Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Malted Barley Improved the Structure and Function of Gastrocnemius Muscle of Hypercholesterolemic Mother Rats and their Offspring

Consumption of processed high cholesterol diet is associated with the development of metabolic diseases. The present work evaluated the role of soaked barley on decreasing the high cholesterol level that impairing the structure and function of the gastrocnemius muscle of mother rats and their offspring. Sixty virgin female albino rats and twenty healthy males (100g body weight) were used in the experimental work. Mating was carried out and pregnancy was determined. Pregnant were arranged into 4 groups (n=15); control (C), barley supplemented group (B) (20%), hypercholesterolemic-group (H) (3%) and hypercholesterolemic & malted barley group (H+B). The third (H) and fourth groups (HB) were consumed hypercholesterolemic diet for 4 months prior to conception and through gestation and lactation period. The fourth group supplemented malted barley containing a hypercholesterolemic diet during gestation and lactation period. At 21 days post-partum, the mother rats and their offspring were anesthetized with sodium phenobarbitone (9.1 mg/kg) and sacrificed. Blood was collected from heart and their sera were separated. Also, the gastrocnemius of both mother and their offspring were removed. Histological, transmission electron microscopy and biochemical investigations were carried out. The present findings showed that the high cholesterol diet possessed abnormal expression of protein bands (SDS-PAGE), associated with poor expression of lactic dehydrogenase (LDH) and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) isoenzymes coincides with damage of the gastrocnemius muscle fibers. The elevated sera cholesterol level induces a decrease of the muscle contents of glutathione-s-transferase and superoxide dismutase. These were followed by increased the lipid peroxidation malondialdhyde (MDA) and apoptic marker caspase-3. On the other side, dietary supplementation of barley plus a hypercholesterolemic diet increased the muscle contents of the assayed antioxidant enzymes and decreased MDA, caspase 3 and LDH isoenzyme expression. This led to improvement of the muscle structure. The authors concluded that malted barley contained flavonoids and phytonutrients with a potent antioxidant activity which reduced the oxidative stress resulted from ingestion of hypercholesterolemic diet. This led to improvement of the myoblast structures in mother rats and their offspring.
Relative Abundance of Helicoverpa armigera (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) on Different Host Crops in India and the Role of These Crops as Natural Refuge for Bacillus thuringiensis Cotton

Abstract Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) infests many economically important crops in India, including cotton, pigeonpea, chickpea, sunflower, corn, chili, tomato, and okra. These crops are cultivated in proximity to each other in central and southern India. The current study examined the relative abundance of H. armigera on different host crops within a crop mosaic. Field studies conducted over two growing seasons (2000–2001 and 2001–2002) indicated differences in egg and larval densities among the host plant species. All of the host crops supported eggs and larvae of H. armigera, but the populations on pigeonpea and chickpea were significantly greater than on cotton and other host crops. Egg numbers also were significantly higher on sunflower, okra, and tomato than on cotton, but larval numbers were not significantly different from cotton at comparable times. Both egg and larval numbers on corn and chili were not significantly different from those on cotton. This study demonstrates that a number of host crops of H. armigera support large populations at the same time that cotton is infested. Thus, these crops may act as important sources of refuge for Bacillus thuringiensis cotton plantings in central and southern India.
Zum Einfluβ interspezifischer Konkurrenz in einer Kleegrasmischung auf die Futterqualität

