Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Housing Systems - Barn vs Cage on the First Phase Egg Production and Egg Quality Traits of Laying Pullet

With an increasing concern on laying hen welfare, barn system has appeared as one of the alternatives to replace the conventional cage. This study was conducted to compare the early laying performance and egg quality at the barn system with those at the conventional cage. A total of 288 shaver-579 brown layers were used for 9 weeks (21 st to 30 t h weeks of age) feeding study. Feed consumption and egg weight were significantly (P<0.01) higher at barn than at cage. However, there were no significant differences between two housing systems on hen day egg production (HDEP), egg mass, body weight, feed efficiency and livability. In case of egg quality parameters, shell thickness, albumen height and Haugh unit were significantly (P<0.05) different between two systems. Haugh unit and albumen height were significantly higher in eggs produced at cage (88.97 and 8.16 mm) compared than those produced at barn (83.11 and 6.87 mm), whereas shell thickness was thicker in eggs produced at barn than those produced at cage. Shape index, breaking strength, blood spots and yolk index data were not influenced significantly by the types of housing system. To implement welfare bestowing production, this study showed that the barn system can replace the conventional cage without serious sacrifices on starting phase egg production. In addition, this study suggested that the barn system need to be optimized in view of daily feed consumption.
Qualitatively Different Ways Students Experience Remote Access Laboratories

This paper reports variations in students' experience of using remote access laboratories (RAL). Outcomes describe what students are actually attending to when engaged in RAL activities. The research was informed by the well-accepted and documented qualitative research method of phenomenography. Four qualitatively different conceptions are described, each revealing characteristics of increasingly complex student experiences. These conceptions reveal increasing awareness of certain aspects of RAL, the most notable of which is how the realness of the activity affects student engagement from simple experimentation to an appreciation that linking theory with practice provides a rich learning experience and can prepare them for professional work. The research outcomes inform pedagogy by providing a platform for improving RAL development and facilitation practices and thereby improving student learning outcomes.
Alterations In Cellular Structure Of Mytilus-Edulis Resulting From Exposure To Environmental Contaminants Under Field And Experimental Conditions

This study, undertaken at the GEEP Workshop, quantifies cell and tissue changes in mussels Mytilus edulis, exposed to diverse contaminants under field and experimental conditions, and correlates the changes with changing tissue levels of PAHs, PCBs and metals. The results indicate effects on reproductive tissues in mussels exposed to high levels of contaminants, both in the field and in the mesocosm experiment. High contaminant concentrations are also seen to induce the formation of pathologically enlarged secondary lysosomes in the digestive epithelium of mussels and to cause a disturbance in lipid levels, resulting in alterations in digestive cell architecture.
VARIATIONS IN HUMAN AND BOVINE SURFACE ENAMEL ACID ETCHING PATTERNS AND RESIN PENETRATION: A SCANNING ELECTRONIC MICROSCOPY IN- VITRO STUDY

The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the different acid etching patterns and resin penetration to human and bovine enamel as indicator of their bond strength properties. Forty human and forty bovine incisors were tested in the shear and tensile bond strength modes using a light-cured composite resin "Reliance Light Bond". Bond strength tests were conducted on a universal testing machine installed to a special computer transducer where bonding failure data were recorded. Statistical analysis of the results revealed a highly significant difference between the shear and tensile bond strengths of human enamel as compared to that of bovine teeth. Scanning Electron Microscopic examination of the enamel surfaces were carried out before and after etching, then resin remnants penetration to enamel after bond failure were also assessed. The results showed a high variability in the etching patterns and penetration depth of the resin tags to human and bovine enamel surfaces which are attributed to the difference in the micro-topography of their enamel surfaces. Despite the overall differences, the consistency of the bovine bonding strength properties suggests their continuous use as a substitute for their human counterparts in similar studies.
The Effectiveness of Delegation as a Process in Primary Schools in South Central Region of Botswana

Abstract The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of delegation as a management process in primary schools. A random sample of 10 schools was selected. A self-administered written questionnaire was designed and given to fifty (50) school teachers in Central South Regions (Serowe schools). The results of the study were analysed through the use of tables showing frequency distribution and percentages. Major findings of this study revealed that there is usually delegation of tasks to subordinates. School managers together with their subordinates share the workload. Furthermore, the study also revealed that school managers are faced with some personal problems that need to be addressed. This study recommends regular in-service training for both school management team and teachers. This will guard against any transfer or absorption of a teacher who is fully skilled in a particular subject or activity.
Politically Connected Governments

