Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deformation-based Morphometry MRI Reveals Brain Structural Modifications in Living Mu Opioid Receptor Knockout Mice

Mu opioid receptor (MOR) activation facilitates reward processing and reduces pain, and brain networks underlying these effects are under intense investigation. Mice lacking the MOR gene (MOR KO mice) show lower drug and social reward, enhanced pain sensitivity and altered emotional responses. Our previous neuroimaging analysis using Resting-state (Rs) functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) showed significant alterations of functional connectivity (FC) within reward/aversion networks in these mice, in agreement with their behavioral deficits. Here we further used a structural MRI approach to determine whether volumetric alterations also occur in MOR KO mice. We acquired anatomical images using a 7-Tesla MRI scanner and measured deformation-based morphometry (DBM) for each voxel in subjects from MOR KO and control groups. Our analysis shows marked anatomical differences in mutant animals. We observed both local volumetric contraction (striatum, nucleus accumbens, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, hippocampus, hypothalamus and periacqueducal gray) and expansion (prefrontal cortex, amygdala, habenula, and periacqueducal gray) at voxel level. Volumetric modifications occurred mainly in MOR-enriched regions and across reward/aversion centers, consistent with our prior FC findings. Specifically, several regions with volume differences corresponded to components showing highest FC changes in our previous Rs-fMRI study, suggesting a possible function-structure relationship in MOR KO-related brain differences. In conclusion, both Rs-fMRI and volumetric MRI in live MOR KO mice concur to disclose functional and structural whole-brain level mechanisms that likely drive MOR-controlled behaviors in animals, and may translate to MOR-associated endophenotypes or disease in humans.
Fiscal Policies and Subnational Economic Growth in Mexico

This study investigates the effects of taxes and public investment on economic growth of Mexican states. The subnational government finance data were drawn from 32 states during the period of 1993 to 2011. Correcting for long-term trends and isolating cointegration effects between economic growth and public finance, the empirical results indicate that taxes have negative effect on growth and the effect can be seen in both transitory and permanent manners. As predicted by growth theory, the effects of public investment on subnational growth are statistically significant and positive in both short and long-runs. On the other hand, we find that educational accomplishment negatively relates to growth. Foreign direct investment does not have any significant effect on subnational economic growth. In general, the results imply that an appropriate fiscal policy (equilibrium between public investment and taxes) is required to boost economic growth in this country.
Enhancing The Mathematical Communication Ability and Self-confidence of Junior High School Students Using Brain-Based Learning

This research is motivated by the fact shows the mathematicalcommunication ability of the students not yet in accordance with theexpected. One such problem is learning that does not provide flexibility tostudents to exploit the potential of the brain optimally, where in general isgenerally more emphasis on the left brain function. Mathematicalcommunication skills need to be supported by right brain function.Characteristics of learning that offers learning concepts that align the waythe brain works naturally designed is by learning Brain-Based Learning(BBL). The research method used is quasi experiment. Quantitative data isobtained from pretest and posttes data. Research found that There areachievements and improvements in students' mathematical communicationskills whose learning uses the Brain-Based Learning approach comparedwith students who received conventional learning in terms of students' earlymath skills, and self-confidence and there is an association between theability of mathematical communication and self-confidence.
Household Valuation of a Pilot Curbside Recycling Program: Participants, Non-Participants, and the Non-Targeted

This study estimates willingness to pay (WTP) of households in Logan, Utah, for a pilot curbside recycling program that required households to separate fibrous from non-fibrous recyclable materials. We generate a conservative estimate of WTP based on corrections for over-sampling of certain types of households and potential hypothetical bias. We also find that inter alia women, younger, higher income, higher educated, drop-off recycling users, and non-participants in the pilot program are willing to pay more for a CRP patterned after the pilot program. We also find that if curbside recycling is bundled with more options under a variable pricing scheme for garbage pickup, a large percentage of households would choose a smaller garbage container size.
World Bank Document

IN THIS ISSUE Nearly half the world’s extreme poor live in countries affected by conflict or violence. In these countries people not only lack security; they also are more likely to lack adequate food and basic services such as clean water and electricity, and their children, if fortunate enough to survive, are less likely to go to school. Failure to meet these basic needs will lead to greater poverty while also fueling unrest and more violence. The World Bank has made addressing fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) a strategic priority. Its approach to fragile states has evolved over the years, but the emphasis has always been on prevention and early action. In recent years the Bank has increased its lending and technical assistance to FCV countries. The International Development Association, the part of the Bank that helps the world’s poorest countries, more than doubled its commitments to FCV countries in 2018, to about 20 percent of its total. The Bank also helps fund the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs providing socioeconomic support to ex-combatants. Research provides the intellectual groundwork for addressing the challenges in the transition of FCV countries. While the broad nexus between security and development is obvious, the underlying causes of conflict are unique to each FCV situation, leading to a need for in-depth analytical work. This issue of the Research Digest features recent Policy Research Working Papers that highlight challenges facing FCV countries. The first four focus on causes and Confronting the Development Challenges of Fragility, Conflict, and Violence . page 1
Investigating Helpfulness of Video Game Reviews on the Steam Platform

