Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantification and Characterization of Maghemite in Soils Derived from Volcanic Rocks in Southern Brazil

Many soils developed from volcanic rocks in southern Brazil exhibit spontaneous magnetization caused by the presence of fine-grained maghemite (γ-Fe2O3), but few attempts were made to quantify or characterize this important soil component. To that end, clays were separated from freely drained soils derived from acid (≥63% SiO2), intermediate (54–62% SiO2), and basic (≤53% SiO2) igneous rocks produced by the Paraná flood volcanism. The sample set included soils with a wide range of pedogenic development on different landscape positions. The Fe oxide mineralogy of these samples was examined by using a combination of selective dissolution, magnetic susceptibility, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques. Hematite and maghemite were the primary Fe oxides in mature soils (Oxisols, Ultisols, and Alfisols) developed from basic rocks; whereas goethite was dominant in all other soils, especially those formed from acid-intermediate rocks. The association of maghemite with basic rock materials suggests that it was primarily formed by oxidation of lithogenic magnetite. A strong, positive correlation (R2 = 0.89) was obtained between mass specific magnetic susceptibility (χ) of the clay fractions and maghemite contents estimated by XRD. Either method could be used for quantitative analyses, but χ was more sensitive than XRD at low maghemite concentrations (<2 wt. %). The clay-sized maghem-ites were superparamagnetic with an estimated value for the mass specific magnetic susceptibility (χlf) value of 91,000 × 10−8 m3 kg−1 and frequency dependent variations of 10–15%. The maghemites also had low unit cell constants, which, if attributed entirely to replacement of Fe by Al, would correlate with Al substitutions in the range of 5–16 mole %. Selective dissolution of the soil maghemites was achieved by treatment of Fe oxide concentrates with 1.8 M H2SO4 at 75°C for 2 h.
Lipase production by Yarrowia lipolytica using olive oil processing wastes as substrates

In this study, the solid and liquid wastes from the olive oil processing industry were evaluated as substrates for Yarrowia lipolytica growth with the aim of lipase production. Olive mill wastewater and olive oil cake seemed to provide the necessary nutrients and physical support for yeast growth and enzyme production. The highest lipolytic activity of 850 IU dm -3 was achieved after 4 days of submerged cultivation in supplemented olive mill wastewater. In addition, olive oil cake appeared to be a convenient substrate for lipase production under a solid-state fermentation mode. Lipase production was further improved by media supplementation and/or change in the physical settings of the experiment. However, the most significant improvement of lipase production under solid-state fermentation was achieved by an alkaline treatment of the substrate (more than 10-fold), when the amount of produced lipase reached up to ≈40 IU g -1 of substrate.
Effects of acute hypobaric hypoxia on regional cerebral blood ̄ ow distribution : a Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography study in humans

Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and radiopharmaceutical stabilizing agents allowed us to investigate regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) distribution in six resting healthy subjects during acute laboratory hypobaric hypoxic conditions. In the hypobaric experiment stabilized Tc-D,L-hexamethyl-propylene amine oxime was injected 40 min after reaching hypoxic conditions corresponding to an altitude of 5500 m above sea level. Arterial blood sample was taken after ®ve additional minutes. Mean arterial oxygen pressure and haemoglobin saturation were 28 mmHg and 56%, respectively. The control experiment was performed similarly, apart from barometric pressure and blood gas analysis. We analysed CBF distribution in 12 regions of functional interest bilaterally in frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital cortex, in the hippocampus, in the basal ganglia and other central structures of brain. No overall effect of hypoxia on normalized regional CBF distribution in the considered regions was found. Motor cortex (Brodmann 4) and basal ganglia were the only regions in which hypobaric hypoxia signi®cantly increased relative distribution of the radiopharmaceutical [F(1,5)  18.30; P < 0.008 and F(1,5)  10.85; P < 0.022, respectively]. Despite severe hypoxia, we did not observe any major regional CBF redistribution. We found a small relative increase in blood ̄ow to the motor cortex and the basal ganglia, at rest after 40 min of hypobaric hypoxia, suggesting a preferential compensatory mechanism of these functional regions of brain.
Breath Analysis: A Systematic Review of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in Diagnostic and Therapeutic Management of Pleural Mesothelioma

