Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biogenic sedimentation in the Eocene equatorial Pacific: the stuttering greenhouse and Eocene carbonate compensation depth

CaCO3, Corg, and biogenic SiO2 were measured in Eocene equatorial Pacific sediments from Sites 1218 and 1219, and bulk oxygen and carbon isotopes were measured on selected intervals from Site 1219. These data delineate a series of CaCO3 events that first appeared at ~48 Ma and continued to the Eocene/Oligocene boundary. Each event lasted 1–2 m.y. and is separated from the next by a low CaCO3 interval of a similar time span. The largest of these carbonate accumulation events (CAE-3) is in Magnetochron 18. It began at ~42.2 Ma, lasted until ~40.3 Ma, and was marked by higher than average productivity. The end of CAE-3 was abrupt and was associated with a large-scale carbon transfer to the oceans prior to warming of high-latitude regions. Changes in carbonate compensation depth associated with CAE excursions were small in the early part of the middle Eocene but increased to as much as 800 m by the late middle Eocene before decreasing into the late Eocene. Oxygen isotope data indicate that the carbonate events are associated with cooling conditions and may mark small glaciations in the Eocene.
Factors Affecting Patient’s Satisfaction with Provided Sexually Transmitted Infections Primary Health Care Service in El-Damazin Locality at Blue Nile State, Sudan 2015 - 2016

Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) continued to be a significant public health problem especially among women at reproductive age and young people. Measuring patient satisfaction is an essential aspect of making services attractive to patients and improving the quality of service. This study was intended to explore the factors affecting the patients satisfaction with the provided STIs service at the primary health care (PHC) in El-Damazin locality at Blue Nile State (BNS) in Sudan, 2015 -2016. This study was analytical cross-sectional health facility-based study. This study revealed that the more than half of studied STIs patients were females, more than 40% were at the age of 25 years or less and single. Majority of studied patients stated that the PHC centers were accessible, and the service is affordable. More than 60% rated the patients-care providers (CPs) communication pattern as good, yet more than 50% of the single STIs patients, and more than 40% of the young patients’ did not receive education and counseling on condom. Also, more than 60% of the illiterate patients did not receive education and counseling for HIV. Though the study showed that more than 60% were satisfied with provided service, the validation of this satisfaction those patients were not fully aware of their rights to communicate and discuss their cases with health CPs, even how to deal with the community and to receive all component of STIs service without discrimination. Based on the results, increase the demand for the STIs service by increasing the awareness of the local community to the STIs service delivery components, STIs/HIV prevention measure is essential. Also, adoption of the right based approach in the awareness raising will increase the demand on the STIs services components by decreasing the cultural silence about the STIs and self-stigma or stigma on health care setting.
Agronomic and qualitative traits of common bean as a function of the straw and nitrogen fertilization1

The main principles of a no-tillage system are the lack of tillage, crop rotation and straw production. The latter is the most limiting factor for food production in tropical soils, since high temperature and humidity may affect its maintenance, accelerating its decomposition (Borghi & Crusciol 2007, Fiorentin et al. 2011). The monocropping and intercropping of maize (Zea mays) and brachiaria (Urochloa ruziziensis) ABSTRACT RESUMO
Consteel© EAF and conventional EAF: a comparison in maintenance practices

The present paper highlights the main differences between Consteel® and conventional EAF technologies regarding scheduled and unscheduled maintenance practices. The study has been made on the basis of data collected in plants with high maintenance standards and more than 10 years of operational experience. These data have been analyzed and organized in a comparison table where they have been associated with the relevant maintenance costs. The comparison shows that the Consteel® technology achieves a significant reduction in the overall maintenance costs compared to a conventional EAF.
SN 2006bp: Probing the Shock Breakout of a Type II-P Supernova

