Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic analysis of some physical properties of bread wheat grain (Triticum aestivum L. em Thell)

Very little information exists on the relative genetic architecture of the grain physical properties of wheat. The physical properties of grain have a direct or indirect influence on the milling and baking quality of wheat. Therefore, understanding the inheritance of grain physical properties will be useful to improve varieties with better quality. Five bread wheat cultivars were crossed in order to evaluate the mode of inheritance and combining ability and the correlation of the grain's physical properties. Analysis of variance for combining ability showed that both additive and non-additive gene actions were involved in controlling most of the traits. Magnitudes of general combining ability (GCA) for all features except grain weight (GW) and grain height (GH) were higher than those of specific combining ability (SCA) The effect of general combining ability was more prominent for 8 out of 10 traits in accordance with ratio of GCA:SCA. Path coefficient analysis showed that grain width (GWI), number of grains per spike (GS), and grain height (GH) had the highest significant direct and indirect effect on most of the other features. The results obtained from this study might be helpful for wheat breeders trying to develop new varieties with better grain features to improve the milling and baking quality of wheat.
EFFECTIVENESS, EFFICIENCY, AND PROMPTNESS OF CLAIMS HANDLING PROCESS IN THE NIGERIAN INSURANCE INDUSTRY

This study was designed with the aim of investigating the effectiveness, efficiency and promptness of claims handling process within the Nigerian insurance industry. To this end, the researchers have been able to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of claims handling process and thus, examine its promptness in relation to the organizational productivity of insurance companies in Nigeria. The study employed a cross-sectional type of survey design. A judgmental sampling technique was employed and relevant data were gathered through the use of structured questionnaire. The sample population consisted of 107 respondents made up of some members of staff within claims department drawn from 33 insurance companies which were selected from the directory of member companies. The major statistical technique employed for this study was a One Sample T-test. Two hypotheses were tested in this study. The hypotheses tested in the study found that managing claims effectively and efficiently will significantly affect operational process in claims management and thus, promptness in claims handling processes does essentially assist in fraud detection and prevention. The study recommends that claims manager should put forward strategic plans to ensuring that insurance claims complaint files are properly kept, monitored and handled for needs that may warrant its usefulness in the future. Claims handling procedures should be promptly managed to avoid deficiency in organization’s operational objectives, and lastly, Government should ammonize their resources and technical knowhow with the Nigerian insurance industry in ensuring that insurance claims are well designed to curtail fraudulent claims experienced in the past.
Evaluating the in-situ effectiveness of indoor environment guidelines on occupant satisfaction

Post occupancy evaluation (POE) studies typically use a combination of occupant questionnaires and physical measurements of various aspects of the indoor environment to assess building performance. These physical measurements are often compared against published reference limits to evaluate compliance and satisfactory performance. This study investigates whether indoor environment conditions compatible with published indoor environment quality (IEQ) standards and guidelines are predictive of occupant satisfaction. Data used in this study were collected as part of two large building evaluation field studies conducted in the past eight years. Occupant questionnaire and physical measurement data from 11 office buildings across North America were used (N=194). Inputs for the analyses were demographic factors and workstation characteristics, as well as aspects of the measured physical indoor environment. Outcome variables were various measures of environmental satisfaction (i.e. lighting, acoustics/privacy, and ventilation/temperature). The results of this study suggest that occupants had higher satisfaction with lighting when measured desktop illuminance levels were within IESNA RP-1-12 (2012) recommendations. Measured sound levels and thermal conditions within reference limits did not correlate to higher occupant satisfaction in their respective categories.
Influence of knolkhol on quality characteristics of chicken meat balls

Poultry meat is a major source of high biological value protein. The incorporation of fiber in meat helps to enhance its nutritive value with added health benefits that demonstrates a relationship between a diet containing an excess of energy- dense food rich in fats and sugar and the emergence of a range of chronic disease and several others. While studying the effect of fiber incorporation on the functional parameters it was observed that cooking yield (%) and emulsion stability (%) significantly decreased and the values were 91.94 % and 91.13 % in control and 87.28 % and 87.01 % in case of T7 (18% KnolKhol powder). The physico chemical analysis revealed that with addition of Knolkhol powder (3%) level, the pH decreased from 6.31 to 6.26, TBARS from 0.39 to 0.33 (mg malonaldehyde /Kg), ash content from 2.60 to 2.52 % crude protein 17.15 to 17.10 %, whereas moisture increased from 66.06 to 67.11 %, crude fiber from 0.58 to 0.65 %. Coliform were not evident in the stored samples up to 30 days of storage, however psychrophyll count was found after 30 days of storage. The total psychrophillic count in control samples was 0.36 (log cfu/g) which increased to 0.81 (log cfu/g) with addition of 25% Sweet Corn paste.
Self-regulation of healthy eating: the role of motivation and approach-avoidance goals

