means. Daytime measured and modeled evapotranspiration were significantly higher in the higher plant diversity treatment, suggesting increased water acquisition. The SW model suggests that, at low plant species richness, a higher proportion of the available energy was diverted to evaporation (a non-productive flux), while, at higher species richness, the proportion of ecosystem transpiration (a productivity-related water flux) increased. While it is well established that LAI controls ecosystem transpiration, here we also identified that the diversity of leaf nitrogen concentration among species in a community is a consistent predictor of ecosystem water vapor fluxes during daytime. The results provide evidence that, at the peak of the growing season, higher leaf area index (LAI) and lower percentage of bare ground at high plant diversity diverts more of the available water to transpiration, a flux closely coupled with photosynthesis and productivity. Higher rates of transpiration presumably contribute to the positive effect of diversity on productivity.
In vivo nonmelanoma skin cancer diagnosis using Raman microspectroscopy

Nonmelanoma skin cancers, including basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), are the most common skin cancers, presenting nearly as many cases as all other cancers combined. The current gold‐standard for clinical diagnosis of these lesions is histopathologic examination, an invasive, time‐consuming procedure. There is thus considerable interest in developing a real‐time, automated, noninvasive tool for nonmelanoma skin cancer diagnosis. In this study, we explored the capability of Raman microspectroscopy to provide differential diagnosis of BCC, SCC, inflamed scar tissue, and normal tissue in vivo.
Canadian Business Risk Management: Private Firms, Crown Corporations, and Public Institutions

This paper considers the current and possible institutions (programs, policies, participants, etc.) that govern public Business Risk Management (BRM) in Canada. This is an important policy topic for two reasons: BRM spending accounts for the vast majority of public monies funneled to Canadian agricultural producers and the upcoming Canadian Agricultural Partnership includes a mandated BRM review and thus presents an opportunity to change these institutions in meaningful ways. We pay particular attention to the rhetoric surrounding greater involvement of private insurance, the lack of rhetoric regarding the use of crown corporations, and issues of subsidization. We conclude with policy recommendations favoring commodity-specific revenue versus whole-farm net margin insurance, a possible reduction in subsidy levels, and a call to reconsider the role of crown corporations. We also make programming recommendations regarding the discontinued use of private reinsurance, a reduction in the level of program reserves, and greater transparency. Ce document examine les institutions actuelles et potentielles (programmes, politiques, participants, etc.) qui gouvernent la gestion des risques d'entreprises (GRE) au Canada. Deux raisons rendent important ce sujet politique : les depenses liees a la GRE totalisent la grande majorite des fonds publics accordes aux producteurs agricoles, et le futur cadre politique agricole offre l'occasion de modifier ces institutions de maniere significative. Nous portons une attention particuliere a la rhetorique entourant l'implication plus soutenue des assurances privees, a l'absence de rhetorique au sujet de l'utilisation de societes d'Etat, et aux enjeux de subvention. Nous concluons avec des recommandations politiques favorisant les assurances de revenus provenant specifiquement de produits agricoles versus celles de la marge nette de l'exploitation globale, une potentielle reduction des niveaux de subvention, et un appel a tenir compte du role des societes d'Etat. Nous proposons aussi des recommandations de programmation concernant l'arret de l'utilisation des reassurances privees, une reduction du niveau des programmes de reserve, et une transparence accrue.
Limiting amino acids for a corn and soybean meal diet in weaned calves less than three months of age.

Holstein bull calves (n = 51) weaned at 6 wk of age were used in four N balance trials for 4 wk (Trials 1 to 3) or for 2 wk (Trial 4) from 8 wk of age to identify limiting amino acids for a corn and soybean meal diet. The calves were trained to maintain reflex closure of the reticular groove throughout the trials. In Trial 1, administration of . 111 g of DL-methionine plus . 333 g of L-lysine monohydrochloride/kg BW through the reticular groove increased N retention compared with the control that received isonitrogenous L-glutamine, but administration of . 333 g L-lysine monohydrochloride/kg BW alone did not increase N retention in Trial 2. In Trial 3, administration of . 111 g of DL-methionine/kg BW improved N balance compared with the control, although the improvement was not detected when DL-methionine was restricted to . 022 g/kg BW. In Trial 4, administration of the mixture of . 111 g of DL-methionine, . 333 g of L-lysine monohydrochloride, and . 055 g of L-tryptophan/kg BW increased N retention in calves compared with calves that received an isonitrogenous mixture of . 111 g of DL-methionine and . 274 g of L-glutamine/kg BW, or . 111 g of DL-methionine, . 055 g of L-tryptophan, and . 234 g of L-glutamine/kg BW. The present results suggest that methionine was the first-limiting and that lysine was probably the second-limiting amino acid for the corn and soybean meal diet in weaned calves less than 11 wk of age, although tryptophan may be either co-limiting with lysine or third-limiting.
Thai-English spam SMS filtering

