Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sexually selected infanticide by male red squirrels in advance of a mast year.

Data collection was supported by grants provided to S. Boutin, A. G. McAdam, M. M. Humphries, J. E. Lane, and D. W. Coltman from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, as well as National Science Foundation grants to A. G. McAdam and B. Dantzer. J. A. Haines was supported by an NSERC Doctoral Postgraduate Scholarship, University of Alberta Canadian Circumpolar Institute Circumpolar/Boreal Alberta Research Funds and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada Northern Scientific Training Program Grants, and University of Alberta Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research scholarships.
The Life of a Dead Ant: The Expression of an Adaptive Extended Phenotype

Specialized parasites are expected to express complex adaptations to their hosts. Manipulation of host behavior is such an adaptation. We studied the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a locally specialized parasite of arboreal Camponotus leonardi ants. Ant‐infecting Ophiocordyceps are known to make hosts bite onto vegetation before killing them. We show that this represents a fine‐tuned fungal adaptation: an extended phenotype. Dead ants were found under leaves, attached by their mandibles, on the northern side of saplings ∼25 cm above the soil, where temperature and humidity conditions were optimal for fungal growth. Experimental relocation confirmed that parasite fitness was lower outside this manipulative zone. Host resources were rapidly colonized and further secured by extensive internal structuring. Nutritional composition analysis indicated that such structuring allows the parasite to produce a large fruiting body for spore production. Our findings suggest that the osmotrophic lifestyle of fungi may have facilitated novel exploitation strategies.
Cervical mobilisation: concurrent effects on pain, sympathetic nervous system activity and motor activity.

Recent findings that spinal manual therapy (SMT) produces concurrent hypoalgesic and sympathoexcitatory effects have led to the proposal that SMT may exert its initial effects by activating descending inhibitory pathways from the dorsal periaqueductal gray area of the midbrain (dPAG). In addition to hypoalgesic and sympathoexcitatory effects, stimulation of the dPAG in animals has been shown to have a facilitatory effect on motor activity. This study sought to further investigate the proposal regarding SMT and the PAG by including a test of motor function in addition to the variables previously investigated. Using a condition randomised, placebo-controlled, double blind, repeated measures design, 30 subjects with mid to lower cervical spine pain of insidious onset participated in the study. The results indicated that the cervical mobilisation technique produced a hypoalgesic effect as revealed by increased pressure pain thresholds on the side of treatment (P=0.0001) and decreased resting visual analogue scale scores (P=0.049). The treatment technique also produced a sympathoexcitatory effect with an increase in skin conductance (P<0.002) and a decrease in skin temperature (P=<0.02). There was a decrease in superficial neck flexor muscle activity (P<0.0002) at the lower levels of a staged cranio-cervical flexion test. This could imply facilitation of the deep neck flexor muscles with a decreased need for co-activation of the superficial neck flexors. The combination of all findings would support the proposal that SMT may, at least initially, exert part of its influence via activation of the PAG.
Apremilast

Objective: To review the pharmacology, efficacy, and safety of apremilast and determine its role relative to other agents in the treatment of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. Data Sources: A PubMed search (1946 to December 2015) using the terms apremilast and CC-10004 was conducted to identify relevant articles. Study Selection and Data Extraction: In vitro or in vivo evaluations of apremilast published in the English language were eligible for inclusion. Controlled clinical trials that involved psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis were selected for review. Data Synthesis: Four trials were identified on the treatment of psoriasis. In those that involved doses of 30 mg twice daily, a significantly greater percentage of patients receiving apremilast (28.8% to 40.9%) compared with placebo (5.3% to 5.8%) achieved at least 75% improvement from baseline in Psoriasis Area and Severity Index score at 16 weeks. Two trials were identified on the treatment of psoriatic arthritis. In the one that involved a dose of 30 mg twice daily, a significantly greater percentage of patients receiving apremilast (38.1%) compared with placebo (19.0%) achieved the American College of Rheumatology criteria for 20% improvement at 16 weeks. In all trials, the drug had an acceptable safety profile, with the most common adverse effects of diarrhea, nausea, and headache. Conclusions: Apremilast has a novel mechanism of action and is safe and effective for the management of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. At this time, apremilast should be reserved for patients unable to take disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs.
MDA in enterprise architecture? The living system theory to the rescue

