Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of tillage systems on yield and quality of durum wheat cultivars

A field experiment was conducted for 3 years, from 2008 to 2010, in Uhrusk, Poland, to investigate the effect of tillage systems on the yield and quality of durum wheat cultivars Floradur and Lloyd. The 3 tillage systems were: 1) conventional tillage (CT) - shallow ploughing and harrowing after harvest of the previous crop, ploughing in the autumn; 2) reduced tillage (RT) - only a cultivator was used after harvest of the previous crop; and 3) herbicide tillage (HT) - only Roundup 360 SL was used after harvest of the previous crop. Both cultivars were found to respond differently to tillage systems and years. The wheat cultivar Floradur was characterised by high- yield stability under all tillage systems and in all years, while cultivar Lloyd produced higher yields under CT than under RT and HT. Grain quality of the tested wheat cultivars was affected to a greater extent by agroclimatic conditions than by tillage systems.
Renewable Generation (Wind/Solar) and Load Modeling through Modified Fuzzy Prediction Interval

The accuracy of energy management system for renewable microgrid, either grid-connected or isolated, is heavily dependent on the forecasting precision such as wind, solar, and load. In this paper, an improved fuzzy prediction horizon forecasting method is developed to address the issue of intermittence and uncertainty problem related to renewable generation and load forecast. In the first phase, a Takagi-Sugeno type fuzzy system is trained with many evolutionary optimization algorithms and established coverage grade indicator to check the accuracy of interval forecast. Secondly, a wind, solar, and load forecaster is developed for renewable microgrid test bed which is located in Beijing, China. One day and one step ahead results for the proposed forecaster are expressed with lowest RMSE and training time. In order to check the efficiency of the proposed method, a comparison is carried out with the existing models. The fuzzy interval-based model for the microgrid test bed will help to formulate the energy management problem with more accuracy and robustness.
Expanding the teaching games for understanding (TGfU) concept to include sport education in physical education program (SEPEP)

TGfU has been in the Australian sporting community for over a decade and more recently as part of school curriculums across Australia. It has focused on a problem solving approach which has been primarily student centred and involves questioning as a primary ingredient. Sport Education in Physical Education Program (SEPEP) also focuses on students and promotes the development of skills by students taking on roles such as coaches, umpires, managers, game analysers, publicity officer etc.These roles increases their knowledge and understanding of the sporting environment.This paper will outline the TGfU and SEPEP models as a starting point. It will closely analyse the questioning technique which is essential to TGfU. With TGfU the questions are primarily directed at the participant or player. The focus here will be how this is now expanded to the SEPEP roles. It will illustrate how questions can be given to the coach and game analyser so that they will have a better understanding of the game. These questions will include the following areas: strategy/tactics, technique, cognition (decision-making, communication and concentration) and rules. Practical examples will be outlined from one of the categories of games (striking/fieldimg, target, invasion and net/court). It will describe the activity/game, and give examples of SEPEP roles and questions.
Dialogicality and social representations: The dynamics of mind.

Preface 1. An epistemological problem for social psychology 2. Thinking and antinomies 3. Linguistic and dialogical antinomies 4. Thinking through the mouth 5. Social representations: old and new 6. Dialogical triads and three-component processes 7. Understanding themata and generating social representations Conclusion: social representations and dialogicality.
Is Reputation at Stake When Environmentally Responsible Multinationals Invest Abroad? An Empirical Investigation

Globalization allows multinational firms to locate strategically the polluting activities in lax countries. This paper revisits the empirical evidence by exploiting heterogeneity in firms’ environmental image. While locating in countries with weak environmental standards is likely to be detrimental for a firm’s image and reputation, investing in corporate environmental responsibility can help firms to convince consumers that they have good environmental practices, even when investing in the “dirty” countries. Exploiting an original database that records an index of environmental responsibility for large European firms, we find that the firms viewed as environmental-friendly are more often than others located in countries with weak environmental regulations. We show that our findings are not likely to be driven by omitted variables bias, specific sectors nor particular countries. Interestingly, this relationship is observed only among the firms with a well-established reputation for environmental responsibility.
A double branching model for earthquake occurrence

