Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diagnostic Value of Cytotoxic Natural Killer Subpopulations in Malignant Pleural Effusions

1Pulmonology Department, Dr Peset University Hospital, Av. de Gaspar Aguilar, 90, 46017 Valencia, Valencia, Spain 2Pulmonology Department, General University Consorci Hospital, Av. Tres Cruces, 2, 46014 Valencia, Valencia, Spain 3Hematology Department, Dr Peset University Hospital, Av. de Gaspar Aguilar, 90, 46017 Valencia, Valencia, Spain 4Hematology Department, La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital, Av. de Fernando Abril Martorell, 106, 46026 Valencia, Valencia, Spain 5Unit of Public Health and Environmental Care, Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Valencia, Av. Vicente Andrés Estellés s/n, 46100 Burjassot, Valencia, Spain *6Biomedical Research Centre Network on Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), Av. Monforte de Lemos, 3–5. Pabellón 11. Planta
Mental Simulation as a Remedy for Biased Reasoning

Prompting mental simulation with a counterfactual scenario has been found to enhance rationality in individuals and groups. Building upon previous findings and the dual-process accounts of reasoning, we hypothesized that debiasing power of mental simulation lies in inhibiting System 1 and facilitating System 2 responses. Therefore, we examined whether counterfactual priming mitigates biased reasoning via changes in cognitive reflection. Each participant of our between-subject experiment (N = 462) solved two out of three tasks on biased reasoning: one before and one after being exposed to the counterfactual scenario. The tasks were designed to elicit selectively seeking hypothesis-confirming evidence, ignoring alternative explanations, and unwillingness to reconsider the default option. In addition, the participants completed two sets of cognitive reflection problems at the beginning and at the end of the experiment. Mental simulation reduced people’s tendencies to ignore alternative explanations and hypothesisdisconfirming evidence, and the latter effect was mediated by intuition inhibition.
INFLUENCE OF NITROGEN FERTILIZER ON YIELD AND ITS COMPONENTS OF BARLEY AND LUPIN OR CHICKPEA IN SOLELY OR INTERCROPPING PLANTING UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF NEWLY RECLAIMED SOIL.

A field trial conducted on barley, lupin and chickpea crops was practiced in sand loamy newly reclaimed soil at the experimental farm of the Faculty of Agriculture, Fayoum University, during 2006/07 and 2007/08 seasons. This work was designed to study the effect of nitrogen fertilizer rates (15, 30 and 45 kg N/fed.) on the three crops grown as sole and intercropping (barley/chickpea and barley/lupin). A split split-plot arrangement in randomized complete block design with three replications was used. The obtained results showed that, compared with the barley/chickpea pattern, monocrop chickpea had significantly improved yielding and quality traits. Whereas, intercropping had higher seed index. Fertilization with 45% N (N3) led to increases in vegetative and reproductive and consequently seed yield/fed. However, similar means of height to first branch and seed index were obtained from application of 30 kg N/fed. (N2) which produced the highest harvest index. Compared with monocrop culture, barley/lupin intercropping resulted in significant increases of lupin height traits in addition its superiority for number of branches and seed index but with inferior seed weight/plant. The heaviest weight of seeds/plant and yield/fed. were obtained from soled lupin. Nitrogen application results revealed the adequacy of N3 for lupin where it produced acceptable seed yield/fed. due to its superior number of pods and harvest index. Except seed and harvest indices all barley traits were significantly affected by intercropping in favour to soled culture. Intercropping barley produced more than half yield/fed. Compared with solid culture. Nitrogen fertilization indicated the suitability of N2 (30 kg N/fed.) for producing improved yield insignificantly different from that of N3. Under cropping patterns with N2 fertilizer dose, the second yielding combinations were barley/chickpea (12.18 ard) and then barley/lupin (11.08 ard) which represented 61 and 55% of yield of soled barley fertilized with N3. These results indicating that chickpea was of better effect than lupin on barley yielding ability and fertilization with the intermediate nitrogen dose (N2) was quite enough for intercropping. Also, with N2 barley/chickpea and barley/lupin yielded 49% chickpea together with 61% barley with LER of 1.15 as well as 46% lupin together with 55% barley with LER 1.21, respectively, compared with sole culture of each crop. These two intercropping –N2 combinations increased total production by 15% and 21% respectively.
Complex-valued multistate associative memory with nonlinear multilevel functions for gray-level image reconstruction