Supervisory Committee Dr. Frederick M.E. Grouzet, Department of Psychology Supervisor Dr. Scott M. Hofer, Department of Psychology Departmental Member Research on healthy eating motivation has shown that people who are autonomously motivated tend to engage in healthier eating behaviours than people with controlled forms of motivation (Ng et al., 2012; Verstuyf et al., 2012). However, healthy eating requires both trying to eat healthy foods (i.e., approach goals) and trying to avoid unhealthy foods (i.e., avoidance goals), and previous research on the association between motivation and approach-avoidance eating goals is mixed (Harrison et al., 2011; Otis & Pelletier, 2008). In the current study, we explored the relationship between motivation and approach-avoidance goals using a 21-day daily diary design. Our findings indicated that approach goals were more difficult than avoidance goals and that higher relative autonomous motivation was associated with greater approach goal success, but not avoidance goal success. We also investigated the relationship between goal specificity, the temporal scope of approach-avoidance goals, and goal success/failure. Our findings are consistent with previous research on motivation and goal difficulty (Aitken et al., 2016; Green-Demers et al., 1997), but our approach-avoidance goal difficulty findings warrant further investigation.
Provincial Nominee Programs: An Evaluation of the Earnings and Retention Rates of Nominees

Provincial Nominee Programs have increased the role of the provinces in selecting economic class immigrants to Canada. Despite the growing importance of the Nominee programs, relatively little is known about the outcomes of immigrants landing through these programs. In this paper, we use administrative data to compare the earnings and retention rates of Nominees with federal economic class immigrants in the first two years after landing. We find that Nominees had substantially higher earnings. However, Manitoba was the only province where Nominees were more likely to stay in the nominating province than observationally equivalent federal economic class immigrants. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J61; J31
Dynamics of phonological coding in bilingual visual word perception

Three experiments investigated whether perception of a spelling-to-sound inconsistent word such as MOOD involves coding of inappropriate phonology caused by knowledge of enemy neighbors (e.g., BLOOD) in non-native speakers. In a new bimodal matching task, Dutch-English bilinguals judged the correspondence between a printed English word and a speech segment that was or was not the printed word's rime. Evidence for coding of inappropriate phonology was obtained with trials in which the speech segment was derived from an English enemy neighbor. In such trials, error rates increased significantly relative to control trials. This effect was also found when speech segments were derived from Dutch enemy neighbors, which suggests inappropriate coding of cross-language phonology. These findings are consistent with a strong phonological theory of word perception (Frost, 1998), in which phonological coding is essentially a language non-selective process.
Free Convective Flow of Electrically Conducting and Viscous Immiscible Fluid Flow in a Vertical Channel in the Presence of First-Order Chemical Reaction

In this paper, the effects of chemical reaction on free convective flow of electrically conducting and viscous incompressible immiscible fluids are analyzed. The coupled nonlinear equations governing the heat and mass transfer are solved analytically and numerically with appropriate boundary conditions for each fluid and the solutions have been matched at the interface. The analytical solutions are solved by using regular perturbation method valid for small values of perturbation parameter and numerically by using finite difference method. The numerical results for various values of thermal Grashof number, mass Grashof number, Hartman number, viscosity ratio, width ratio, conductivity ratio, and chemical reaction parameter have been presented graphically in the presence and in the absence of electric field load parameter. In addition, the closed form expression for volumetric flow rate, Nusselt number, species concentration, and total heat rate added to the flow is also analyzed. The solutions obtained by finite difference method and perturbation method agree very well to the order of 10−4 for small values of perturbation parameter.
Explaining differences in job retention between alien and nonalien workers after an in-company training

This study focuses on the job retention of unemployed workers, after they attended a subsidized in company training programme in Flanders. Using a new large scale dataset of the Flemish Labour Exchange, we look for differences in the probability of employment between aliens and nonaliens during the 36 months following their on the job training. We further investigate whether differences persist after controlling for several socio-economic characteristics and labour market related variables. Estimating a modified probit model we find that, on average, being an alien lowers the probability of employment after training by approximately 15%. This effect reduces to 10% when controlling for other variables. The effect of education on a trainee's employment chances differs for aliens and nonaliens. Aliens have a markedly lower return on investment in education. Good language skills and a longer in company training period also increase employment probability, but more so for aliens. Other control variables do not significantly improve the explanatory power of the model. The main conclusion is that even after a tailored on the job training, aliens still lag behind nonaliens in terms of employment success.
RISK REGULATIONS AND DISCLOSURE IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: AN INSTITUTIONAL THEORY ANALYSIS