Digital retail platforms, such as Steam, offer an easy way for potential customers to evaluate video games before buying them and many rely on the experiences other users expressed in reviews. However, not all reviews are helpful making it difficult for users to extract useful information. Hence, Steam allows for users to label reviews as helpful or unhelpful and ultimately to sort by most helpful reviews. Naturally, these community-sourced labels are not available at the time of writing. In this paper, we analyze differences between helpful and unhelpful reviews by investigating a large number of video game reviews on Steam. To that end, we crawl over one hundred thousand reviews, extract numerous features, apply a statistical hypothesis test and conduct a prediction experiment. We find that there are significant differences between the two groups. For example, review length and time spent playing a game strongly influence the helpfulness of reviews. Our results reveal valuable insights for developers on how to support the community by, for example, providing immediate feedback to authors when writing reviews.
Feed intake and growth performance of goats supplemented with soy waste

The objective of this work was to evaluate the effects of supplemental feeding of soy waste on the feed intake and growth rate of goats. Twenty male crossbred (Boer x local) goats were assigned to two isonitrogenous diet groups: one of commercial pellet and the other of soy waste. The commercial pellet (1.0%) and soy waste (0.8%) were provided on the dry matter basis of body weight (BW) per day, to the respective group of each diet. The soy waste group had lower daily intakes of total dry matter (0.79 vs. 0.88 kg) and organic matter (665.71 vs. 790.44 g) than the group fed pellet; however, the differences on daily intakes for grass (0.62 vs. 0.64 kg), crude protein (96.81 vs. 96.83 g), and neutral detergent fibre (483.70 vs. 499.86 g) were not significant. No differences were observed between groups for BW gain. The feed conversion ratio and feed cost per kilogram of BW gain were lower for the group fed soy waste than for the one fed pellet. Goats fed supplemental soy waste have a lower total dry matter intake, feed conversion ratio, and feed cost per kilogram of body weight gain than those fed commercial pellets.
Experimental and Numerical Study of Uniaxial-Stress Effects on DC Characteristics of pMOSFETs

This paper focuses on the stress-induced changes of the direct-current (dc) characteristics on p-type metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) field-effect-transistors (FETs). First, the uniaxial-stress effects on dc characteristics of pMOSFETs are evaluated experimentally. Then, the experimental results are simulated using a device simulation including an exiting hole mobility model for considering the effects of mechanical stress. The hole mobility model is able to consider the stress-induced variations of the transport mass of holes. It is demonstrated that the device simulation can qualitatively produce the effects of uniaxial-stress on dc characteristics of pMOSFETs.
On the Assessment of Power System Stability Using Matlab/Simulink Model

Several voltage collapses have been experienced by most practical power systems in recent times in Nigeria. These have been mostly attributed to island formation within the network as a result of switching out of critical buses within the network. This paper assesses the stability of a practical power network of the Nigerian National Grid (NNG) with reference to a critical transmission line which could cause island formation as a result of fault within the NNG network. The Matlab/ Simulink model for both the steady-state and dynamic behaviours of the critical bus within NNG network is presented. The simulations for various fault conditions are also presented. The results obtained from the simulations are discussed. From the simulation results, high flow of reactive power and current, as a result of various faults along the transmission lines, were observed. Furthermore, non-sinusoidal waveforms generated from the simulation results show an indication that a high degree of compensation is required at the studied bus. The study uses Benin bus of NNG with respect to Benin-Onitsha-Alaoji 330-kV transmission network due to its location and sensitivity within the grid.
Crowdsourcing the Human Gut. Is crowdsourcing also 'citizen science'?

The participation of non-professionally trained people in so-called citizen science (CS) projects is a much discussed topic at the moment. Frequently, however, the contribution of citizens is limited to only a few narrow tasks. Focusing on an initiative dedicated to the study of the human microbiome, this paper describes such a case where citizen participation is limited to the provision of funding, samples, and personal data. Researchers opted for a crowdsourced approaches because other forms of funding and recruitment did not seem feasible. We argue that despite the narrow understanding of participation in the context of some CS projects, they can address some of the democratic concerns related to scientific knowledge creation. For example, CS and crowdsourcing can help to foster dialogue between researchers and publics, and increase the influence of citizens on research agenda setting.
SPLAT: Semantic Pixel-Level Adaptation Transforms for Detection