The complex-signum function has been widely used as an activation function in complex-valued recurrent neural networks for multistate associative memory. This paper presents two alternative activation functions with circularity. One is the complex-sigmoid function based on a multilevel sigmoid function defined on a circle. The other is a characteristic of a bifurcating neuron represented by a circle map. The performance of the complex-valued neural networks with the two kinds of activation functions is investigated in multistate associative memory tests. In both networks, the connection weights to store the memory patterns are determined by the generalized projection rule. We also demonstrate gray-level image reconstruction as a possible application of the proposed methods.
Diversity in Image Retrieval using Randomization and Learned Metrics

Providing useful information to user requested queries is the most investigated problem in the multimedia retrieval community. The problem of information retrieval usually has many possible solutions, due to uncertainities in the user‘s information need and ambiguities in query specification. Some mechanism is required to evaluate the options and select a solution. This is quite a challenging task. In the recent years, the focus is gradually shifting towards relevance and diversity of retrieved information, which together improve the usefulness of retrieval system as perceived by users. Intuitively it is desirable to design a retrieval system with three requirements: a) Accurate retrieval i.e., the method should have high precision, b) Diverse retrieval, i.e., the obtained results should be diverse, c) Efficient retrieval, i.e., response time should be small. While considerable effort has been expended to develop algorithms which incorporate both relevance and diversity in the retrieval process, relatively less attention has been given to design efficient algorithms. The main contribution of this thesis lies in developing efficient algorithms for the diverse retrieval problem. We show that the diverse retrieval problem can be mathematically defined as an integer convex optimization problem, and hence finding the optimal solution is NP-Hard. The existing approximate and greedy algorithms that try to find solution to this problem suffer from two drawbacks: a) Running time of the algorithms is very high as it is required to recover several exact nearest neighbors. b) Computations may require an unreasonably large amount of memory overhead for large datasets. In this work, we propose a simple approach to overcome the above issues based on two ideas: 1) Randomization and 2) Learned Metrics In the first case, the method is based on locality senstive hashing and tries to address all of the above requirements simultaneously. We show that the effectiveness of our method depends on randomization in the design of the hash functions. Further, we derive a theoretically sound result to support the intuitiveness and reliability of using hash functions (via randomization) in the retrieval process to improve diversity. We modify the standard hash functions to take into account the distribution of the data for better performance. We also formulate the diverse multi-label prediction (of images and web pages) in this setting and demonstrate the scalability and diversity in the solution. To validate our proposal and to gain more insights into existing methods, we empirically compare our method against common as well as several diversity-based retrieval methods. We demonstrate effectiveness of our approach in different large-scale retrieval tasks via Image Category Retrieval, Multi-label Classification and Image Tagging.
Physico-chemical characteristics of VitAto TM flour from different drying processes (

The physico-chemical characteristics (minerals and vitamins, colour, total sugar, reducing sugar, total starch, solubility, swelling power) and size of flour granules from different drying types (hot-air dried and drum dried) on selected sweet potato variety (VitAtoTM) were investigated. VitAtoTM was collected locally in Malaysia. Calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, sulphur, zinc and vitamin C contents in VitAtoTM flour using drum dried technique were significant higher (p <0.05) than hot-air dried flour. Drum drier technique showed a higher content of total starch (36.55 ± 0.89) and swelling power and solubility as the temperature increased. Total sugar (76.57 ± 0.67) and reducing sugar (25.02 ± 0.09) contents of VitAtoTM flour by drum dried process was also higher than hot-air flour. The colour parameters showed that the L* value that measured brightness (76.57 ± 0.67) and b* values (52.93 ± 5.17) for drum dried flour were significantly higher (p <0.05) than hot-air flour. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis showed that the granular of flour from drum drier technique had irregular shapes with an average size ranging from 50 – 200 μm. This gives an idea about higher solubility value of drum dried flour than hot-air flour. This study showed that drum dried flour can be promoted as a potential drying technique in the food industry.
Bilateral Foreign Direct Investment from South Africa and Income Convergence in the Southern African Development Community