HET optical spectroscopy and unfiltered ROTSE-III photometry spanning the first 11 months since explosion of the Type II-P SN 2006bp are presented. The data suggest that the supernova was first detected just hours after shock breakout. Optical spectra obtained about 2 days after breakout exhibit narrow emission lines corresponding to He II λ4200, He II λ4686, and C IV λ5805 in the rest frame. These emission features persist in a second observation obtained 5 hr later but are not detected the following night or in subsequent observations. These lines probably emanate from material close to the explosion site, possibly in the outer layers of the progenitor that have been ionized by the high-energy photons released at shock breakout. A P Cygni profile is observed around 4450 Å in the +2 and +3 day spectra. We propose that this line is due to He II λ4687 rather than high-velocity Hβ, as previously suggested. Further HET spectra cover the evolution across the photometric plateau up to 73 days after breakout and during the nebular phase around day +340. Expansion velocities are derived for key features. The measured decay slope for the unfiltered light curve is 0.0073 ± 0.0004 mag day-1 between days +121 and +335, which is significantly slower than the decay of rate 56Co. We present a quasi-bolometric light curve through day +60. We see a slow cooling over the first 25 days but no sign of an early sharp peak; any such feature from the shock breakout must have lasted less than ~1 day.
Using best-worst scaling method to examine consumers’ value preferences: A multidimensional perspective

Abstract Unlike most prior studies, this study reconceptualizes the perceived value construct from the multidimensional perspective by incorporating the aesthetic and altruistic values from Holbrook’s value typology with the Theory of Consumption Value. Moreover, this study is a pioneer in measuring the construct of multidimensional perceived value with the Best-Worst Scaling method instead of rating scales to fill methodological deficiency in the literature. This study collected data through web-based survey using online consumer panels. Hierarchical cluster analysis used as the major data analysis technique. Results indicate consumers can be segmented on the basis of their preferences. Therefore, the use of the cluster analysis of the value dimensions would permit practitioners to develop more effective market segmentation strategies in order to attain sustainable competitive advantage in the growing hospitality and tourism industry.
Progressive Collapse Assessment of the Steel Moment-frame with Composite Floor Slabs Based on Membrane Action and Energy Equilibrium

Received: December 15, 2016 Revised: February 15, 2017 Accepted: February 16, 2017 Abstract: Background and Objective: Progressive collapse resistance of the steel moment-frame with composite floor slabs can be assessed by sudden column loss scenarios. In order to investigate the progressive collapse-resistant capacity of the steel moment-frame with composite floor slabs, a simplified approach based on the theory of membrane action and energy equilibrium principle is presented, which assessed the behaviour of progressive collapse resistance of this frame subjected to the removal of a penultimate column via the static and dynamic analysis.
Perioperative transfusion of patients with sickle cell disease undergoing surgery at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI).

A one-year retrospective analysis was done to identify the perioperative transfusion practice in patients with all genotypes of sickle cell disease at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) and their postoperative complication rates. Twenty-nine patients who had 32 procedures were included. Most patients (23) were homozygous SS. The most common procedure was splenectomy, accounting for 34.4%. The mean steady state haemoglobin level was 8.1 ± 1.4 g/dl and 56% of patients had a haemoglobin level at surgery which was below their steady state. The perioperative transfusion rate was 34%. Main indications were symptomatic anaemia and significant blood loss. Nine patients (31%) had at least one postoperative complication. A selective transfusion approach in sickle cell patients, based on haemoglobin concentration relative to steady state and clinical status, was practiced at the UHWI. This approach did not appear to increase the incidence of postoperative complications.
Response of spring crops and associated aphids to elevated atmospheric CO 2 concentrations