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a rare neoplasm related to asbestos exposure and with high mortality rate. The management of patients with MPM is complex and controversial, particularly with regard to early diagnosis. In the last few years, breath analysis has been greatly implemented with this aim. In this review the strengths of breath analysis and preliminary results in searching breath biomarkers of MPM are highlighted and discussed, respectively. Through a systematic electronic literature search, collecting papers published from 2000 until December 2018, fifteen relevant scientific papers were selected. All papers considered were prospective, comparative, observational case–control studies although every single one pilot and based on a relatively small number of samples. The identification of diagnostic VOCs pattern, through breath sample characterization and the statistical data treatment, allows to obtain a strategic information for clinical diagnostics. To date the collected data provide just preliminary information and, despite the promising results and diagnostic accuracy, conclusions cannot be generalized due to the limited number of individuals included in each cohort study. Furthermore none of studies was externally validated, although validation process is a necessary step towards clinical implementation. Breathomics-based biomarker approach should be further explored to confirm and validate preliminary findings and to evaluate its potential role in monitoring the therapeutic response.
Morphological Studies on Seeds of Scrophulariaceae s.l. and Their Systematic Significance

This study employed scanning electron microscopy and light microscopy to observe seed surface micromorphology and seed coat anatomy in the Scrophulariaceae s.l. to investigate seed characters of taxonomic importance. Seeds of 41 taxa corresponding to 13 genera of the family were carefully investigated. Seeds were minute and less than or slightly larger than 1 millimeter in length except forMelampyrum and Pedicularis species. The seed shape ranged from elliptical to broad elliptical and ovoid. In the studied species the surface sculpture was predominantly reticulate-striate, regular reticulate, sometimes colliculate, and rugose, or rarely ribbed, as in Lindernia procumbens and Paulownia coreana. Seed coats comprised the epidermis and the endothelium. Nevertheless, in all Melampyrum and some Veronica species the seed coat was very poorly represented and only formed by a papery layer of epidermis. According to correspondence analysis (CA) and unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) based cluster analysis the close affinities among the species of Scrophularia were well supported by their proximity to one another. Similarly, the proximity of Melampyrum species and Pedicularis species cannot be denied. In contrast, Veronica species were divided into two groups in CA plots and even three in the UPGMA tree. Regardless of the limited range taxa considered we found that similarities and differences in seed morphology between different genera could help us to understand the systematic relationships involved.
Nitrendipine and Dementia: Forgotten Positive Facts?

Nowadays, there are about 50 million people suffering from dementia worldwide. In 2030, it is expected that there will be 82 million people living with dementia and in 2050, their number should reach 152 million. This increase in the number of people with dementia results in significant social and economic problems. Therefore, researchers attempt to reduce risk factors causing the development of dementia such as high blood pressure. Epidemiological studies have shown that hypertension increases the risk of dementia at an older age. It can, therefore, be assumed that hypertension therapy will reduce the risk of dementia. However, previous clinical studies have shown that the efficacy of different antihypertensive drugs differs in this respect. The drug group that appears to be the most effective in these analyses is calcium channel blockers (CCBs). The most significant preventive efficacy in terms of protection against dementia has been demonstrated with nitrendipine. Its use is, therefore, particularly advantageous in elderly patients with systolic hypertension who are at high risk of dementia. The purpose of this study is to restore the discussion on the prevention of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s dementia with nitrendipine in indicated hypertonic patients. The authors performed a literature search of available sources describing the issue of dementia, hypertension and its treatment with nitrendipine. In addition, they made a comparison and evaluation of relevant findings. The results of the detected research studies indicate that nitrendipine is able to reduce the incidence of dementia [Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular and mixed] by 55%. The treatment of 1,000 patients with nitrendipine for 5 years may prevent 20 cases of dementia. However, what has not yet been explained is the temporal link between hypertension and dementia due to the long-time intervals between hypertension and the development of dementia.
Explaining miracles: Third ways and work and welfare

The emergence of the Dutch miracle – often seen as a result of the famous Polder model – has not only resulted in drastic changes as regards the labour market policy, but also in a performance that is considered superior to most other OECD economies. In addition, it is often suggested that this development may well be considered a prototype of the Third Way politics of contemporary social democracy. Both views are scrutinised and discussed by means of a cross-national and cross-time analysis of 19 liberal democracies within the OECD world. The comparative analysis of the labour market performance, also by means of demographic categories, demonstrates that the performance of the Dutch labour market is neither outstanding nor exceptional. It appears mainly to have been caused by the growth of part-time labour. Hence, one may well doubt whether a Dutch miracle exists at all. The analysis also demonstrates that the Dutch labour market performance is neither optimal nor beneficial to all concerned. Finally, it is observed that the social democratic Third Way turns out to be a trade-off in the Netherlands: welfare is becoming less generous and work comes first.
Antibacterial Assays of the Solvents Partitioned Portions of Methanol Stem Bark Extract of Bauhinia rufescens Lam (Leguminosae-Caesalpinioideae).