The paper aims at exploring the social, political and economic forces underlying the development and the deployment of risk disclosure regulations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It synthesizes an institutional theory framework in order to link the UAE institutional environment to the UAE corporations’ practices associated with risk disclosure. Drawing on DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) notions of “isomorphic mechanisms”, Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) notions of “sagacious conformity” and Oliver’s (1991) notion of “strategic choice”, the paper explores the legitimation processes behind risk disclosure regulations in the UAE and, at the same time, reveals how managers put into effect and deploy these regulations. The paper relies, primarily, on the discourse analysis of textual data published in legislations, newspapers articles and annual reports published by some of the UAE corporations listed in Abu Dhabi and Dubai financial markets. The paper finds that the UAE institutional context mainly the country’s aspiration to join global security markets, regulatory framework and accountancy profession activities excretes pressures on individual corporations to put into effect risk disclosure regulations. In response, the UAE corporations adopt risk regulations as a “strategic disclosure”, or as Oliver (1991) calls a “strategic choice”, that enables those corporations to communicate a positive image to wider stakeholders. The paper adds to the literature relating to the institutional development behind risk disclosure and the disclosure management literature in emerging economies countries.
Assessing the degree of plug flow in oxidation flow reactors (OFRs): a study on a potential aerosol mass (PAM) reactor

Abstract. Oxidation flow reactors (OFRs) have been developed to achieve high degrees of oxidant exposures over relatively short space times (defined as the ratio of reactor volume to the volumetric flow rate). While, due to their increased use, attention has been paid to their ability to replicate realistic tropospheric reactions by modeling the chemistry inside the reactor, there is a desire to customize flow patterns. This work demonstrates the importance of decoupling tracer signal of the reactor from that of the tubing when experimentally obtaining these flow patterns. We modeled the residence time distributions (RTDs) inside the Washington University Potential Aerosol Mass (WU-PAM) reactor, an OFR, for a simple set of configurations by applying the tank-in-series (TIS) model, a one-parameter model, to a deconvolution algorithm. The value of the parameter, N, is close to unity for every case except one having the highest space time. Combined, the results suggest that volumetric flow rate affects mixing patterns more than use of our internals. We selected results from the simplest case, at 78 s space time with one inlet and one outlet, absent of baffles and spargers, and compared the experimental F curve to that of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. The F curves, which represent the cumulative time spent in the reactor by flowing material, match reasonably well. We value that the use of a small aspect ratio reactor such as the WU-PAM reduces wall interactions; however sudden apertures introduce disturbances in the flow, and suggest applying the methodology of tracer testing described in this work to investigate RTDs in OFRs to observe the effect of modified inlets, outlets and use of internals prior to application (e.g., field deployment vs. laboratory study).
ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL STUDY AND PHYTOCHEMICAL SCREENING OF THREE PLANTS (ASTERACEAE FAMILY) FROM THE REGION OF SOUTH WEST ALGERIA

Anvillea Radiata, Cotula Cinerea and Matricaria Pubescens are plants belonging to Asteraceae family, they are commonly used in traditional medicine in south west of Algeria (northern Sahara), for the treatment of several diseases.The aqueous extracts of the aerial parts (leaves and stems) of these plants were subjected to phytochemical screening tests to demonstrate the existence of natural products (alkaloids, saponins, flavonoids, terpens . etc.) the secondary metabolisms of these may have pharmacological and therapeutic properties.
Modeling particle nucleation and growth over northern California during the 2010 CARES campaign