The study is devoted to investigating the productivity and income convergence implications of bilateral FDI between South Africa as the leading source country of FDI and technology in the SADC and the rest of countries in the region. Using country per capita income data over the period from 1980 to 2011, we find evidence suggesting that countries with high levels of bilateral FDI between themselves and South Africa converge faster both on the region average income and on South Africa’s per capita income than those with low bilateral FDI stocks. The finding is robust to estimating countries’ income gaps to South Africa conditioned on alternative potential sources of technology and productivity growth, including trade, FDI from the rest of the world and domestic capital formation. This implies that there are prospects of technology and income convergence in the SADC region driven by South Africa as the regional economic leader.
CALLPLAN: An Interactive Salesman’s Call Planning System

CALLPLAN is an interactive computer system designed to aid salesmen or sales management in allocating sales call time more efficiently. The system increases their capacity to consider the allocation in a logical and consistent manner. CALLPLAN uses as input the salesman's own best estimates of expected contribution of all possible call policies for each account and prospect. The computer can help the estimating procedure by fitting curves through estimated points on a response function or by obtaining expected values from probability estimates. The system solves a mathematical program which determines the best time allocation to maximize contribution according to these estimates. Factors considered by the system include travel time and costs to get to geographical areas within the territory, amount of time required per call on an account within an area, account profitability, and minimum and maximum account call frequency limitations. An efficient incremental analysis routine is discussed as a solution procedure for the mathematical program. CALLPLAN seems best suited to repetitive selling situations where the amount of time the salesman spends with an account is an important factor in the magnitude of sales generated. Preliminary applications have been made by fourteen salesmen in six sales situations. A transcript of a session at the computer terminal of one application is presented. Anticipated sales increases, based on the salesman's judgmental inputs, for the call policy generated by CALLPLAN were between five and twenty-five per cent in the majority of applications.
Reproductive hormonal profile and estrous cycles of gilts fed fermented and enzyme-supplemented cassava peels meal based diets

Fresh cassava peels were collected, fermented for four days and sundried for 3-5 days. It was ground and used to compound maize replaced grower and finisher diets. A group of 27 weaner gilts (Largewhite x Duroc), aged 8 weeks and weighed 10.61±0.27kg were fed the diets. The weaner gilts were allotted to three treatments comprising T1 (control), T2 (fermented CPM) and T3 (fermented CPM + maxigrain R enzyme) in a completely randomized design. The diets were given at 4% of their live body weights daily throughout the experiment. At 20 weeks of age, three gilts per treatment were selected and watched for symptoms of heat which were scored using a scale of 1 4. In a similar vein, the gilts were monitored for expression of heat, which was recorded. Each was bled of 3-5ml fresh blood in the 3 rd day of third estrous cycle via venopuncture every thirty minutes for six hours and was transferred into clean and sterile test tubes, allowed to coagulate, serum decanted and stored at -20°C for hormonal assays of estradiol 17β, follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and leuteinizing hormone (LH). Data were collected and analysed using one way analysis of variance and difference in means separated with Duncan’s Multiple Range Test. The results showed that the duration of estrous cycle was not significantly different (p>0.05) and spanned between 20.33 21.33, 19.33 – 20.33 and 19.33 – 20.00 days for T1, T2 and T3 respectyively. Estradiol-17β ranged from 7.28 – 12.73, 7.14 – 11.26 and 7.62 – 8.86 pg/ml for T1, T2 and T3 respectively and showed significant difference (p<0.05) during 2 nd , 3 rd and 5 th hours. The LH and FSH had no significant difference (p>0.05), however, ranged from 3.72 – 14.38, 3.53 – 13.22 and 3.92 – 15.86 ng/ml and 1.72 – 8.43, 1.63 – 8.88 and 1.61 – 8.94 ng/ml for T1, T2 and T3 respectively. Therefore, fermented cassava peels with or without enzyme supplementation has no deleterious effect on the external estrus symptoms and reproductive hormones.
Empirical Methods for Exploiting Parallel Texts