[1] The purpose of this work is to put forward a double branching model to describe the spatiotemporal earthquake occurrence. The model, applied to two worldwide catalogs in different time-magnitude windows, shows a good fit to the data, and its earthquake forecasting performances are superior to what was obtained by the ETAS (first-step branching model) and by the Poisson model. The results obtained also provide interesting insights about the physics of the earthquake generation process and the time evolution of seismicity. In particular, the so-called background seismicity, i.e., the catalog after removing short-time clustered events, is described by a further (second-step model) branching characterized by a longer time-space clustering that may be due to long-term seismic interaction. Notably, this branching highlights a long-term temporal evolution of the seismicity that is never taken into account in seismic hazard assessment or in the definition of reference seismicity models for a large earthquake occurrence. Another interesting issue is related to the parameters of the short-term clustering that appear constant in a different magnitude window, supporting some sort of universality for the generating process.
Monitoring drainage water quality during green roof irrigation trials using synthetic greywater

Aims: To evaluate the potential for substituting green roof mains water irrigation by irrigation using lightly loaded synthetic greywater. Study Design: The planted green roof system was designed to be operated and tested within a glasshouse. Place and Duration of Study: Schools of Engineering, and Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, for 28 days commencing 28th of May 2012. Methodology: A trial was conducted for comparing two planting schemes using Sedum and Stachys Byzantina and a third unplanted control. The three sets of growing boxes were subdivided between substrate depths of 10cm and 20cm. By further subdivision, half of each set were watered using mains water, and half using a synthetic greywater. The soil composition and water quality of the drainage (filtrate) water were monitored. Statistical analysis of the results was conducted. Results: Consistency was observed in influent pH and EC, in both mains and greywater samples. Influent Na concentrations were higher in the greywater samples due to detergent content. The Na mass balance calculations for all boxes showed that some Na mass was unaccounted for when comparing aggregated concentrations in influent, plant tissue and soil with the aggregated Na mass in filtrate, plant tissue and soil water. It was concluded that this was likely to be due to retained/ponded irrigation water in the boxes, difficulties in attaining homogenous box flushing and the underestimation of soil Na. The variation in substrate depth affected all results. The plants themselves seemed to have little significant influence on the measured parameters, with the exception of the accumulation of Na mass in plants irrigated with greywater. Conclusion: No improvement was observed in the quality of the greywater following filtration through the soil matrix. For longer term watering using greywater, a choice of Na resistant species should be considered, although the Sedum species used in this trial showed no recorded adverse growth effects due to Na accumulation.
Alleviation of salinity effects by exogenous applications of salicylic acid in pearl millet ( Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.) seedlings

Experiments for the study of alleviation of salt stress effects by exogenous applications of salicylic acid (SA) in pearl millet ( Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br. ) seedlings were conducted in soil filled earthen pots having size 12 inches with 7 kg soil. Three treatments comprising, control (T 0 ), 50-mol m -3 NaCl (T 1 ) and T 2 are having NaCl (50 mol m -3 ) + SA (50 mg l -1 ). Pots were arranged in completely randomized design (CRD) with 6 replicates. NaCl significantly reduced the plant and root lengths, plant fresh and dry weights. In contrast, NaCl did not show any adverse effect on plants treated with NaCl plus SA. Salicylic acid treated pearl millet plants under NaCl salinity strongly reduced accumulations of Na + , K + , Ca 2+ and Cl − and glycinebetaine (GB) and total soluble carbohydrates (TSC) as compared to NaCl treatments. Higher N and relative water contents (RWC) was noted in T 2 (NaCl + SA) but it reduced in T 1 (NaCl) as compared to control. It was concluded that SA could be used as a potential growth regulator to improve salt tolerance in plants. Keywords: Exogenous, salicylic acid, growth, ion contents, salt tolerance, pearl millet
Natural History and Conservation of the Eyelash Palmpitviper (Bothriechis schlegelii) in Western Panamá