Domain adaptation of visual detectors is a critical challenge, yet existing methods have overlooked pixel appearance transformations, focusing instead on bootstrapping and/or domain confusion losses. We propose a Semantic Pixel-Level Adaptation Transform (SPLAT) approach to detector adaptation that efficiently generates cross-domain image pairs. Our model uses aligned-pair and/or pseudo-label losses to adapt an object detector to the target domain, and can learn transformations with or without densely labeled data in the source (e.g. semantic segmentation annotations). Without dense labels, as is the case when only detection labels are available in the source, transformations are learned using CycleGAN alignment. Otherwise, when dense labels are available we introduce a more efficient cycle-free method, which exploits pixel-level semantic labels to condition the training of the transformation network. The end task is then trained using detection box labels from the source, potentially including labels inferred on unlabeled source data. We show both that pixel-level transforms outperform prior approaches to detector domain adaptation, and that our cycle-free method outperforms prior models for unconstrained cycle-based learning of generic transformations while running 3.8 times faster. Our combined model improves on prior detection baselines by 12.5 mAP adapting from Sim 10K to Cityscapes, recovering over 50% of the missing performance between the unadapted baseline and the labeled-target upper bound.
YOLO-Based Three-Stage Network for Bangla License Plate Recognition in Dhaka Metropolitan City

Real-time Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a challenging task in computer vision since license plates in the real-world scenarios are difficult to recognize due to the presence of various factors like transparent background, occlusion, existence of multiple plates in an image, variance in illumination and viewing angle, etc. In most of the previous works related to Bangla license plate, images used for ALPR were captured in ideal conditions due to unavailability of dataset representing non-ideal conditions. In this paper, we present an approach for real-time Bangla license plate detection that is robust to enormous variations in complex real-world environment. A novel license plate recognition method is also presented making it a complete end-to-end deep learning-based ALPR system. We introduce a dataset by collecting 1, 500 different Bangladeshi vehicular license plate images that are captured manually from the street resembling various real-world scenarios. In this work, we have employed YOLOv3 algorithm to successfully localize the license plate and recognize the digits. To recognize the character, we have also built a Bangla scene character dataset containing more than 6, 400 characters, with which we have trained a ResNet-20-based deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our proposed method achieves more than 85% Intersection over Union (IoU) in digit recognition. The ResNet-20-based CNN model achieves 92.7% accuracy in recognizing the Bangla character present in the license plate.
Assessment of Transport in NCSX

Abstract We explore whether the energy confinement and planned heating in the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) are sufficient to test magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stability limits, and whether the configuration is sufficiently quasi-axisymmetric to reduce the neoclassical ripple transport to low levels, thereby allowing tokamak-like transport. A zero-dimensional model with fixed profile shapes is related to global energy confinement scalings for stellarators and tokamaks, neoclassical transport properties are assessed with the DKES, NEO, and NCLASS codes, and a power balance code is used to predict temperature profiles. Reaching the NCSX goal of = 4% at low collisionality will require HISS-95 = 3, which is higher than the best achieved in present stellarators. However, this level of confinement is actually ~10% lower than that predicted by the ITER-97P tokamak L-mode scaling. By operating near the stellarator density limit, the required HISS-95 is reduced by 35%. The high degree of quasi-axisymmetry of the configuration and the self-consistent “ambipolar” electric field reduce the neoclassical ripple transport to a small fraction of the neoclassical axisymmetric transport. A combination of neoclassical and anomalous transport models produces pressure profile shapes that are within the range of those used to study the MHD stability of NCSX. We find that = 4% plasmas are “neoclassically accessible” and are compatible with large levels of anomalous transport in the plasma periphery.
Postharvest Changes in the Total Phenolic Content, Antioxidant Capacity and L-Phenylalanine Ammonia-Lyase Activity of Strawberries Inoculated with Botrytis cinerea

A comparative study of the total phenolic content (TPC), antioxidant capacity (AC) and L-phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) activity of non-inoculated and inoculated fruits of five strawberry cultivars (‘Cle des Champs’, ‘Darselect’, ‘Jewel’, ‘Kent’ and ‘Veestar’) with varying degrees of resistance or susceptibility to Botrytis cinerea was performed during five days of storage in 2007 and 2008. During storage, the TPC and AC of the non-inoculated fruits remained steady, whereas the TPC and AC changed significantly in the inoculated fruits, with the exception of the AC of the ‘Veestar’ fruits. For the susceptible cultivar ‘Kent’, a quadratic pattern of PAL activity was observed in both the non-inoculated and the inoculated fruits, similar to the pattern in the non-inoculated fruits of ‘Cle des Champs’. In general, linear reductions in the TPC and AC were observed in the inoculated fruits.
A Learned-Behavior Approach to Management Skill Development