SMS spam filtering for Thai-English language has not previously been studied and implemented. Two methods of spam SMS message filtering objected to filter spam SMS messages written in Thai and English have been studied and implemented. The first method simply uses current spam English message filtering and then upgrades for Thai language support. The second one applies text normalization, word segmentation process, and analyzing/correcting the semantic of Thai words. However, both methods are applied by 2 different decision-making algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naive Bayesian (NB) algorithms. Finally, the results from trial applying in the real system are shown. The results show that the second filtering method has higher accuracy. Moreover, the SVM based filtering consumes more processing time than the NB based filtering about 2.5 times for both proposed methods.
Religious art in a social context. How to involve stakeholders

Throughout history, religious art has held a never-ending transitional significance regarding how people reflect on the art objects’ role in both Church and society. Heidegger (1971, quoted in Walter 2014: 640) states that humanity’s fundamental experience of reality changes over time and suggests that works of art explain the basic mechanism of this historical transformation of intelligibility. With this point as a fundament, it can be claimed that the valuing of an artwork makes it in some way meaningful, and the reason for making it meaningful for today’s community is changing through time.
Global Dissemination of blaKPC into Bacterial Species beyond Klebsiella pneumoniae and In Vitro Susceptibility to Ceftazidime-Avibactam and Aztreonam-Avibactam

ABSTRACT The Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC), first described in the United States in 1996, is now a widespread global problem in several Gram-negative species. A worldwide surveillance study collected Gram-negative pathogens from 202 global sites in 40 countries during 2012 to 2014 and determined susceptibility to β-lactams and other class agents by broth microdilution testing. Molecular mechanisms of β-lactam resistance among carbapenem-nonsusceptible Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were determined using PCR and sequencing. Genes encoding KPC enzymes were found in 586 isolates from 22 countries (76 medical centers), including countries in the Asia-Pacific region (32 isolates), Europe (264 isolates), Latin America (210 isolates), and the Middle East (19 isolates, Israel only) and the United States (61 isolates). The majority of isolates were K. pneumoniae (83.4%); however, KPC was detected in 13 additional species. KPC-2 (69.6%) was more common than KPC-3 (29.5%), with regional variation observed. A novel KPC variant, KPC-18 (KPC-3[V8I]), was identified during the study. Few antimicrobial agents tested remained effective in vitro against KPC-producing isolates, with ceftazidime-avibactam (MIC90, 4 μg/ml), aztreonam-avibactam (MIC90, 0.5 μg/ml), and tigecycline (MIC90, 2 μg/ml) retaining the greatest activity against Enterobacteriaceae cocarrying KPC and other β-lactamases, whereas colistin (MIC90, 2 μg/ml) demonstrated the greatest in vitro activity against KPC-positive P. aeruginosa. This analysis of surveillance data demonstrated that KPC is widely disseminated. KPC was found in multiple species of Enterobacteriaceae and P. aeruginosa and has now become a global problem.
Cultural influences on IT use amongst factory managers: a UK–Japanese comparison

This paper seeks to analyse the influence of national cultural factors on the use of information technology (IT) by managers. An analysis of the existing literature on the interplay between technology, culture and organizational context indicates that the influence of national culture needs to be carefully specified if it is to be differentiated from institutional and organizational factors. Moreover, insofar as such influence operates at all, it is subsumed within, and not exterior to, a dynamic and emergent process of interaction between technology design and organizational practices. In this light, the study presented here seeks to avoid a simplistic approach in which national culture is viewed as an exogenous force directly conditioning action, but rather posits such influence as a critical element of the wider context which enframes action. These considerations were reflected in the research design of the empirical study presented here. This involved a survey of managers in over 1400 firms across five industrial sectors in the UK and Japan. These countries were chosen because previous studies had indicated that they exhibit distinctive cultural differences in their management practices. By conducting a large-scale survey across a range of sectors, the study aimed to abstract the diffuse effect of these cultural differences from the specific impact of sectorial and organizational contingencies. In particular, questions within the survey sought to explore the extent to which managerial preferences and practices in IT use could be interpreted in terms of two key dimensions of national cultural difference. The latter were operationalized in this study as a control orientation to IT use, and an individualistic orientation to IT use, respectively. The overall analysis of the survey data suggests that the effect of national culture is significant and seems to operate across industry boundaries. Managers in Japanese factories do in fact exhibit the hypothesized stronger orientation towards a control orientation in the use of IT, while managers in British factories show a relatively stronger orientation towards individualistic use of IT at the management level.
Detach and Adapt: Learning Cross-Domain Disentangled Deep Representation