Integrating business and information technology (IT) is essential for enterprises to be competitive. The integration of business and IT forces project teams to analyze and design a hierarchy of systems such as: groups of companies collaborating in business systems, people and IT systems collaborating in business processes, software components collaborating in IT systems, and programming language objects collaborating in software components. The current tools, and in particular MDA, have not been tailored for the design of hierarchical systems. As a result the project teams have difficulties designing integrated business and IT systems. In this paper we present a technique for supporting the design of hierarchical systems. We were inspired by Miller's general theory of living system, a theory that addresses the analysis of hierarchical living systems. We provide concrete guidelines on how to introduce levels in UML-based system modeling, in general, and in MDA in particular. This allows the project team to develop one, common, integrated enterprise (or project) model. This in turn enables the different specialists to reason about and design business and IT systems that are truly integrated. The overall benefit is an increase in the project success rate.
Schiff Bases of Methanesulfonylhydrazine. Synthesis, Spectroscopic Characterization, Conformational Analysis, and Biological Activity

Three novel Schiff bases: salicylaldehyde methanesulfonylhydrazone (1), 2-hydroxyacetophenone methanesulfonylhydrazone (2) and 2-hydroxy-1-naphthaldehyde methanesulfonylhydrazone (3) have been synthesized. Compounds 1-3, as well as acetone methanesulfonylhydrazone (4) have been characterized by TLC, 1H NMR and IR spectra. The spectroscopic results for 1-3 have revealed the presence of an intramolecular hydrogen bond between the hydroxyl group and the imine N atom. The conformational isomerism of 1-4 with respect to the rotations around the SN and NN bonds have been studied by the method of molecular mechanics. Compounds 1-4 and methanesulfonylhydrazine exhibit antibacterial and cytotoxic effects.
Novel therapeutic agents in neurogastroenterology: advances in the past year

There have been significant advances in understanding the pathophysiological mechanisms in patients with neurogastroenterological disorders including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and functional abdominal pain, functional diarrhea, chronic constipation, gastroparesis, and functional dyspepsia. These advances have led to the development of novel pharmacological therapy of neurogastroenterological disorders.
Emotion Generation and Emotion Regulation: One or Two Depends on Your Point of View

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods.
Description of a model to optimise the feeding of amino acids to growing pullets

Abstract 1. A nutrition model is described that may be used to optimise the amino acid nutrition of laying-type pullets prior to the onset of lay. It is not a method of optimising lifetime laying performance. 2. The potential growth and composition of the body, feathers, ovary and oviduct are described from hatching to the age at which sexual maturity is attained, from which the daily amino acid and energy requirements for the average individual in the population can be calculated. 3. There are two parts to the approach used, the first being a description of the model itself and the second being a description of how the required information was gathered. A number of assumptions made in developing the model are discussed. 4. The rates of maturing of the body, feather-free body and body protein of the DeKalb pullets used were shown to be constant at 0.017/d and those of feathers at 0.02/d. These are considerably slower than those of the oviduct and ovary (0.139 and 0.084/d respectively). The ovary attained a higher mature weight (78.4 vs. 58.7 g) than the oviduct. 5. The age at which the growth of the reproductive organs is initiated in the model is defined by the user. The daily amount of threonine required to meet the requirements for maintenance and potential growth of the developing tissues and organs is calculated for each day of the growing period from hatching to the age at which the first egg is laid. A method of calculating the required daily concentration of threonine in the feed is described, from which a feeding programme may be derived. 6. For the model to produce an optimum economic feeding programme for a population of laying-type pullets, more information than is available from this study is required. These issues are discussed in the paper.
Signal processing methods for music synchronization, audio matching, and source separation