Having evolved a parasitic relation to their host plants, aphids may serve as indicators of plant responses to environmental changes. The present rise in atmospheric CO 2 concentrations is expected to alter plant leaf chemistry and may thus alter host plant – aphid relations. We involved a climate chamber system and used bird cherry-oat aphid ( Rhopalosiphum padi L.) and green peach aphid ( Myzus persicae S.) and their respective host plants, spring wheat ( Triticum aestivum L. cv. “Triso”) and oilseed rape ( Brassica napus cv. “Campino”), to elucidate the effects of atmospheric CO 2 enrichment on such bitrophic systems. Spring wheat grown at elevated CO 2 (600 ppm) generally had greater above ground biomass than plants grown at ambient CO 2 (400 ppm). Bird cherry-oat aphid infestation resulted in reduced spring wheat above ground biomass compared to the non-infested control. Relative crop growth rate (RGR) was increased by elevated CO 2 . In our study, the relative developmental stage (rDS) and intrinsic rate of increase (r m ) of the aphids was only slightly and non-signifi cantly increased under elevated atmospheric CO 2 conditions. The response of aphid weight and RGR to elevated CO 2 differed, increasing by 24% and 18.2% for bird cherry-oat aphid and decreasing by 12% and 12.5% for green peach aphid, respectively. Aphids reared on spring wheat at elevated CO 2 had a shorter lifespan, whereas the opposite effect was found for aphids reared on oilseed rape. The average number of nymphs of the two pest species showed both an increase under elevated CO 2 . No consistent picture emerges from these findings, and further investigation on host – aphid relations under changing atmospheric conditions such as CO 2 enrichment appear necessary.
Impact of first birth career interruption on earnings: evidence from administrative data

ABSTRACT This article makes use of unique administrative data to expand the understanding of the role women’s intermittency decisions play in the determination of her wages. We demonstrate that treating intermittency as exogenous significantly overstates its impact. The intermittency penalty also increases in the education level of the woman. The penalty for women with a high school degree with an average amount of intermittency during 6 years after giving birth to her first child is roughly half the penalty for college graduates. We also demonstrate the value of making use of an index to capture multiple dimension of the intermittency experience, and illustrate the importance of firm dynamics in the determination of a woman’s wage.
Raising the Quality of Secondary Education in East Asia

The author seeks to broaden our understanding of the determinants of student achievement among East Asian economies using the TIMSS-R data set and, in the process, to remedy some of the ambiguities in the literature to date. These ambiguities are frequently due to the sparseness of detailed data on students, teachers, and schools. The TIMSS-R data set offers detailed information on these variables, which is not typically available from other sources, allowing the author to isolate the impact of various factors affecting student achievement, while controlling for specific characteristics of the students, teachers, and schools surveyed. The results indicate that the most consistent factors affecting student performance are characteristics associated with students (innate abilities and home resources). Moreover, the author does not find any consistent relationship between the performance of students and school resources or teacher autonomy, both of which are often advocated in the discussion of education reform.
Parameter tuning is a key part of dimensionality reduction via deep variational autoencoders for single cell RNA transcriptomics

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a powerful tool to profile the transcriptomes of a large number of individual cells at a high resolution. These data usually contain measurements of gene expression for many genes in thousands or tens of thousands of cells, though some datasets now reach the million-cell mark. Projecting high-dimensional scRNA-seq data into a low dimensional space aids downstream analysis and data visualization. Many recent preprints accomplish this using variational autoencoders (VAE), generative models that learn underlying structure of data by compress it into a constrained, low dimensional space. The low dimensional spaces generated by VAEs have revealed complex patterns and novel biological signals from large-scale gene expression data and drug response predictions. Here, we evaluate a simple VAE approach for gene expression data, Tybalt, by training and measuring its performance on sets of simulated scRNA-seq data. We find a number of counter-intuitive performance features: i.e., deeper neural networks can struggle when datasets contain more observations under some parameter configurations. We show that these methods are highly sensitive to parameter tuning: when tuned, the performance of the Tybalt model, which was not optimized for scRNA-seq data, outperforms other popular dimension reduction approaches – PCA, ZIFA, UMAP and t-SNE. On the other hand, without tuning performance can also be remarkably poor on the same data. Our results should discourage authors and reviewers from relying on self-reported performance comparisons to evaluate the relative value of contributions in this area at this time. Instead, we recommend that attempts to compare or benchmark autoencoder methods for scRNA-seq data be performed by disinterested third parties or by methods developers only on unseen benchmark data that are provided to all participants simultaneously because the potential for performance differences due to unequal parameter tuning is so high.
Evaluation of low-temperature tolerance of zoysia grass.