The authors develop and provide arguments and some supporting empirical data for a learned-behavior approach in competency-based MBA education. The learnedbehavior approach emphasizes micro skills and inductive learning of behavior. Here, students learning various skills focus on very specific micro-skill components, largely on an inductive basis; the conceptualization underlying the micro skills is introduced later as needed to help in providing cognitive understanding of the previously performed micro skills. In performing the skills, the micro-skill components are combined in various ways across the skills and are useful in helping to integrate the skill set. The authors conclude by considering assessment of the approach and its integrative role in a revised MBA at their institution. They also examine the approach’s contribution to innovation in competency-based management education.
Tomato seeds preferably transmit plant beneficial endophytes

Endophytes with plant growth-promoting activity can improve the health and development of plants during all life stages. However, less is known about their stability and transmission across plant genotypes, habitats, and generations. By combining community and isolate analyses, we found that each plant habitat and genotype harbored distinct bacterial communities and plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB). Soil, root endosphere, and rhizosphere were the habitats with the highest bacterial diversity, while seeds hosted more selective communities. Seeds generated under field conditions showed traces of a bacterial community composition connected to the suppression of plant pathogens. In contrast, seeds of the successive generation grown in a pathogen-free and low-nutrient environment showed a predominance of bacteria that facilitate the uptake of nutrients. These modifications of the microbiome can be explained by an adaptation to prevalent environmental conditions. Cultivation approaches revealed microhabitat-specific PGPB that were assigned to various species of Bacillus, Stenotrophomonas, and Ralstonia. Tracking down these bacteria among the whole tomato plant allowed us to identify the seed as a primary vehicle of PGPB transmission. This previously undescribed vertical transmission of PGPB represents a strategy to maintain plant beneficial bacteria over generations and has an impact for the design of seed treatments.
On the stratospheric chemistry of hydrogen cyanide

HCN profiles measured by solar occultation spectrometry during 10 balloon flights of the JPL MkIV instrument are presented. The HCN profiles reveal a compact correlation with stratospheric tracers. Calculations with a 2D‐model using established rate coefficients for the reactions of HCN with OH and O(1D) severely underestimate the measured HCN in the middle and upper stratosphere. The use of newly available rate coefficients for these reactions gives reasonable agreement of measured and modeled HCN. An HCN yield of ∼30% from the reaction of CH3CN with OH is consistent with the measurements.
The effectiveness of using a bilingualized dictionary for determining noun countability and article selection

This article discusses the use of a bilingualized dictionary, namely Oxford Advanced Learner's English–Chinese Dictionary 8 (OALECD8), by advanced Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners in the determination of noun countability and associated article use. A homogenous group of 30 English majors in a local university participated in the study, which consisted of a noun countability and article selection task without and with the use of the dictionary. The results show that although bilingualized dictionaries are useful in helping learners determine noun countability and associated article use, learners often misinterpret dictionary information and model on inappropriate structures, resulting in article errors and/or wrong countability judgments. Chinese translations are also sometimes sources of errors. The results of the study provide lexicographers with signposts to the selection of noun information to be included in a learner's dictionary. More explicit information about noun countability and related article use should be provided in a more user-friendly arrangement. ESL teachers are also advised to engage advanced learners in analyses uncovering the different syntactic requirements of equivalent vocabulary items in the target and source languages when using a bilingualized dictionary.
THE EFFECTS OF FIXED-TERM CONTRACTS ON WORKERS IN COLOMBIA

This paper studies the effects of fixed-term contracts on workers. Specifically, the paper analyzes their impact on wages and on satisfaction levels. Regulations governing fixed-term and indefinite contracts in Colombia and the main labor reforms related to these two types of contract are analyzed. Women, young and low-educated workers, who work in small firms, in the private sector and in construction or manufacturing are most likely to have fixed-term contracts. In terms of wages, we found a significant raw and adjusted wage gap against workers with fixed-term contracts. Finally, we found, as expected, evidence that fixed-term contracts reduce the level of worker satisfaction.
Photometric redshifts for type Ia supernovae in the supernova legacy survey

We present a method using the SALT2 light curve fitter to determine the redshift of type Ia supernovae in the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) based on their photometry in g', r', i' and z'. On 289 supernovae of the first three years of SNLS data, we obtain a precision σΔ z/(1+z) = 0.022 on average up to a redshift of 1.0, with a higher precision of 0.016 for z 0.45. The rate of events with |Δ z|/(1+z) > 0.15 (catastrophic errors) is 1.4%, and reduces to 0.4% when restricting the test sample of spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia supernovae. Both the precision and the rate of catastrophic errors are better than what can be currently obtained using host galaxy photometric redshifts. Photometric redshifts of this precision may be useful for future experiments which aim to discover up to millions of supernovae Ia but without spectroscopy for most of them.