While representation learning aims to derive interpretable features for describing visual data, representation disentanglement further results in such features so that particular image attributes can be identified and manipulated. However, one cannot easily address this task without observing ground truth annotation for the training data. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning model of Cross-Domain Representation Disentangler (CDRD). By observing fully annotated source-domain data and unlabeled target-domain data of interest, our model bridges the information across data domains and transfers the attribute information accordingly. Thus, cross-domain feature disentanglement and adaptation can be jointly performed. In the experiments, we provide qualitative results to verify our disentanglement capability. Moreover, we further confirm that our model can be applied for solving classification tasks of unsupervised domain adaptation, and performs favorably against state-of-the-art image disentanglement and translation methods.
A Joint Sparse and Low-Rank Decomposition for Pansharpening of Multispectral Images

Pansharpening aims to fuse a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image and a low-resolution multispectral (MS) image. Several synthesis techniques have been reported to solve the problem of pansharpening. Details injection (DI) consists of the cascaded processes of details extraction and injection. The former is crucial for performance. By exploiting the relationship among multiple data acquired on the same scene through different sensors, this paper first develops a joint sparse and low-rank (JSLR) decomposition with an assumption that multiple data have a common low-rank component. Then, a novel DI-type pansharpening method is proposed based on JSLR decomposition, named as JSLR-based pansharpening (JSLRP). In JSLRP, the injected spatial details are calculated as a linear combination of JSLR decomposed components. To ensure the low-rank condition, the JSLR is implemented on the PAN and MS images in the nonlocal similar patches form by adopting the nonlocal self-similarity. Finally, the superiority of JSLRP is demonstrated by comparing with several well-known methods on the reduced-scale data and full-scale data.
Cross-cultural comparability of the Geriatric Depression Scale: Comparison between older Koreans and older Americans

It is becoming increasingly clear that, in order to better understand the implications of global aging, more cross-cultural research is needed. In the present study, the structure and validity of the Geriatric Depression Scale-Short Form (GDS-SF) was examined in Korean and US samples of older adults. The participants included 153 older adults living in Korea (mean age=65.9 years) and 459 older adults from Florida (mean age=72.4 years). All participants completed the original or translated versions of the GDS-SF, as well as additional demographic and health-related measures. The results indicated that the GDS-SF exhibited good reliability in both samples. However, the results of a principal components analysis indicated that the structure was not well replicated across the two samples. In general, the present study suggests that, despite great efforts to make the questionnaires equivalent in the two cultures, the concept of depression for older adults may vary greatly in Korea and the USA. Possible explanations for cross-cultural differences are discussed, as well as implications.
Imipenem‐cilastatin vs. tobramycin and metronidazole for appendicitis‐related infections

The efficacy of imipenem-cilastatin was compared with that of tobramycin and metronidazole for the treatment of appendicitis-associated abdominal infections in children in an open, randomized trial. Two hundred eighteen patients between 2.5 and 16.8 years of age hospitalized for appendectomy because of suspected acute appendicitis were allocated to 5 treatment groups. The appendix was perforated in 54 (33.8%) of the 160 cases with appendicitis. All patients responded favorably to treatment. Infection in the wound coccurred in 15 of 125 (12.0%) of those without preoperative antibiotic
Mean square finite-time boundary stabilisation and H∞ boundary control for stochastic reaction-diffusion systems

ABSTRACT In this paper, the boundary control problem of stochastic reaction-diffusion systems (SRDSs) is studied. First, a distribution controller is designed, and a sufficient condition is established to achieve mean square finite-time stability. Then a boundary controller is proposed, and a criterion is obtained for mean square finite-time stability by using Poincaré's inequality and Gronwall's inequality. When the system is subject to external noise, a boundary controller is presented for the systems with an performance. Furthermore, a boundary controller is presented to ensure robust mean square finite-time stability of linear uncertain SRDSs. Numerical examples illustrate the validity of the theoretical results.
Molecular investigation of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia isolates exhibiting rapid emergence of ticarcillin-clavulanate resistance.