The field of music information retrieval (MIR) aims at developing techniques and tools for organizing, understanding, and searching multimodal information in large music collections in a robust, efficient and intelligent manner. In this context, this thesis presents novel, content-based methods for music synchronization, audio matching, and source separation. In general, music synchronization denotes a procedure which, for a given position in one representation of a piece of music, determines the corresponding position within another representation. Here, the thesis presents three complementary synchronization approaches, which improve upon previous methods in terms of robustness, reliability, and accuracy. The first approach employs a late-fusion strategy based on multiple, conceptually different alignment techniques to identify those music passages that allow for reliable alignment results. The second approach is based on the idea of employing musical structure analysis methods in the context of synchronization to derive reliable synchronization results even in the presence of structural differences between the versions to be aligned. Finally, the third approach employs several complementary strategies for increasing the accuracy and time resolution of synchronization results. Given a short query audio clip, the goal of audio matching is to automatically retrieve all musically similar excerpts in different versions and arrangements of the same underlying piece of music. In this context, chroma-based audio features are a well-established tool as they possess a high degree of invariance to variations in timbre. This thesis describes a novel procedure for making chroma features even more robust to changes in timbre while keeping their discriminative power. Here, the idea is to identify and discard timbre-related information using techniques inspired by the well-known MFCC features, which are usually employed in speech processing. Given a monaural music recording, the goal of source separation is to extract musically meaningful sound sources corresponding, for example, to a melody, an instrument, or a drum track from the recording. To facilitate this complex task, one can exploit additional information provided by a musical score. Based on this idea, this thesis presents two novel, conceptually different approaches to source separation. Using score information provided by a given MIDI file, the first approach employs a parametric model to describe a given audio recording of a piece of music. The resulting model is then used to extract sound sources as specified by the score. As a computationally less demanding and easier to implement alternative, the second approach employs the additional score information to guide a decomposition based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF).
Knowledge management and effective university governance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between governance and knowledge management in an Australian university, paying attention to the ways in which the notions of knowledge, constructions of the role of governing councils and shared understandings about performance in committee roles, might impact on the university's future success. Design/methodology/approach – Earl's taxonomy of knowledge is extended to reflect more recent literature and used as the framework of analysis for a qualitative case study which is based on observations and interview data garnered from key governance committees. Findings – The paper illustrates that effective governance and strategic success are dependent on appropriate knowledge manipulation activities. The authors conclude that in the case example, the types of knowledge targeted are narrow and committee members are focused on processes that do not effectively enable the creation or transfer of knowledge. Research limitations/implications – This is a single case study and further research would be required in order to confirm the exploratory findings. Practical implications – An important shift in improving effective knowledge strategies in the organisation will involve the reconceptualisation of the role of knowledge in the university. Originality/value – This paper makes two major contributions to the literature; the extension of Earl's typology to reflect current knowledge management literature, and the identification of a lack of knowledge management as a major weakness in university governance. The paper begins to unravel the practical issues that constrain strategic decision making.
Replacement of Yellow Maize with Pearl Millet (Pennisetum typhoides), Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica) or Finger Millet (Eleusine coracana) in Broiler Chicken Diets Containing Supplemental Enzymes

An experiment was conducted to study the performance of broilers chicks (2 to 42 d of age) fed diets containing pearl millet (PM, Pennisetum typhoides), foxtail millet (FOM, Setaria italica) or finger millet (FIM, Elusine coracana) totally replacing (w/w) yellow maize (YM) with and with out supplementing non-starch polysaccharide (NSP) hydrolysing enzymes at the rate of 0.5 g/kg diet. Enzyme preparation contained amylase 2,400 units, hemi-cellulase 5,400 units, cellulase 12,000 units, protease 2,400 units and beta-glucanase 106 units/g. Each diet was fed to eight replicates (five female Vencob broilers/replicate) housed in stainless steel battery brooders. The estimated metabolizable energy (ME) contents of YM, PM, FOM and FIM were FM (PM) were about 3,389, 2,736, 3,303 and 2,846 kcal/kg, respectively. Total replacement of YM with FOM did not influence the body weight gain, ready to cook yield, relative weights of giblet, liver, intestine, lymphoid organs (bursa and spleen) and length of intestine, antibody titers and livability at 42 d of age. But the food efficiency decreased significantly in FOM fed broilers compared those fed YM. Further, the fat content in thigh muscle reduced with FOM fed groups compared to those fed YM. The performance of broilers decreased significantly in PM and FIM fed broilers compared to those fed YM. The relative weights of giblet, gizzard and liver increased in FIM fed groups compared to those fed YM as the principal source of energy in broilers. Incorporation of NSP hydrolysing enzymes in commercial broiler diets improved the efficiency of feed utilization during starter phase but not at 42 d of age. The results thus indicate that yellow maize can be replaced in toto on weight basis in commercial broiler diets without affecting the performance. Supplementation of NSP hydrolysing enzymes was beneficial in enhancing feed utilization during the starter phase. (Asian-Aust. J. Anim. Sci. 2004. Vol 17, No. 6 : 836-842)
Television food advertising directed towards Bulgarian children

Background: Childhood obesity is a serious health problem worldwide with a prevalence rising to epidemic proportions. Television viewing is suspected as an important contributor and along with food advertisements significantly influence children’s unhealthy dietary habits, purchase requests and adiposity. Objectives: To examine the exposure of Bulgarian children to television food advertising and to make a content analysis of the food/beverage advertisements during children’s television programmes. Design: 41.5 h of children’s television programming on three national networks, were videotaped. All recorded food advertisements were evaluated to identify the marketing strategies used for the stimulation of children’s purchase requests. Results: Food/beverage advertisements accounted for 124 (33.4%) of all commercials, with 96.8% being for unhealthy foods. 57% of them were aimed specifically at children as the most advertised products were salty/sweetened snacks and cereals, sweets, soft drinks/carbohydrate juices and salty foods, with no fruit or vegetable commercials. Food advertisements used more themes of adventure, animation, music and gifts to attract children’s attention, and gave information based on the product’s taste, physical qualities, novelty, presence of premiums/prizes. Of all food/beverage advertisements, 27.4% contained health-related information about the products; three-quarters of the advertisements were shot with young normal-weight actors with a good/healthy appearance. Conclusion: Almost all recorded food advertisements do not support the Bulgarian dietary recommendations for healthy and balanced eating. More activities to reduce the unhealthy food promotion to children are mandatory as restrictions by type of advertised food, target group or limits on the advertisements’ account and times shown, as well as parental/self-regulation.
Treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia with 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor: morphological changes in patients who fail to respond.