The translation of a text can be viewed as a detailed annotation of the text's meaning. From this point of view, texts that exist in two languages (bitexts) are the richest accessible source of linguistic knowledge. Such knowledge can be exploited in many ways, if it can be automatically acquired. The acquisition process is invariably based on automatic methods for inducing translational equivalence relations between the two halves of a bitext. At the word token level, these relations are called bitext maps; at the word type level, they are called translation models. This dissertation advances the state of the art in methods for determining both kinds of translational equivalence. It also shows how to integrate these methods to exploit a much wider variety of bitexts than was previously possible. The dissertation begins by showing that the language-specific aspects of the bitext mapping problem can be encapsulated and modularized away, leaving only a problem of geometric pattern recognition. The best solution is then the one that maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio in the search space and employs the fastest and most accurate search algorithm. The dissertation presents new methods for maximizing the signal strength, for filtering noise, and for searching the resulting scatterplot in linear expected space and time. The unprecedented accuracy of this solution enables a new application of bitext maps--automatic detection of omissions in translations. The second half of the dissertation makes a number of advances in statistical translation modeling. First, it proves the feasibility of modeling translational equivalence independently of word order. Second, the dissertation shows why and how translation models can benefit from an explicit noise model. Third, it shows how the noise model can be conditioned on almost any kind of pre-existing language-specific knowledge, and that even simple linguistic clues can significantly improve translation model accuracy. Fourth, the dissertation shows how to automatically determine the sense inventories of words in bitext and how to automatically discover word sequences that are translated as a unit. This information enables translation models that account for polysemy and for phrasal translations.
Construct Validity of Multiple-Choice Cloze Test and Cloze-Elide Test in Testing Reading Comprehension among Iranian EFL Learners

Cloze tests have been extensively used for measuring readability, language proficiency and reading comprehension. This study is intended to determine and cross-compare the construct validity of multiple-choice cloze tests and cloze elide tests in testing reading comprehension via a differential group design. In this study, two instruments were developed and used: a multiple-choice cloze test and a cloze elide test. The tests were administered to sixty, BA and MA EFL Iranian students. The results indicated that a) multiple-choice cloze tests are valid in testing reading comprehension, b) cloze elide tests are valid in testing reading comprehension, c) BA and MA performances on cloze elide tests were better than BA and MA performances on multiple-choice cloze tests.
Aflatoxins Investigation on Dried Fishes of Tuticor in, South East Coast of India