This paper shows that US local governments located within the constituencies of powerful congressional members demonstrate relatively weak stewardship over public resources. We use plausibly exogenous declines in the power of congressional representation to show that the effect is causal. We also show that reduced voter attention to stewardship is a plausible mechanism that underlies the negative link between local stewardship and powerful congressional representation. Further tests suggest that the benefits of powerful congressional representation allow local government officials to reduce their supply of stewardship without materially adverse effects on their reelection prospects. In sum, powerful congressional representation weakens local governments' incentives to act in a socially optimal manner.
Longevity and sexual maturity vary across species with number of cortical neurons, and humans are no exception

Maximal longevity of endotherms has long been considered to increase with decreasing specific metabolic rate, and thus with increasing body mass. Using a dataset of over 700 species, here I show that maximal longevity, age at sexual maturity, and postmaturity longevity across bird and mammalian species instead correlate primarily, and universally, with the number of cortical brain neurons. Correlations with metabolic rate and body mass are entirely explained by clade‐specific relationships between these variables and numbers of cortical neurons across species. Importantly, humans reach sexual maturity and subsequently live just as long as expected for their number of cortical neurons, which eliminates the basis for earlier theories of protracted childhood and prolonged post‐menopause longevity as derived human characteristics. Longevity might increase together with numbers of cortical neurons through their impact on three main factors: delay of sexual maturity, which postpones the onset of aging; lengthening of the period of viable physiological integration and adaptation, which increases postmaturity longevity; and improved cognitive capabilities that benefit survival of the self and of longer‐lived progeny, and are conducive to prolonged learning and cultural transmission through increased generational overlap. Importantly, the findings indicate that theories of aging and neurodegenerative diseases should take absolute time lived besides relative “age” into consideration.
Hepatic Insulin Clearance in Regulation of Systemic Insulin Concentrations—Role of Carbohydrate and Energy Availability

Hyperinsulinemia is the hallmark of insulin resistance in obesity, and the relative importance of insulin clearance, insulin resistance, and insulin hypersecretion has been widely debated. On the basis of recent experimental evidence, we summarize existing evidence to suggest hepatic insulin clearance as a major and immediate regulator of systemic insulin concentrations responding within days to altered dietary energy and, in particular, carbohydrate intake. Hepatic insulin clearance seems to be closely associated with opposite alterations in hepatic lipid content and glucose production, providing a potential mechanistic link to hepatic insulin sensitivity. The molecular regulation of insulin clearance in the liver is likely to involve changes in insulin binding and receptor internalization in response to the dietary alterations, the molecular mechanisms of which await further research.
Return to Play After Hook of Hamate Excision in Baseball Players

Background: Fractures of the hook of hamate in baseball players are significant injuries that can lead to pain and missed time from competition. The diagnosis is typically delayed because of the vagueness of symptoms and normal radiographic findings. Excision of the nonunited fragment has been supported as the primary treatment, but there are currently limited information and data on a timetable for return to competition after surgery. Purpose: To report on a large cohort of competitive baseball players with hook of hamate fractures treated with excision of the fragment and to assess the timetable for return to full athletic competition. Study Design: Case series; Level of evidence, 4. Methods: Competitive baseball players treated between 2012 and 2017 with hook of hamate excision for acute fractures or chronic fracture nonunions were retrospectively identified. All patients were treated by the same surgeon, and the time to return to full athletic competition was assessed. Return to play was defined as reaching the athlete’s preinjury level and being able to perform full sport activities. Results: A total of 41 baseball players were identified, all of whom were documented to have a chronic presentation of a nonunion or partial union. The population consisted completely of male athletes, with a median age of 21 years (range, 18-34 years). All patients were competitive athletes, with 12 professional baseball players, 17 collegiate baseball players, and 12 high school baseball players. All patients were treated with hook of hamate excision, with 7 patients undergoing concomitant procedures as indicated. The median time to return to play was 5 weeks (range, 3-7 weeks). The time to return to play was similar between professional, collegiate, and high school athletes. All athletes returned to their preinjury level of activity by 7 weeks postoperatively. Conclusion: This study confirms that excision of the fractured hook provides predictable, early return to play, with a limited complication rate.
Fine-Grained Grocery Product Recognition by One-Shot Learning