Low temperature is one of the main factors limiting the growth of zoysia grasses (Zoysia spp.). This study was conducted to assess the low-temperature tolerance of zoysia grasses, and especially to explore the low-temperature tolerance of different organs. The leaf LT 50 (temperature at which 50% of leaves die) of zoysia grasses tested ranged from −1.9°C to −10.4°C (CV 27.8%). The LT 50 of different species ranked as: Z. japonica (−6.68°C) stolon (−7.8°C) > rhizome (−8.4°C). There was a significant correlation between LT 50 values of different organs (P<0.05) suggesting that leaf LT 50 could be used an indicator of low-temperature tolerance of zoysia grasses.
THE GREAT BUSTARD OTIS TARDA IN ANDALUSIA, SOUTHERN SPAIN: STATUS, DISTRIBUTION AND TRENDS

SUMMARY. —The Great Bustard Otis tarda in Andalusia, southern Spain: status, distribution and trends. Aims: Between 2001 and 2004 the first comprehensive census of Great Bustards Otis tarda was carried out in Andalusia, southern Spain. This region holds one of the most endangered populations of the Iberian Peninsula. The aims were to establish the locations of current leks and the numbers of birds breeding at them, determine their age and sex structure and reproductive success, and discuss present and past population trends. These data are essential to plan the conservation of this threatened population. Results and Conclusions: The total estimated number of birds in the region was 338, distributed in 16 leks plus two breeding sites with only females. The species is today extinct in Almeria, Granada, and Malaga. The current distribution is highly fragmented, with two main aggregations of three and five leks in the Guadalquivir valley, respectively close to Osuna, in Sevilla province, and at the border between the provinces Cordoba and Jaen. Another group of three leks is located in the northwest border of the region, separated from the rest by Sierra Morena mountain chain. These birds are perhaps demographically more related to the Bustards of Extremadura than to other leks in Andalusia. The Guadalquivir subpopulation is the remnant of a formerly much larger population, which has declined due to the high hunting pressure before the hunting ban in 1980, and to agriculture intensification during the last decades. Great Bustards survive today in suboptimal habitat, but could go through a slow extinction process in the future if habitat conditions are not improved. Maninduced mortality causes have also probably contributed to the extremely female-biased sex-ratio, with an estimated 3.28 females per male, and several leks with only 1-2 males with 4-17 females. Throughout the study period numbers of males and females increased in Osuna, and adult males decreased in Arahal, Gerena and Bujalance. These decreases are not compensated for by the remarkably low productivity (0.08 young per female in September, range of annual values 0.04-0.12). In conclusion, the small numbers of birds, fragmented distribution, extremely biased sex-ratio, high adult male mortality, and low productivity clearly reflect the poor conservation status and serious extinction risk of the Great Bustard population in Andalusia. Conservation efforts should be urgently directed towards improving habitat conditions, in order to increase current productivity values and decrease mortality through collision with powerlines.
Screening of multidrug-resistant bacteria of antibiotic-associated diarrhea and their inhibition by leaf extracts of Moringa oleifera Lamk