The prevalence of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia resistance to ticarcillin-clavulanate has dramatically increased in our hospital over the past few years. Sixty-six clinical isolates, collected from 61 patients, were tested for antibiotic susceptibility and genotyped by two different enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus-PCR (ERIC-PCR) systems. Although two small outbreaks were identified in the medical intensive care unit, the remaining 58 strains generated 48 different PCR patterns. The rapid emergence of resistance in S. maltophilia occured in absence of an epidemic and was probably influenced by increasing-b-lactam use in our hospital.
Trading Equality for Health? Evaluating the Trade-off and Institutional Hypotheses on Health Inequalities in the Global South

It has been suggested that as medicine advances and mortality declines, socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes will grow. Yet, most research on this topic uses data from affluent Western democracies, where mortality is declining in small increments. We argue that the Global South represents the ideal setting to study this issue in a context of rapid mortality decline. We evaluate two competing hypotheses: (1) there is a trade-off between population health and health inequality such that reductions in under-five mortality are linked to higher levels of social inequality in health; and (2) institutional interventions that improve under-five mortality, like the expansion of educational systems and public health expenditure, are associated with reductions in inequalities. We test these hypotheses using data on 1,369,050 births in 34 low-income countries in the Demographic and Health Surveys from 1995 to 2012. The results show little evidence of a health-for-equality trade-off and instead support the institutional hypothesis.
Entre 2010 et 2015, les inégalités de patrimoine se réduisent légèrement

Debut 2015, la moitie des menages vivant en France possedent plus de 158 000 euros de patrimoine brut et concentrent 92 % des avoirs patrimoniaux des menages. Les 10 % les mieux dotes disposent d’au moins 595 700 euros de patrimoine brut et detiennent pres de la moitie de la masse totale de celui-ci. Les 1 % des menages les plus aises en matiere de patrimoine possedent chacun plus de 1,95 million d’euros d’actifs. A l’oppose, les 10 % de menages les moins dotes detiennent chacun moins de 4 300 euros de patrimoine et collectivement moins de 0,1 % de la masse totale. Le montant des actifs accumules varie selon la position des membres des menages dans le cycle de vie, mais aussi selon leur categorie socioprofessionnelle : detenteurs d’actifs professionnels, les menages d’independants ont en moyenne un patrimoine plus eleve que les menages de salaries. Entre debut 2010 et 2015, en excluant le patrimoine relatif aux vehicules, a l’equipement de la maison, aux bijoux et aux œuvres d’art, les inegalites globales de patrimoine mesurees par l’indice de Gini ont legerement diminue. Elles se sont cependant accentuees parmi les menages les plus modestes. Les menages les plus jeunes ont su profiter de taux bas pour acceder a la propriete : le poids de l’immobilier a ainsi augmente de 6 points en cinq ans pour atteindre, debut 2015, 70 % de la valeur de leur patrimoine prive brut (hors biens durables et de valeur).
Focused Ion Beam Etched Ring-Resonator in CVD-grown Ge-SbS Thin Films

Focused ion beam technique has been applied to fabricate ring resonators in Ge-Sb-S thin films for optoelectronic applications. The CVD-grown Ge-Sb-S thin films have been characterizatezed by micro-Raman, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray analysis and UV-VIS-NIR spectroscopy and the properties of the resonator are being assessed.
Use of community pharmacies: a population-based survey.

BACKGROUND Community pharmacies are widely used in the UK, but the services they provide are changing, with pharmacists expected to take on wider roles and responsibilities. The impact of such changes will partly depend on who uses pharmacies and their illnesses. METHODS This was a cross-sectional survey of a stratified random sample of 10,000 adults aged 35 years plus. RESULTS In the previous month, 59 per cent of respondents had collected a prescription medicine and 40 per cent had purchased an over-the-counter (OTC) medicine from a pharmacy, whereas only 12 per cent had asked for advice. Women were more likely to have obtained medicine or asked for advice (76 per cent), but nearly two-thirds of men had done so (63 per cent). Poor self-rated health was the key factor in obtaining medicine, both on prescription and OTC. Purchasers of OTC medicine were more likely to be younger and from higher socio-economic classes, whereas those who collected prescription medicine were more likely to be older, feel at risk of vascular health problems and non-smokers. Medicines to treat cold and flu symptoms were the most frequently reported purchase type. Only a small number of respondents who asked for advice had not also obtained medicine. Respondents who asked for advice were more likely to have asked about a specific medicine or illness than to have asked for general health advice. CONCLUSION Whilst those with poorer health are more likely to visit, a wide range of ages and social classes visit pharmacies each month. This provides an opportunity for public health initiatives to be delivered in pharmacies.
Surgical response to the 2008 Mumbai terror attack

Mumbai, the financial capital of India, was attacked by terrorists at various famous, densely populated places on 26 November 2008. The attack lasted for 60 h, resulting in multiple civilian casualties from bullet and blast injuries. The aim was to review the disaster management plan and analyse the injury patterns and surgical response.