Fine-grained grocery product recognition via camera is a challenging task to identify the visually similar products with subtle differences by using single-shot training examples. To address this issue? we present a novel hybrid classification approach that combines feature-based matching and one-shot deep learning with a coarse-to-fine strategy. The candidate regions of product instances are first detected and coarsely labeled by recurring features in product images without any training. Then, attention maps are generated to guide the classifier to focus on fine discriminative details by magnifying the influences of the features in the candidate regions of interest (ROI) and suppressing the interferences of the features outside, improving the accuracy of fine-grained grocery products recognition effectively. Our framework also performs a good adaptability which allows existing classifier to be refined without retraining for new coming product classes. As an additional contribution, we collect a new grocery product database with 102 classes from 2 stores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Validation of the Montreal cognitive assessment against the RBANS in a healthy South African cohort

Background Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) represents an intermediate state between normal cognition and dementia. Early detection and treatment of reversible contributing factors to progressive cognitive decline currently forms the cornerstone of management. As the population at risk of developing dementia is projected to increase significantly in many low- and middle-income countries where health care services continue to operate under clinical and human resource constraints, there is a need for low-cost, quick and reliable screening tools. The Montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA) was developed as a brief screening tool with high sensitivity and specificity for detecting MCI. The initial validation sample for the MoCA consisted of English and French speaking Canadians. Studies undertaken in a variety of countries show that the reliability and validity of the MoCA in screening for MCI is good; however, it has been recommended that some item modification and adjustment of cut-offs for the diagnosis of MCI in these populations may be needed to account for cultural differences. To date, no studies have evaluated the MoCA in the South African population. We aimed to compare the validity of the MoCA to the RBANS, evaluate the effectiveness of the MoCA as a screening tool for MCI and generate normative data for the MoCA. Methods A cross-sectional observational study comprising a sample of 370 cognitively healthy males and females aged 18 years and older of mixed race (Coloured ethnicity) who were administered the MoCA and RBANS during screening. Results The MoCA showed acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.624). MoCA scores were significantly associated with gender (r = -0.199, p = 0.000), and correlated with age (r = -0.203, p = 0.000) and education (r = 0.326, p = 0.000). There was a strong correlation between total scores on the MoCA and RBANS (r = 513; p = 0.000), indicating good criterion-related validity. The MoCA also showed good agreement with the RBANS according to the Bland–Altman plot. ROC statistics demonstrated that the performance of the MoCA for predicting MCI compared to the RBANS was fair with an AUC of 0.794. Using the recommended cut-off score of 26, the MoCA showed high sensitivity (94.23%) but low specificity (28.16%). When the cut-off score was lowered to 23, the sensitivity was 75% and specificity 66.77%, while a cut-off of 24 demonstrated a sensitivity of 84.62% and a specificity of 52.53%. Conclusion Although the MoCA appears fairly reliable at identifying MCI in this population, our findings suggest that some modification to certain domains and items is needed to improve the differentiation between normal ageing and MCI. Until such time that a culturally adapted version of the MoCA has been developed and validated for this population, we suggest lowering the cut-off score to 24 in order to reduce false-positive diagnoses of MCI.
G1m1 predominance of intrathecal virus‐specific antibodies in multiple sclerosis

We have previously shown that plasmablasts of the G1m1 allotype of IgG1 are selectively enriched in the cerebrospinal fluid of G1m1/G1m3 heterozygous patients with multiple sclerosis, whereas both allotypes are equally used in neuroborreliosis. Here, we demonstrate a strong preference for the G1m1 allotype in the intrathecal humoral immune responses against measles, rubella, and varicella zoster virus in G1m1/G1m3 heterozygous multiple sclerosis patients. Conversely, intrathecally synthesized varicella zoster virus‐specific IgG1 in varicella zoster virus meningoencephalitis comprised both allotypes. This implies that G1m1 B cells are selected to the central nervous system of multiple sclerosis patients regardless of specificity and suggests that an antigen‐independent mechanism could drive the intrathecal humoral immune response.
ECG-Based User Authentication and Identification Method on VANETs

