Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Membership Characteristics and Financial Performance of Investment Groups Investing in Securities Market in Kenya

Investment groups provide a system of mobilizing together capital, lowering risks per individual and availing cheap capital for microenterprise growth. How the membership structure dimensions of an investment group affect its financial makeup is not well understood. The objective of the study was to assess the role of membership characteristics in the financial performance of investment groups in Kenya. Descriptive survey design was used and stratified sampling technique applied to select group members and investment groups. The data collected was analyzed using inferential statistics via regression analysis. The results indicate that group membership structure dimensions, such as experience, gender, occupation, business training and ethnic diversity, has a positive and statistically significant effect on financial performance of investment groups, which participate in securities markets in Kenya. Policies that entrench gender issues in investment groups and encourage creation of investment groups which are ethically balanced and occupationally diverse are critical in the success of such groups. Policies should be crafted by the investments group lobby outfits, which will facilitate training programs and forums to educate the members on investment skills and proper management practices as well as need for diversification of group investment portfolios. Keywords: Group Membership Characteristics; Group Financial Performance; Group Ethnic Diversity; Kenya Association of Investment Groups; Chama Investments. DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-10-15 Publication date: May 31 st 2020
The Effect of Female Prairie Vole (Microtus ochrogaster) Immigrants on Space Use of Conspecific Female Residents

Abstract We tested the hypothesis that female prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) residents change their space use patterns in response to immigration pressure. We established prairie vole populations in four 32 × 32-m enclosures during 2000 and 2001. Four populations were supplemented with adult female immigrants and the other four served as control populations in which no females were introduced. Using radio-telemetry, we monitored and compared the home ranges and movement distances of residents vs. immigrants within the same enclosures and residents in enclosures with and without immigrants. Immigrants had significantly larger home ranges and moved greater distances during the evening hours than residents. Resident home ranges and hourly movements were unaffected by the presence of immigrants. The results suggested that resident females could successfully defend their territories without changes in their home ranges and movement distances. However, due to our experimental design, we could not exclude the possibility that female immigrants affected the space use of male residents.
ON THE OCCURRENCE OF CYANOBACTERIA IN THE MADEIRA RIVER IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON

The spatial-temporal variation of cyanobacteria was studied from 2002 to 2007 on the Madeira River, a river with muddy waters of Amazon origins in the Andes, whose main characteristics are the massive amount of material in suspension and relative wealth of nutrients and inorganic ions. The presence of cyanobacteria in Madeira River was not associated with high levels of pollution or organic contents. Unique species of white waters and typical species of clear waters were found. The genera Oscillatoria and Anabaena were predominant, with a significant concentration of species (46.8%), highest number of taxa (63%) and higher values of species richness (S) and diversity index (H0) on the headwaters during the high water levels. About 57% of the identified taxa were considered accidentals. The traditional communities consume water from the river without prior treatment, so it can not be ruled out intoxication by cyanotoxins.
E-tailing service recovery and customer satisfaction and loyalty: Does perceived distributive justice matter?

We built an e-tailing service recovery research framework to explore the effect of online service recovery on postrecovery customer satisfaction and loyalty after service failure. We also investigated the mediating role of customer perceived distributive justice in the relationship between service recovery and recovery effects. We conducted a survey with 330 undergraduate students in Beijing. The results showed that both psychological and tangible recovery were significantly related to customer perceived distributive justice. Psychological recovery and distributive justice also positively influenced postrecovery customer satisfaction. The positive impact of tangible recovery on postrecovery satisfaction was not significant. Psychological and tangible recovery and distributive justice all positively affected customer loyalty. The mediating role of distributive justice in the relationship between online service recovery and recovery effects was also confirmed. These findings show that e-tailers should pay more attention to both psychological and tangible recovery after service failure to retain customer satisfaction and loyalty.
ISOLATION AND IDENTIFICATION OF LACTIC ACID BACTERIA IN THE PEOPLE'S MOUTH AND STUDYING ON THEIR INHIBITORY EFFECT ON SOME ENTROPATHOGENIC BACTERIA