Abstract. Accurate representation of the aerosol lifecycle requires adequate modeling of the particle number concentration and size distribution in addition to their mass, which is often the focus of aerosol modeling studies. This paper compares particle number concentrations and size distributions as predicted by three empirical nucleation parameterizations in the Weather Research and Forecast coupled with chemistry (WRF-Chem) regional model using 20 discrete size bins ranging from 1 nm to 10 μm. Two of the parameterizations are based on H2SO4, while one is based on both H2SO4 and organic vapors. Budget diagnostic terms for transport, dry deposition, emissions, condensational growth, nucleation, and coagulation of aerosol particles have been added to the model and are used to analyze the differences in how the new particle formation parameterizations influence the evolving aerosol size distribution. The simulations are evaluated using measurements collected at surface sites and from a research aircraft during the Carbonaceous Aerosol and Radiative Effects Study (CARES) conducted in the vicinity of Sacramento, California. While all three parameterizations captured the temporal variation of the size distribution during observed nucleation events as well as the spatial variability in aerosol number, all overestimated by up to a factor of 2.5 the total particle number concentration for particle diameters greater than 10 nm. Using the budget diagnostic terms, we demonstrate that the combined H2SO4 and low-volatility organic vapor parameterization leads to a different diurnal variability of new particle formation and growth to larger sizes compared to the parameterizations based on only H2SO4. At the CARES urban ground site, peak nucleation rates are predicted to occur around 12:00 Pacific (local) standard time (PST) for the H2SO4 parameterizations, whereas the highest rates were predicted at 08:00 and 16:00 PST when low-volatility organic gases are included in the parameterization. This can be explained by higher anthropogenic emissions of organic vapors at these times as well as lower boundary-layer heights that reduce vertical mixing. The higher nucleation rates in the H2SO4-organic parameterization at these times were largely offset by losses due to coagulation. Despite the different budget terms for ultrafine particles, the 10–40 nm diameter particle number concentrations from all three parameterizations increased from 10:00 to 14:00 PST and then decreased later in the afternoon, consistent with changes in the observed size and number distribution. We found that newly formed particles could explain up to 20–30 % of predicted cloud condensation nuclei at 0.5 % supersaturation, depending on location and the specific nucleation parameterization. A sensitivity simulation using 12 discrete size bins ranging from 1 nm to 10 μm diameter gave a reasonable estimate of particle number and size distribution compared to the 20 size bin simulation, while reducing the associated computational cost by ~ 36 %.
Ethnocentric Behaviour and Business Performance of Multinational Enterprises (MNES): Evidence From South-West Nigeria

The globalised world has become more integrated and has witnessed an unprecedented dispersal of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) across various nations and regions of the world. Most of these MNEs advertently or inadvertently exhibit tendencies that show them off as ethnocentric- possessing superior culture than those of their host country. This study assessed the effects of ethnocentric behaviours on the performance of MNEs in the South West of Nigeria. Adopting a survey design, the study made use of primary data collected mainly through administering a set of questionnaire to 207 management staff of selected MNEs from Oyo, Lagos and Ogun states respectively. Findings inter alia revealed that: engaging expatriates in strategic positions by MNE's leads to increased operating costs; foreign culture of MNE's home country negatively affects the local acceptance of management techniques by employees in host countries and MNE's standardized marketing strategies encouraged customers' loyalty and patronage in the Nigeria business environments. The work among other things, recommends that local employees in host nations must be incorporated into key decisions to aid MNE's continuous effectiveness. The work, in addition to that, also advised that MNE's should guide against culture shock i.e. the disorientation, cultural risks and stress associated with being in a foreign environment.
Evaluating the influence of land use, drought and reach isolation on the occurrence of freshwater mussel species in the lower Flint River Basin, Georgia (U.S.A.)

SUMMARY 1. North American freshwater mussels have been subjected to multiple stressors in recent decades that have contributed to declines in the status and distribution of many species. However, considerable uncertainty exists regarding the relative influence of these factors on observed population declines. 2. We used an occupancy modelling approach to quantify relationships between mussel species occurrence and various site- and catchment-level factors, including land cover, stream size, the occurrence of drought and reach isolation due to impoundment for 21 mussel species native to the lower Flint River Basin, Georgia, U.S.A. 3. Our modelling approach accounted for potential biases associated with both incomplete detection and misidentification of species, which are frequently not accommodated as sources of bias in freshwater mussel studies. 4. Modelling results suggested that mussel species were, on average, four times less likely to be present following severe drought, but the negative effects of drought declined rapidly with increasing stream size. Similarly, mussel species were 15 times less likely to occupy small streams that were isolated from mainstem tributaries by impoundments. 5. This study provides insight into the effects of natural and anthropogenic factors on freshwater mussel species. Our findings add to a growing body of literature aimed at improving understanding of the predominant factors influencing freshwater mussel populations and fostering the development of more informed and effective conservation strategies.
The State-Level Risk and Protective Factors of Suicide for American Indians and Alaska Natives

Objective. To identify the risk and protective factors of suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Methods. Using a negative binomial regression analysis and state-level data, pooled data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2005-2010), and the 2000 U.S. Census to examine the state-level predictors of suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Results. An increase in the states’ urban population is associated with increased suicide rates among American Indians and Alaska Natives. An increase in the young male population is associated with decreased suicide risk for the population. No association was found related to religious adherence, or gun ownership. Conclusion. The results underscore the need for further demographic controls in the assessment of suicide for American Indians and Alaska Natives.