The in-vitro antibacterial activities of the organic solvents partitioned portions of the methanol stem bark extract of Bauhinia rufescens Lam were evaluated in some Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria using the hole-in-plate disc diffusion technique. Test microorganisms were Corynaebacterium spp. and Staphylococcus aureus (Gram positive); Proteus vulgaris, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Shigella dysenteriae (Gram negative) bacteria. The diameters of inhibition zone exhibited by all the portions on the Gram positive bacteria ranged from 11.17 ± 0.33 mm to 23.67 ± 0.33 mm while on Gram negative organisms the values were from 10.67 ± 0.17 mm to 22.00 ± 0.00 mm. The results revealed that most of the portions were highly sensitive against S. aureus and P. aeruginosa which had highest MIC/MBC values of 1.56/1.56 mg/ml (ethylacetate and n-butanol portions) respectively. All the portions studied recorded comparatively higher activity index against S. aureus and P. aeruginosa when computed with ciprofloxacin than when computed with erythromycin or gentamicin; while activities of S. dysenteriae and P. vulgaris relates closer to gentamicin than ciprofloxacin. Similarly, Corynaebacterium spp. relates averagely closer to erythromycin than the broad-spectrum ciprofloxacin throughout the portions. Overall, this extract portions were found to be more sensitive to Gram positive (17.90) than Gram negative (17.15) species studied. Therefore, this study further confirms the traditional use of the stem bark of B. rufescens in some parts of Northern Nigeria as a remedy against diarrhea, dysentery, and other related diseases which are caused by most of the organisms studied. (
Meiobenthos response to pore water from sewage impacted areas : a comparison of different laboratory approaches

The usual procedures for ecological risk assessment have been based for decades on simplified approaches. Although these approaches allowed the development of international regulatory tools capable of reducing the adverse effects on ecosystems, they generally suffer from a lack of ecological realism. Within this context, microcosm studies using meiobenthic communities offer a good compromise between the complexity of the ecosystem and the often highly artificial settings of laboratory experiments. Therefore, an experiment was designed to investigate the potential of the microcosm approach using meiofauna as a tool for ecotoxicological studies. The experiment tested the ecological effects of exposure to sewage-impacted pore water simultaneously at the community level using meiofauna microcosms and at the individual level using laboratory fecundity tests with the copepod Nitokra sp. Specifically, the experiment tested the toxicity of pore water from three sites according to a contamination gradient. Both approaches were efficient in detecting differences in toxicity between the cleaner and most polluted sites. However, only multivariate data from community analysis detected differences in the gradient of contamination. In addition to information about toxicity, the community level microcosm experiments gave indications about sensitive and tolerant species, indirect ecological effects, as well as raised hypothesis about contamination routes and bioavailability to be tested. The results from this study confirm the potential of the microcosm approach using natural communities as an impending tool for ecotoxicological studies.
Stochastic Dynamics and Matching in the Old Keynesian Economics: A Rationale for the Shimer's Puzzle

Following the Farmerâ€™s (2008a-b, 2010) micro-foundation of the General Theory, I build a competitive search model in which output and employment are demand-driven, prices are flexible, the nominal wage is used as numeraire and agents are divided in two categories: wage and profit earners. Within this framework, I show that the model economy has a continuum of demand constrained equilibria that might be consistent with a certain degree of endogenous real wage stickiness. Moreover, calibrating and simulating the model economy in order to fit the US first-moments data, I show that this setting can provide a rationale for the Shimerâ€™s (2005) puzzle, i.e., the relative stability of real wages in spite of the large volatility of labor market tightness.
REGIONAL GDP GROWTH IN CZECH AND SLOVAK NUTS3 REGIONS: SPATIAL ANALYSIS

This paper concentrates on the issues of regional GDP growth with orientation on instruments ofspatial analysis. Analyses dealing with the regional economic growth have become very popular during the recent years in order to identify the regional disparities and to adopt appropriate steps to remove them. The important issue of this analysis is consideration of spatial dimension and specification of neighbouring regions based on appropriate definition of spatial weight matrix. Testing of spatial autocorrelation is possible through different statistics, in this paper we applied the global and local Moran’s I statistics and local Getis-Ord Gi statistic.The analysis dealt with 22 NUTS3 Czech and Slovak regions in pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis period. Since in periods before crisis, i.e. in 2007/2006 and 2008/2007 the statistically significant positive spatial autocorrelation was confirmed, in the crisis period 2009/2008 was the spatial autocorrelation slightly positive, in post-crisis period 2010/2009 there was a negative spatial autocorrelation. Based on local statistics it was possible to detect concrete regions with statistically significant spatial autocorrelation including the type of autocorrelation. Since the positive autocorrelation indicates clustering of regions with similar values of GDP growth rates, on the other hand the negative autocorrelation indicated, in which regions is the GDP growth lower or higher in comparison to neighbouring regions.
Effects of biotic and abiotic factors on soil organic carbon in semi-arid grassland