Introduction: Predominant organisms in plaques are of the genus Streptococcus, with Streptococcus mutans being the species most important in the formation of dental caries. Another organism that is important in the development of caries is the Lactobacillus. Lactobacillus species are not important in the initiation of caries but in the continuation. The aim of this study was to isolation and identifies of Lactic Acid Bacteria from the mouth in different ages, determination of pH and study the inhib itory effect of Isolated Lactobacilli on some entropathogens (Salmonella, Shigella and Escherchia coli.)
Balitora Brucei (Gray) and Glyptothorax Telchitta (Hamilton), Two new Reports for Arunachal Pradesh, India

The authors are thankful to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India for providing financial support; to Shri. D.R. K. Sastri, Officer-in-Charge, Andaman and Nicobar Regional Station, Zoological Survey of India, Port Blair for permitting us to make use of the library and laboratory facilities; to Shri. N. Yesu Rathnam, Divisional Forest Officer and Shri. B. Chatterjee, Wildlife Warden, Campbell Bay for encouragement and facilities, and to the Indian Coast Guard for logistic support.
ASSESSMENT OF ARGOS LOCATION ACCURACY FROM SATELLITE TAGS DEPLOYED ON CAPTIVE GRAY SEALS

The Argos satellite system is commonly used to track and relay behavioral data from marine mammals, but their underwater habit results in a high proportion of locations of non-guaranteed accuracy (location classes (LC) O, A, and B). The accuracy of these locations is poorly documented in marine mammals. We assessed the accuracy of all LCs on four juvenile gray seals fitted with Argos satellite relay data loggers and held in captivity in an outdoor tank for a total of 61 seal-days. Four hundred and twenty-six locations were obtained from seals in captivity, and their latitude and longitude error was assessed before and after filtering, following MConnell et al. (1992). There was significantly more error in longitude than latitude in all LCs except I. C A. The ratio of the standard deviations of longitude : latitude ranged from 1.77 (LC 3) to 2.58 (LC 1). Filtering had very little effect on errors in LCs 3-1, but in the remaining LCs filtering resulted in error reductions ranging from 8% to 63%. In LCs O, A, and B, error reduction was greater in the 95th percentile errors, especially in longitude. The averages of the latitude and longitude 68th percentile errors and those predicted by Argos (in brackets) were 226 (150), 372 (350), and 757 (1000) m for LCs 3, 2, and 1 respectively. Both latitude and longitude errors of LCs > O were normally distributed. Both filtered and unfiltered LC A locations were of a similar accuracy to LC 1 locations, and considerably better than LC O locations.
Prevalence of Ever Self-Reported Asthma and Associated Factors among University Students in Iran: A Population-Based Study

Background: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disease with regressive episodic symptoms. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of asthma ever (lifetime prevalence of asthma) and the associated factors among newly entered students in public universities in Iran. Methods: This population-based cross-sectional study was part of the “Mental and Physical Health Assessment of University Students in Iran. ” The target population included all newly admitted students (N = 151,671) in 74 public universities in 28 provinces (out of the 31 provinces) in Iran. STATA version 12 was used for calculating the descriptive statistics. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were employed to identify relationships between asthma and socioeconomic variables. The level of significance was set at 95% confidence interval. Results: Of a total of 79,277 participants, 55.23% (n = 43,785) and 44.77% (n = 35,492) were female and male, respectively. The prevalence of ever asthma among studied student was 1.89%. Of all the participants with asthma, 88.43% (85.49%–90.84%) were nonsmokers. More than 20% of the subjects were physically inactive. The respondents who revealed smoking >10 cigarettes/week were about 1.22 (1.036–1.437) times more likely to suffer from asthma disease (0.017), as compared with those who were not smoking. Conclusions: Our study provides valuable information about the prevalence of asthma ever symptoms among university students in Iran. In fact, the results of this study can fill information gaps concerning the affected groups in Iran, and even worldwide.
Dynamic Response of Articulated Offshore Wind Turbines under Different Water Depths