Context: Emergence of multi drug resistance bacteria (MDRB) to human pathogenic infection is increasing day by day but the number of new drugs to overwhelm the problem is not sufficient. Evidences revealed that Moringa oleifera Lamk. has various pharmaceutical activities like antibacterial, antifungal, antispasmodic, anti-inflammatory, anticancer and diuretic. Herbal treatment may be one of the possible ways to treat diseases caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria. Objectives: The present research was undertaken to screen of multidrug resistant bacteria (MDRB) from antibiotic-associated diarrheal samples and to evaluate the potentiality of M. oleifera leaf extracts on these bacteria with the view to provide scientific evidence for its application in health remedy. Materials & Methods: Antibiotic-associated diarrheal fecal specimens were collected from pediatric ward of Rajshahi Medical College and cultured onto MacConkey agar. MDRB were determined by antibiotic susceptibility test, using disc-agar diffusion method. Biochemical tests of the MDRB were done according to Bergeys Manual of Determinative Bacteriology for identification of the species. Dried and fresh leaf of M. oleifera was used to prepare exaction with or without solvents such as hot water, cold water, chloroform, petroleum ether, acetone and ethanol, separately. Antibacterial assay was done by disc diffusion method and minimum inhibitory concentration of the extracts was also measured. Results: In the present study seven isolates were screened as MDRB and the highest prevalence (42.86%) was occurred in the age group of 25-36 months and the lowest (14.28) was in the group of <1 and 1-6 months. Ethanol extract of dried leaf of M. oleifera Lamk. showed moderate inhibitory activity against all of the isolates while petroleum ether, chloroform and acetone extracts of dried leaf have no inhibitory effect. Fresh leaf sap powder in DMSO exhibited strong inhibitory effect against all of the test bacteria where as hot aqueous extract could not show any inhibition. The minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) of the potent extracts ranged 937.5 to 3750 ? g/ml and 7.9 to 234.4 ? g/ml in dried and fresh leaf extracts, respectively. Conclusion: The present data indicates that M. oleifera leaf extract possess antimicrobial potential to control of MDRB causes infection thus it can be used as a novel drugs in future. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/jbs.v20i0. 17652 J. bio-sci. 20: 41-48, 2012
Synergistic Effects of d-δ-Tocotrienol And Xanthorrhizol on Murine B16 Melanoma Cells

SYNERGISTIC EFFECTS OF d-δ-TOCOTRIENOL AND XANTHORRHIZOL ON MURINE B16 MELANOMA CELLS by Darren Chan Background: Skin cancer has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, of which melanoma is the most lethal form. Conventional chemotherapy treatments come with a host of side effects. d-δ-Tocotrienol and xanthorrhizol have shown potential in treatment of cancers. Tocotrienol, an isomer of vitamin E, has demonstrated apoptotic and cell cycle arrest effects on cancer cells. Xanthorrhizol, a sesquiterpenoid, has demonstrated anticancer effects through both hormonal and nonhormonal pathways. It is unknown whether combinations of d-δ-tocotrienol and xanthorrhizol provide greater growth-suppressive activity than these agents alone. Methods: The proliferation of murine B16 melanoma cells was measured using MTT assay with CellTiter 96 Aqueous One Solution (Progmega, Madison WI, USA). Cell cycle distribution was examined by flow cytometry. Protein expression was detected by Western blot analysis with chemiluminescent imaging. Results: Xanthorrhizol inhibited cell proliferation in a dose-response manner. The IC50 of xanthorrhizol, or the concentration of xanthorrhizol required to suppress the cell proliferation by 50%, was estimated to be 65 μM. A combination of 16.25 μM xanthorrhizol and 10 μM d-δ-tocotrienol inhibited cell proliferation to a greater extent than those by individual compounds (P<0.01), suggesting a synergistic effect. Cell cycle analysis showed trends towards G1 cell-cycle arrest, though these did not reach statistical significance. Western blot analysis did not demonstrate significant changes in protein expression across treatment groups in cyclin D1, cyclin-dependent kinase 4, or procaspase-3. Conclusion: Xanthorrhizol and d-δ-tocotrienol demonstrate additive and possibly synergistic effects on the viability of murine B16 melanoma cells. The underlying mechanisms of action for this finding, including apoptosis and cell cycle, warrant further investigation.