Industry and academia continuously look for improvements in data security and privacy due to the increasing amount of pervasive applications launched every day. This paper investigates the use of electrocardiogram (ECG) as an authentication factor in VANETs and shared car context. Other authentication approaches exist, but many of them do not apply continuous authentication, resulting in scenarios where illegitimate drivers can use the vehicle as it is unlocked and on. ECG has historically been employed for healthcare monitoring and, only recently, as a biometric based on the QRS graphical deflections. We exploit the ECG biometric aspect and we employ a fiducial point detection algorithm based on Hill Climbing to detect the QRS complex. Our approach is feasible given the small time window required for data collection and the simple QRS detection process, which can be implemented in any device, different from other complex proposals.
Eliciting User Food Preferences in terms of Taste and Texture in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Food preference varies from person to person and is not easy to verbalize. This study proposes a dialogue system that elicits the user's food preference through human-robot interaction. First, as the default knowledge of the dialogue system, we determined the ingredients of each dish from a large-scale recipe database, and collected the taste and texture of each dish and its ingredients by analyzing a large number of Twitter messages. Subsequently, the dialogue system asks questions to elicit the user's preferred taste/texture of the food by using the default knowledge base, while employing frame-based dialogue management. Finally, we created a food vector space that represents the relationship between the dish names, ingredients, and taste/texture expressions. We also discuss the possibility of using this vector space in dish recommendation.
Label Propagation with Neural Networks

Label Propagation (LP) is a popular transductive learning method for very large datasets, in part due to its simplicity and ability to parallelize. However, it has limited ability to handle node features, and its accuracy can be sensitive to the number of iterations. We propose an algorithm called LPNN that solves these problems by a loose-coupling of LP with a feature-based classifier. We experimentally establish the effectiveness of LPNN.
Tech-trends in orthopedics 2018

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Nordic Orthopedic Federation. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) DOI 10.1080/17453674.2018. 1518806 A trend is a direction in which something is developing; in medical specialties this can be viewed as the phase before something becomes evidence-based medicine. Early adopters are those that start using a technology as soon as it becomes available, i.e., individuals that are sensitive to trends. Within the medical field, orthopedics has a long track record of being an early adopter. Unfortunately, discriminating between positive and negative trends can be difficult; while the anterolateral approach for hip fractures (Enocson et al. 2009) has become evidencebased medicine, other trends such as resurfacing arthroplasties (Reito et al. 2017) and primary surgery for clavicle fractures (Ban et al. 2016) have failed. As increasing amount of innovation occurs in the digital space, it is important that we transfer the lessons from surgical trends to these innovations.
Learning Analytics to identify dropout factors of Computer Science studies through Bayesian networks

ABSTRACT Student dropout in Engineering Education is an important problem which has been studied from different perspectives, as well as using different techniques. This manuscript describes the methodology used in order to address this question in the context of learning analytics. Bayesian networks (BNs) have been used as they provide adequate methods for the representation, interpretation and contextualisation of data. The proposed approach is illustrated through a case study about Computer Science (CS) dropout at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), which is close to 40%. To that end, several BNs were obtained from a database which contained 383 records representing both academic and social data of the students enrolled in the CS degree during four courses. Then, these probabilistic models were interpreted and evaluated. The results obtained revealed that the best model that fits the data is provided by the K2 algorithm although the great heterogeneity of the data studied did not permit the adjustment of the dropout profile of the student too accurately. Nonetheless, the methodology described here can be taken as a reference for future works.
A Patient-Centered Utility Index for Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer in the United States

Background. A preference-based quality-of-life index for non–small cell lung cancer was developed with a subset of Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy (FACT)–General (G) and FACT–Lung (L) items, based on clinician input and the literature. Design. A total of 236 non–small cell lung carcinoma patients contributed their preferences, randomly allocated among three survey groups to decrease burden. The FACT-L Utility Index (FACT-LUI) was constructed with two methods: 1) multiattribute utility theory (MAUT), where a visual analog scale (VAS)–based index was transformed to standard gamble (SG); and 2) an unweighted index, where items were summed, normalized to a 0 to 1.0 scale, and the result transformed to a scale length equivalent to the VAS or SG MAUT-based model on a Dead to Full Health scale. Agreement between patients’ direct utility and the indexes for current health was assessed. Results. The agreement of the unweighted index with direct SG was superior to the MAUT-based index (intraclass correlation for absolute agreement: 0.60 v. 0.35; mean difference: 0.03 v. 0.19; and mean absolute difference 0.09 v. 0.21, respectively). Mountain plots showed substantial differences, with the unweighted index demonstrating a median bias of 0.02 versus the MAUT model at 0.2. There was a significant difference (P = 0.0002) between early (I-II) and late stage (III-IV) patients, the mean difference for both indexes being greater than distribution-based estimates of minimal important difference. Limitations. The population was limited to non–small cell lung cancer patients. However, most quality-of-life literature consulted and the FACT instruments do not differentiate between lung cancer cell types. Minorities were also limited in this sample. Conclusions. The FACT-LUI shows early evidence of validity for informing economic analysis of lung cancer treatments.