Focusing on the transitional depth offshore area from 50 m to 75 m, types of articulated foundations are proposed for supporting the NREL 5 MW offshore wind turbine. To investigate the dynamic behaviors under various water depths, three articulated foundations were adopted and numerical simulations were conducted in the time domain. An in-house code was chosen to simulate the dynamic response of the articulated offshore wind turbine. The aerodynamic load on rotating blades and the wind pressure load on tower are calculated based on the blade element momentum theory and the empirical formula, respectively. The hydrodynamic load is simulated by 3D potential flow theory. The motions of foundation, the aerodynamic performance of the wind turbine, and the loads on the articulated joint are documented and compared in different cases. According to the simulation, all three articulated offshore wind turbines show great dynamic performance and totally meet the requirement of power generation under the rated operational condition. Moreover, the comparison is based on time histories and spectra among these responses. The result shows that dynamic responses of the shallower one oscillate more severely compared to the other designs.
Hierarchical Archimedean Copulas for MATLAB and Octave: The HACopula Toolbox

To extend the current implementation of copulas in MATLAB to non-elliptical distributions in arbitrary dimensions enabling for asymmetries in the tails, the toolbox HACopula provides functionality for modeling with hierarchical (or nested) Archimedean copulas. This includes their representation as MATLAB objects, evaluation, sampling, estimation and goodness-of-fit testing, as well as tools for their visual representation or computation of corresponding matrices of Kendall's tau and tail dependence coefficients. These are first presented in a quick-and-simple manner and then elaborated in more detail to show the full capability of HACopula. As an example, sampling, estimation and goodness-of-fit of a 100-dimensional hierarchical Archimedean copula is presented, including a speed up of its computationally most demanding part. The toolbox is also compatible with Octave, where no support for copulas in more than two dimensions is currently provided.
The role of management commitment of service quality through job embeddedness on service recovery performance / Norhamizan Hamir

Service recovery is a corrective action that is carried out immediately by the service provider if the service offered went wrong. The employee is responsible to handle the situation in order to ensure that the customer who might not be satisfied with the situation that happens turns to be satisfied. One of the concepts of the service recovery that have been discussed in the literature is related to service recovery performance. The researcher defined that service recovery performance is to focus on the performance of frontline employees. Service recovery performance is not about a strategy or action to handle a service recovery situation which among others are an apology, giving discounted price and compensation but more towards the behavior of the frontline employees getting engage in resolving the situation. Past researchers have identified that the management commitment to service quality which represented by several indicators may lead to the service recovery performance of the employees. However, the relationship has a missing link. The objective of this conceptual paper is to further discuss the relationship between management commitment to service quality and service recovery performance with the present mediating role of job embeddedness among frontline hotel employees in four and a five-star hotels. The proposition suggested in this paper may require support with further empirical findings to be carried out.
Vegetation Survey of Dean Hills Nature Preserve, Fayette County, Illinois

Abstract A study of the vegetation of Dean Hills Nature Preserve in Fayette County, Illinois was undertaken to document the composition and structure of the vascular flora and to provide information for land management decisions. A total of 313 species in 85 families and 204 genera were collected at the 30-hectare preserve which occurs on a glacial kame and has a rugged ridge and ravine topography. Mature mesic and dry-mesic forest covers much of the preserve. The canopy is dominated by white oak (Quercus alba), red oak (Quercus rubra), and sugar maple (Acer saccharum). Data suggest that sugar maple is regenerating more successfully than the oaks. This same result has been found in several other studies of oak-hickory forests in Illinois. If management such as prescribed burning is not implemented, it is predicted that sugar maple will increase and oaks will decrease in dominance within the preserve.
Integrating tree-based kernels and support vector machine for remote sensing image classification