Carbon sequestration in grassland soil has been paid considerable attention in recent decades. However, the changes of soil organic carbon (SOC) still need clarification under the effect of environmental factors in semiarid area. Here, twenty sampling sites were selected to study the effects of plant community (plant cover, biomass, litter, composition and diversity) and environmental factors (i.e. mean annual precipitation, mean annual temperature) on SOC sequestration in the semi-arid grasslands. The results showed that SOC was significant positively related to mean annual precipitation, soil water content and soil pH. The higher aboveand below-ground biomass, species evenness and diversity presented the higher SOC. Specially, the species richness and proportion of gramineous species functional group significantly increased SOC. Below-ground biomass affected SOC mainly in the top 30 cm soil. Our results suggest that higher plant species richness and gramineous species proportion play a positive role in increasing the potential of soil carbon sequestration in semi-arid grassland.
Technical Efficiency of Farming Households in Uganda: Evidence from the national Panel Survey Data, 2005-2010

We investigate performance of the agricultural sector in Uganda and whether it has varied by the 4 major regions in Uganda using agricultural technical efficiency as a proxy for performance on a nationally representative panel data set. We apply the classical parametric stochastic production frontier estimator in estimating the technical efficiency scores for each of the 4 regions using a panel framework. We find rather surprising results contrary to our hypothetical expectations. The households in the northern and eastern regions are found to have relatively higher levels of technical efficiency over the study period compared to the rest of the regions. The presence of increased government intervention in the peace process, and concerted effort by both government and international agencies to develop and promote agriculture programs in the region during this period, were possibly responsible for the observed levels and trends in technical efficiency in the two regions. The western region had the lowest levels of technical efficiency and a declining trend over the study period. Overall in the country data, male household heads are found to be more efficient than their female counterparts and the difference is found to be significant at 5%. Higher levels of education are found to significantly decrease inefficiency at the 10% level.
Effect of Adding Chelating Agents on the Absorption of Zinc from Polluted Soil Sludge Textile Industrial Waste by Sunflower Plant (Helianthus annuus L.)

Textile industry caused the increase of the heavy metal Zn in soil in the form of sludge. Waste treatment by the phytoremediation method is one of the alternatives of environmental refinement with low cost and high effectiveness. This study used sunflower plants (Helianthus annuus L.) as a phytoremediator. The chelating agent EDTA was added in some treatment to increase the heavy metal absorption. The addition of 1.5 kg sludge on growth media inhibits the sunflower growth. T0K0 treatment has the most efficient result with a total Zn absorption of 101.74 mg/kg. T0K0 treatment was able to reduce Zn up to 96%. In 100% soil treatment, the EDTA additions decreased the ability of sunflower plants to absorb Zn metal in the phytoremediation process. However, in the 40% sludge treatment, the addition of EDTA did not affect the ability of sunflower plants to absorb the Zn metal in the phytoremediation process.
Public Investment and Golden Rule of Public Finance in an Overlapping Generations Model

This paper develops an overlapping generations model with debt-financed public investment. The model assumes that the government is subject to the golden rule of public finance and that households are Yaari-Blanchard type. It is shown that the growth-maximizing and utility-maximizing tax rates do not satisfy the Barro tax rule, which is equal to the output elasticity of public capital. Furthermore, we show that both tax rates positively depend on longevity, with an aging population increasing debt per GDP. This result captures a tendency of increasing debt per GDP under population aging in the real world.
Neural Network Pruning for Crossbar Architecture

Crossbar architecture has been widely adopted in neural network accelerators due to the efficient implementations on vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) operations. However, in the case of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the efficiency is compromised dramatically because of the large amounts of data reuse. Although some mapping methods have been designed to achieve a balance between the execution throughput and resource overhead, the resource consumption cost is still huge while maintaining the throughput. Network pruning is a promising and widely studied method to shrink the model size. Whereas, prior work for CNNs compression rarely considered the crossbar architecture and the corresponding mapping method, and cannot be directly utilized by crossbar-based neural network accelerators. This paper proposes a crossbar-aware pruning framework based on a formulated L0norm constrained optimization problem. Specifically, we design an L0-norm constrained gradient descent (LGD) with relaxant probabilistic projection (RPP) to solve this problem. Two types of sparsity are successfully achieved: i) intuitive crossbar-grain sparsity and ii) column-grain sparsity with output recombination, based on which we further propose an input feature maps (FMs) reorder method to improve the model accuracy. We evaluate our crossbar-aware pruning framework on the median-scale CIFAR10 dataset and the large-scale ImageNet dataset with VGG and ResNet models. Our method is able to reduce the crossbar overhead by 44%-72% with insignificant accuracy degradation. This work significant reduce the resource overhead and the related energy cost, and provides a new co-design solution for mapping CNNs onto various crossbar devices with much better efficiency.