In this study I examined the effects of color, body size, and sex on growth and survival in an arboreal Neotropical snake, the eyelash palm-pitviper, Bothriechis schlegelii. This species exhibits polychromatism in populations throughout its range. Growth and survival were estimated during a seven-year, mark-recapture study of a population in western Panama. My results indicate that body size has the strongest influence on growth and that sex and color morph have little impact on this variable. Sex had the greatest ability to explain variation in survival whereas body size and color were less informative. However, sex and body size were correlated in this species because females grew to a larger size than males. So, the influence of these two variables on demographic parameters was difficult to disentangle. INTRODUCTION Polychromatism has evolved independently in a number of lineages, and it has been studied in a variety of vertebrate taxa (Shine et al., 1998a). The maintenance of multiple color patterns in a given population suggests that there is an adaptive significance associated with each pattern (Madsen and Shine, 1992). Therefore, certain 5 aspects of a species’ biology must be correlated to its color pattern in order for multiple color states to persist. Biological traits that vary with color pattern include body size and shape, diet, energy stores, parasite loads, predation rates, and sex ratios (King, 1992; Andren and Nilson, 1981; Shine et al., 1998a). Many of these traits have the potential to influence growth rates as well as survival. Squamates exhibit polychromatism in a number of divergent lineages. In snakes there are polychromatic species in at least five families. The family Viperidae contains more such species than the other four families combined, perhaps because vipers are ambush foragers (Shine et al., 1998a). Bothriechis schlegelii, an arboreal snake that relies in part on ambush foraging (Sorrell, In revision), is unique among Neotropical viperids in that it exhibits pronounced polychromatism. Color patterns from a single population range from yellow individuals that are typically monochromatic to individuals whose dorsal coloration exhibits variations of green, gray or brown. Unlike other arboreal species (eg. Corallus caninus, Bothriechis lateralis), B. schlegelii does not exhibit an ontogenetic shift in coloration. Furthermore there is no obvious pattern of sexual dichromatism in B. schlegelii such as that present in other viperids ( eg. Agkistrodon taylori, Vipera ammodytes, and V. berus). Therefore, the presence of multiple color patterns that are fixed at birth and do not appear to be sex-linked allows us to examine whether B. schlegelii exhibits colorsizeor sex-specific growth or survival rates.
Heterogeneity of Intellectual Assets A Method for Identification and Measurement With Patent Data

This paper deals with methodological issues of measuring and assessing the composition and level of heterogeneity of firms’ intellectual assets. It develops an original metric referred to as the H-index for measuring heterogeneity at firm level using data extracted from patent documents. The main purpose is to improve the characterization of research activities within firms in the biotechnology sector. Although the H-index grew out of research on biotech firms, the metric carries broader relevance for all patent-intensive industries. The measurement and assessment of the Hindex is illustrated and tested using empirical data from our study on Scandinavian biotech firms. ISBN 87-91549-03-5 2 edition
Suspicious Patterns in Hedge Fund Returns and the Risk of Fraud

Recent cases of hedge fund fraud have caused large losses for investors and have fueled the debate regarding the ability of regulators to oversee the industry. This article proposes a set of performance flags, based on suspicious patterns in returns, as indicators of a heightened risk of fraud. We collect a sample of hedge funds charged with legal or regulatory violations and find that funds charged with misappropriation, overvaluation, misrepresentation, or Ponzi schemes trigger the performance flags at a higher frequency than other funds. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. , Oxford University Press.
An Effective POI Recommendation in Various Coldstart Scenarios

The advances in GPS enabled mobile devices has led people to share their real-time experiences ubiquitously through various online platforms. Users’ experiences on various services (products), interesting places (famously known as point of interests (POI)), events, movies, etc. are being widely collected these days by various enterprise houses. It helps the community to browse through these online contents before selecting a product or a POI. Recommender system is proven to be a successful tool which can automatically provide an eﬀective list of items to an active user based on her preferences by ﬁltering through the large item space. However, a recommender system often fails to learn the user preferences for a new user who has no historical data (widely known as the cold start problem). This work focuses on developing a POI recommender system for handling various cold start scenarios such as, ‘new user’ and ‘new city’. In this regard, a Feature and Region based POI Recommender System (FRRS) has been devised which can eﬀectively provide a list of top-K POIs to an active user in cold start scenarios. The proposed system FRRS has two modules, modelling and recommendation. First, the user preferences and features of POIs are learnt from various online contents such as ratings and reviews. Finally, the recommendations are obtained by combining the learnt user preferences with the interests of inﬂuential users and the proximity of POIs from the active location for recommending a list of top-K POIs. Experiments are performed on the real-world Yelp dataset. We compare the performance of our approach with three existing works and a baseline approach for recommending POIs. The obtained results show that our proposed approach out-performs the existing works.
Alignment of Requirements Engineering and Software Testing