Random forest (RF) is a popular ensemble learning method that is widely used for the analysis of remote sensing images. RF also has connections with kernel-based method. Its tree-based structure can generate a Random Forest Kernel (RFK) that provides an alternative to common kernels such as Radial Basis Function (RBF) in kernelbased methods such as Support Vector Machine (SVM). Using RFK in an SVM has been shown to outperform both RF and SVM-RBF (i.e., using an RBF kernel in an SVM) in classification tasks with a high number of features. Here, we explore new designs of RFKs for remote sensing image classification. Different RF structural parameters and characteristics are used to generate various RFKs. In particular, we explore the use of RF’s depth, the number of branches between terminal nodes of trees, and the predicted class probabilities for designing and evaluating new RFK. Two depth-based kernel are proposed: an RFK at the optimal depth, and a multi-scale one created by combining RFKs at multiple depths. We evaluate the proposed kernels within an SVM by classifying a time series of Worldview-2 images, and by designing experiments having a various number of features. Benchmarking the new RFKs against RBF shows that the newly proposed kernels outperform RBF kernel for the experiments with a higher number of features. For the experiments with a lower number of features, RFKs and RBF kernel perform at about the same level. Benchmarking against standard RF also shows the general outperformance of the proposed RFKs in SVM. In all experiments, the best results are obtained with a depth-optimized RFK.
Functional Connectivity Between the Trigeminal Main Sensory Nucleus and the Trigeminal Motor Nucleus

The present study shows new evidence of functional connectivity between the trigeminal main sensory (NVsnpr) and motor (NVmt) nuclei in rats and mice. NVsnpr neurons projecting to NVmt are most highly concentrated in its dorsal half. Their electrical stimulation induced multiphasic excitatory synaptic responses in trigeminal MNs and evoked calcium responses mainly in the jaw-closing region of NVmt. Induction of rhythmic bursting in NVsnpr neurons by local applications of BAPTA also elicited rhythmic firing or clustering of postsynaptic potentials in trigeminal motoneurons, further emphasizing the functional relationship between these two nuclei in terms of rhythm transmission. Biocytin injections in both nuclei and calcium-imaging in one of the two nuclei during electrical stimulation of the other revealed a specific pattern of connectivity between the two nuclei, which organization seemed to critically depend on the dorsoventral location of the stimulation site within NVsnpr with the most dorsal areas of NVsnpr projecting to the dorsolateral region of NVmt and intermediate areas projecting to ventromedial NVmt. This study confirms and develops earlier experiments by exploring the physiological nature and functional topography of the connectivity between NVsnpr and NVmt that was demonstrated in the past with neuroanatomical techniques.
Evaluation of Natural Sources of Carotenoid Pigments from Rosa rubiginosa on Growth, Survival and Coloration of Xiphophorus helleri Fish Fry

2 Abstract: The present study was to investigate the effect of natural sources of carotenoid pigments from Rosa rubiginosa petals on growth, survival and coloration of ornamental swordtail Xiphophorus helleri fish fry. Homogeneous groups of swordtail fish fry were fed both a control (formulated diet) and three different supplement diet (including 200, 1000 and 2000 mg/kg petals extract), twice a day. The feeding experiment was continued for a period of 28 days. The experimental observation was carried out at seven days interval for 28 days. The coloration was enhanced in all the treated groups in respect with their diet concentrations but no change was observed in coloration of the control group. The maximum coloration was found in the treated group III with reddish orange tint from soft orange color. Specific growth rate (SGR) were significantly different among groups by the various dietary treatments (P>0.05). The maximum weight and length was recorded in treated group III with 0.30±0.01 g and 2.96±0.05 cm. The higher survival rate of 96.6±0.57% was recorded in the treated group III. The present study it could be concludes that the natural sources of carotenoid pigments extract from R. rubiginosa petals have a positive role in the growth, survival and colour development of fish fry.
Seasonal Abundance of Aphidophagous Hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) and Their Population Levels In and Outside Mediterranean Sweet Pepper Greenhouses