AIMS: To describe the prostatic adenectomy specimens of six patients with symptomatic benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) who failed to respond to long term treatment with a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor, finasteride. METHODS: Histological sections from six cases of BPH who had been treated with finasteride were investigated. Five patients were prescribed 5 mg finasteride daily for six months and one patient 5 mg daily for 12 months. The patients underwent adenectomy as their urethral obstruction failed to resolve. Twenty cases of untreated BPH served as controls. RESULTS: In patients taking finasteride for six months the prostatic adenectomy specimens showed a reduction in the size of the prostate and an increase in the stroma:epithelial and stroma:lumen ratios compared with controls. The size of the ducts and acini was not as uniform as in the controls. In particular, some ducts and acini were still lined by a bistratified epithelium similar to that found in controls but lacked undulations at the epithelial border; other ducts/acini were atrophic. Some scattered clusters of small acini with a focally fragmented basal cell layer were observed in two of the five treated cases. One prostatic adenectomy specimen, from the patient treated for one year, showed extensive lobular atrophy and diffuse squamous and transitional cell metaplasia. At the periphery of the transition zone, there was a complex intra-acinar papillary-cribriform proliferation of clear cells without nuclear atypia, similar to clear cell papillary hyperplasia. The periurethral region showed stromal nodules in both patients and controls. CONCLUSIONS: Morphological evaluation of finasteride treated BPH showed changes in the lobules of the transition zone, but not in the periurethral stroma.
Allometry of animal–microbe interactions and global census of animal-associated microbes

Animals live in close association with microorganisms, mostly prokaryotes, living in or on them as commensals, mutualists or parasites, and profoundly affecting host fitness. Most animal–microbe studies focus on microbial community structure; for this project, allometry (scaling of animal attributes with animal size) was applied to animal–microbe relationships across a range of species spanning 12 orders of magnitude in animal mass, from nematodes to whales. Microbial abundances per individual animal were gleaned from published literature and also microscopically counted in three species. Abundance of prokaryotes/individual versus animal mass scales as a nearly linear power function (exponent = 1.07, R2 = 0.94). Combining this power function with allometry of animal abundance indicates that macrofauna have an outsized share of animal-associated microorganisms. The total number of animal-associated prokaryotes in Earth's land animals was calculated to be 1.3–1.4 × 1025 cells and the total of marine animal-associated microbes was calculated to be 8.6–9.0 × 1024 cells. Animal-associated microbes thus total 2.1–2.3 × 1025 of the approximately 1030 prokaryotes on the Earth. Microbes associated with humans comprise 3.3–3.5% of Earth's animal-associated microbes, and domestic animals harbour 14–20% of all animal-associated microbes, adding a new dimension to the scale of human impact on the biosphere. This novel allometric power function may reflect underlying mechanisms involving the transfer of energy and materials between microorganisms and their animal hosts. Microbial diversity indices of animal gut communities and gut microbial species richness for 60 mammals did not indicate significant scaling relationships with animal body mass; however, further research in this area is warranted.
A DOUBLE‐BLIND TRIAL OF SINGLE‐DOSE CHEMOPROPHYLAXIS WITH CO‐TRIMOXAZOLE DURING VAGINAL HYSTERECTOMY AND REPAIR

Twenty‐five patients received 10 ml co‐trimoxazole (800 mg sulphamethoxazole and 160 mg trimethoprim) and 25 a placebo by intravenous infusion during one hour from the commencement of surgery for vaginal hysterectomy with anterior colporrhaphy and posterior colpo‐perineorrhaphy. Single‐dose chemoprophylaxis with co‐trimoxazole was shown to be effective in reducing the incidence of post‐operative febrile morbidity and urinary tract infection, especially that caused by Proteus species.
Prolactin receptors in human pituitary adenomas

OBJECTIVE In the rat, prolactin receptors (PRL‐R) have been identified In normal pituitary cells and In anterior pituitary tumours induced by oestradiol. No published data are available concerning PRL‐R in the human pituitary. The aim of our study was therefore to detect the presence of PRL‐R in the normal human pituitary gland and human pituitary adenomas.