Context: As a result of the separation of concerns of a software development project into different phases, the requirements engineering (RE) and software testing (ST) activities have drifted far apart. RE and ST are two activities of a software development process that supplement each other. The requirements dictate how the software to be developed should operate and testing should verify that the software operates exactly as required. Thus the development process could benefit from linking the RE and ST activities for closer collaboration. This is highly important in industry today where systems are oftentimes very complex with thousands of requirements and in particularly in safety critical domains. Objective: The objective of this thesis is to identify, aggregate, classify and structure all existing research regarding alignment of RE and ST published by the end of 2015 through a systematic mapping study. The contributions are analysed in terms of publication venues, publication year, contribution and research types, benefits and challenges, and how alignment is supported in the studies both from an academic and practitioner viewpoint. Method: The method applied in this thesis is systematic mapping study that is very similar to a systematic literature review. The research question can be much less specific and more open in a systematic mapping study compared to one of a systematic literature review, since the aim is not to find an applicable solution to a certain problem, but to structure research in a certain area. Results: The intensity of research show that there has been an increased interest towards the topic in the previous decade and the number of journal or magazine publications has increased during the recent years. Most of the studies contribute with evaluation of frameworks, methods and techniques in case studies together with a few studies presenting practices to support alignment. Tool support encompassing the whole development process and metrics of alignment are concerns requiring more research. The arguments of the benefits of alignment are very convincing, but evidence of these benefits are scarce. Conclusion: The importance of aligning RE and ST for an optimized development process have been recognized by both researchers and industrial practitioners. RE is as important as ever in the development process to be able to meet the needs of the users, however RE alone cannot guarantee success of a development project, but testing have to be taken into account early on. The main benefits of aligning RE and ST, together with the right tool support for automation, are the decreased burden of engineers, shorter time to market, reduced cost of the development process, and more satisfied customers. This thesis provides an inventory of studies relevant to the topic that are otherwise scattered around in many different journals, workshops and conferences.
Water displacements in the Pacific and the genesis of El Nino cycles

Sea level observations are used to estimate the amounts of warm water exchanged during the 1982 to 1983 El Nino event, indicating an eastward flux of about 40 x 10/sup 6/ m/sup 3/ s/sup -1/. At the end of El Nino the equatorial Pacific is depleted of warm water which is lost toward higher latitudes. The duration of a complete El Nino cycle is determined by the time required for the slow accumulation of warm water in the western Pacific. The cycle constitutes an energy relaxation of the ocean-atmosphere system.
Protection of rats by extracts of some common Nigerian trees against acetaminophen-induced hepatotoxicity

th day. The effect of the extracts on serum transaminase and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) were measured in the rats. The leaf, stem and root extracts of all the plants except Vitellaria paradoxa showed preponderance of saponin and tannin. Phlobatannin, cardiac glycosides and anthraquinones were observed in concentrations ranging between 10 to 100 mg/kg plant material. Stem bark extracts of the four plants produced significant (P < 0.05) hepatoprotective effects by decreasing the activity of serum enzymes. Values recorded for AST, ALT and ALP were significantly lower compared to those recorded for control rats. A higher inhibition of serum level elevation of ALP was observed with the four extracts. From these results, it was suggested that the extracts could protect the liver cells from paracetamolinduced liver damages perhaps by eliminating the deleterious effects of toxic metabolites from the drug.
Exploring Individual Differences in Stroop Processing with Cluster Analysis: Target Article on Stroop-Differences

A relatively small number of studies of the Stroop task has examined individual differences in age, sex, hemispheric processing, and language. The amount of interference is the primary dependent measure in most studies, not the factors that contribute to the interference. In the present target article, cluster analysis is used to identify groups of participants who respond similarly on the Stroop task. Integrated color-word Stroop stimuli were presented for varying durations in the first study. Significant individual differences were found. A cluster analysis identified two groups of subjects. One group responded consistently across durations and conditions while the other responded more erratically. Potential sources of individual differences were examined in a second study. 120 subjects were given the Color and Word Test along with selected subtests of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test, age appropriate Wechsler tests, and the Detroit Tests of Learning Aptitude. Again, cluster analysis found two groups of subjects. The group with higher scores on visual reasoning and short-term memory produced more interference.
An Update on Modes and Timing of Gamete and Planula Release in Hawaiian Scleractinian Corals with Implications for Conservation and Management

Reproductive data for 24 of the 50 plus species of scleractinian corals in Hawai'i are available. A majority of species (75%) are broadcast spawners, just over half (58%) of which are hermaphrodites. Peak reproduction of Hawaiian corals occurs during summer months, although reproduction continues year-round for some brooders. Timing, duration, mode, and location of reproductive processes have implications for disturbance management, assessment, and conservation of reef corals.
Characteristics of a Compact Circularly Polarized Microstrip Antenna

A novel compact circular polarization (CP) operation of a microstrip antenna with four semicircular grooves along the four edgesof the patch and a pair of truncated corners is proposed and investigated. The simulation is performed using Zeland IE3D, an integratedfull wave electromagnetic simulation and optimization package for the analysis and design of three dimensional microstrip patchantennas. The simulation results show that the proposed compact CP design can have an antenna size reduction as compared to theconventional corner truncated square microstrip antenna at a given operating frequency. Details of the design considerations of theproposed antenna are described, and simulation results of the obtained CP performance are presented and discussed. Ill. 4, bibl. 4 (inEnglish; summaries in Lithuanian, English and Russian).