Abstract The species composition and the population dynamics of aphidophagous syrphids (Diptera: Syrphidae) in polyethylene-covered greenhouses of sweet pepper (Capsicum spp.) were studied over a 3-yr period in southeastern Spain. Modified Malaise traps were used to sample the adult flies within the greenhouses, accompanied by direct sampling of syrphid larvae on the sweet pepper plants. Over a 2-yr period, modified Malaise traps also were used to record the movement of syrphids into the greenhouses from the surrounding environment. Additionally, the effect of opening or closing the side walls of the greenhouse (ventilation management) on syrphids was assessed by census techniques. In total, nine species of aphidophagous syrphids were found as larvae, preying on aphids on sweet pepper plants. Three of these species, Eupeodes corollae (F.), Episyrphus balteatus (De Geer), and Sphaerophoria rueppellii (Wiedemann), made up 98% of the larvae collected. There was a temporal succession during the season, attributed to temperature, and variability among years related to drought. S. rueppellii seems to be the most adapted to survival in the high temperatures and dry conditions. Modified Malaise traps proved effective for monitoring adult syrphids in greenhouses, but they also captured species whose larvae are not associated with the aphid colonies in sweet pepper. This indicates that when studying aphidophagous syrphids, sampling of adults by Malaise trap should be accompanied by sampling of larvae. Larger numbers of syrphids were captured outside of the greenhouse than inside. Opening the side walls of greenhouses increased syrphid numbers within it, and this should be considered in pest management regimes.
ASSESSMENT OF MICROBIAL CONTAMINATION OF INDIAN PAPER CURRENCY NOTES IN CIRCULATION

Money, whether in the form of coins or paper notes is perhaps the most widely handled article by people everyday throughout the world. Money is used as a medium for exchange for goods and services, settlement of debts and for deferred payments in economic activities. Currency notes represent a universal medium for the transmission of bacteria in the environment and among humans. There is a possibility that currency notes might act as environmental vehicles for the transmission of pathogenic organisms. The present investigation was carried out on one hundred and twenty Indian paper currency notes of all the denominations obtained from different occupational groups in Coimbatore City, TamilNadu, India. Assessment revealed active participation of the following organisms as Escherichia coli, Bacillus spp, Klebsiella spp, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella spp and Pseudomonas spp. The study suggested that Indian paper currency notes are highly contaminated with pathogenic microorganisms and this contamination may play a significant role in transmission of infectious diseases. Hence, great care must be taken while handling money during the preparation and handling of food to avoid cross contamination.
The influence of vitamin D receptor gene polymorphism on basal cell carcinoma development in the Polish population

Introduction: Basal cell carcinomas (BCC) are the most common cancers in Caucasian populations. Their patho- genesis is not fully known, but genetic and environmental factors are relevant. Among genetic disturbances, genes encoding intracellular signalling pathways and regulatory proteins are considered the most important. In recent years associations between polymorphisms in the VDR gene and different internal organs and skin neoplasms have been found. Aim: To assess the frequency of FokI, BsmI, TaqI and ApaI polymorphisms in the VDR gene in patients with BCC. Material and methods: VDR polymorphisms were assessed in 142 BCC patients using PCR-RFLP. Results: The presence of TT genotype in FokI polymorphism was linked to the highest risk for BCC development (OR = 10.145, p < 0.001). Other genotypes such as GT in ApaI and TT and TC in TaqI also statistically increased the risk for BCC, but these associations were weaker. No correlation between the presence of any analysed polymor- phisms and constitutive features such as hair or eye colour or skin phototype was found. Conclusions: The obtained results confirm the role of the polymorphisms in the VDR gene in the development of basal cell carcinomas in patients of Polish origin.