Accepted: 29/12/2015 Abstract The aim of the current study was to determine the t oxigenic fungus on dried fishes of Tuticorin such as Chirocentrus dorab, Saurida tumbil, Epinephelus merra, Sillago sihama, Atule mate, Apri on virescens and production of fungal toxins. The quantitative enume ration of fungi as colony-forming units per gram (CFU/g) was between 3 . 5×10 2.0×10 /g during 6 month of storage period but the initial fungal cou nts in the sun-dried fishes from market were between 2.8×10 2 to 1.2×10 CFU/g. Moisture and pH content of the dried fish samples v aried with storage time and it was between 8.5 33 % and 5.10 7.95 respe ctively. Twenty three different fungal species were found and it was asso ciated with the dried fishes samples sold in the dried fish markets. The associated fungi were Aspergillus flavus, A. terreus, Aspergillus fumigat us, Absidia sp. , Rhizopus sp, A. niger, Mucor sp, Penicillium sp, Fusarium moniliformis, A. oryzae, Trichoderma sp, Geotricus candidum, A. sulphureus, A. terricola, A. awamori, A. flavipes, A. versicolor, A. tamari, Eur oteum sp, Alternaria sp, A. parasiticus, A. sydowii and A. ochraceous. The Aspergilus flavus and A. niger had the highest rate of occurrence among the isolat ed fungi . The concentration of aflatoxin B1 and G1 were also assessed in the store d dri d fish sample and these were found in the dried fish sample ranged between 0.001 5. 492μg/kg and 0.01 2.296 μg/kg respectively. Quantification of Aflatoxins from the dried fish revealed samples wer e contaminated with Aflatoxins but they did not exceed the legal limits and confirms potential exposure of this toxin from dried fish infected wit h fungi. Prolonged intake of dried fish with these metabolites may constitute potential public health hazard. Adequate cooking could help in reducing myc oflora of dried fish. This study demonstrates the importance of proper pr ocessing and handling of fish in order to safeguard public health. Findin gs of this study will increase the knowledge base towards adoption of imp roved handling and drying methods hence minimize fungal growth and pos sible aflatoxin contamination in the dried fish sector. This study also showed that long time stored dried fish displayed for sale at market sites of Tuticorin were contaminated with more aflatoxin which posses a gre t threat on the health of the consumers. However, fish samples should be w ell salted and dried to reduce the moisture content, the samples for sale s hould be kept in a covered container or show glass to reduce settling of droplets and spores and retailers to reduce long time storage of dried fishes to reduce contaminations.
HOST RANGE OF AN ITALIAN POPULATION OF HETERODERA BETAE WOUTS , RUMPENHORST ET STURHAN ( NEMATODA HETERODERIDAE )

An Italian population of Heterodera betae Wouts, Rumpenhorst et Sturhan, from an infested sugarbeet field in Alessandria province, was able to invade and reproduce (R=Pf/Pi>1) on 13 of 28 botanical species tested under controlled temperature conditions (24°C). The species belonging to the Chenopodiaceae were efficient hosts. Among these susceptible ones the greatest reproduction rate was observed in Beta vulgaris L. and Beta vulgaris conditiva L. In the family of Cruciferae Brassica and Sinapis genera resulted basically infested by the nematode whereas genus Raphanus showed a total resistance. The tested Leguminosae showed poor or no reproduction, while tomato cv Marmande supported a fairly good nematode increase. Among the wild vegetable plants the genera Stellaria and Rumex confirmed their susceptibility.
Plasma level of protein modification and inflammatory markers in snakebite induced acute kidney injury patients undergoing haemodialysis-An observational study

Hemodialysis is one of the therapeutic mode of renal failure. Our study aims to evaluate its effect on plasma level of protein modification markers and inflammatory markers in snake-bite mediated acute kidney injury (SAKI) patients. The plasma level of methylglyoxal, advanced oxidation protein products (AOPP), advanced glycation end products (AGE), and other protein modification markers and inflammatory markers-soluble receptor for AGE (sRAGE) and TGFβ1 were found to be significantly elevated in SAKI patients. Methylglyoxal and AOPP shows a decreasing pattern during first few sessions (p<0.05) but increases gradually thereafter. Plasma AGE and advanced lipid peroxidation end products (ALE) does not shows any significant variation whereas dityrosine, pentosidine and other protein medication markers were found to be increased across the dialysis session (p<0.05). Among the inflammatory makers sRAGE does not show any improvement but plasma TGFβ1 level were found to be significantly reduced (p<0.05) after hemodialysis. These findings suggest that although hemodialysis of SAKI patients improves some markers but fails to normalize other stress and inflammatory markers and during last session all except TGFβ1 level were found to be elevated compared to first hemodialysis session.