The Influence of Interspecific Competition in a Grass-clover Mixture on Nutritional Value In a field experiment, the influence of interspecific competition on the nutritional value of different species in a grass-clover mixture was studied. The species were Trifolium pratense and Dactylis glomerata or Lolittm multiflorum, respectively. N-fertilization was varied in two steps (20 and 70 kg N ha-1 cut-1). The swards were cut four times a year, and each species was harvested separately. The content of net energy (NEL), crude protein (CP), water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC) and minerals in each species were determined. The NEL content of the species was only slightly influenced by mixed cropping. The CP concent of the grasses was higher in mixtures with Trifolium pratense than in monocultures. The WSC content of the grasses decreased with an increasing ratio of Trifolium pratense in the mixtures. This was due to a higher N-supply in the grasses in mixtures compared with monocultures on the one hand, and shading by Trifolium pratense on the other. In a few cases, the WSC content of Trifolium pratense was reduced by mixed cropping with the grasses. The mineral content of three species was clearly influenced by interspecific competition. The extent and the direction of the changes were different in the particular cuts and depended on the growing conditions and yield ratios of the species in the different mixtures. The results show that interspecific competition has an influence on the nutritional value of the species in a grass-clover mixture.
Gendered Professional Role Confidence and Persistence of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Students

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) technology can be biased through non-representative training and testing activities leading to discriminatory and negative social consequences. The enormous potential of ML/AI to shape the future of technology underscores the need to increase the diversity of workers within the field, with one group of untapped talent being women engineers. An unresolved contradiction exists between the trend of greater woman representation in broader STEM fields and the consistently low numbers of women engineers pursuing careers in ML/AI. Furthermore, there has been a lack of tailored research investigating the potential causes of such under-representation. Professional role confidence has been shown to be a significant and positive predictor of persistence of women in STEM. However, this link has not yet been established specifically within the field of ML/AI. For this study, we surveyed targeted undergraduate students at a major international university. Students reported on their predictors of persistence including their professional role confidence in ML/AI, their experiences with discrimination, their career exposure, and their internal drivers. We present three models using Ordinal Logistic Regression to determine the effect of those predictors on Intentional Persistence. We found that higher levels of Expertise Confidence and Career Fit Confidence were related to higher levels of persistence in ML/AI careers. We also found that women who experienced discrimination from their instructors were less likely to persist in engineering and that discrimination was more prevalent for women than for men. Focusing on those predictors of intentional persistence, our study calls for efforts to correct the under-representation of women in ML/AI.
Diets of Non-Native Deer in Australia Estimated by Macroscopic Versus Microhistological Rumen Analysis

ABSTRACT Estimating diet is often an important step in understanding and managing the impacts of ungulates, particularly for non-native species, but there is uncertainty about whether rumen contents should be assessed using macroscopic or microhistological methods or both. Introduced sambar deer (Cervus unicolor) have a large and increasing distribution in south-east Australia, and there is concern about their impacts on native and non-indigenous plant species. We estimated the diets of 102 sambar deer harvested during 2007–2009 using macroscopic and microhistological rumen analysis techniques. We identified 105 plant species in the diets of sambar deer, 61 identified with both techniques and 22 identified only macroscopically or only microhistologically. Rumen species richness was 70% greater using the microhistological technique. Estimates of taxonomic (i.e., monocot and dicot) and functional (i.e., fern, shrub—tree, forb, climber, grass, and grass-like) group composition by the 2 techniques were similar. Shrubs—trees dominated the diet (macroscopic, 49.7%; microhistological, 52.7%), followed by grasses (macroscopic, 22.7%; microhistological, 17.5%) and ferns (macroscopic, 20.6%; microhistological, 22.2%). We identified 9 non-indigenous plant species, 2 of which we identified using only the microhistological technique. We detected seeds of the weed blackberry (Rubus fruticosus aggregate), sometimes in large amounts, only with the macroscopic technique, whereas we detected foliage of that species with both techniques. Both techniques classified sambar deer as an intermediate mixed feeder closer to a concentrate selector—browser than a bulk and roughage feeder. However, both techniques detected seasonal differences in the percentages of taxonomic and functional groups in the diet; sambar deer were more grazers in autumn and more browsers in spring. Our results indicate that both macroscopic and microhistological techniques may need to be used when it is important to identify plant species in the diet, as is often the case for non-native ungulates. However, either technique can be used to estimate broader taxonomic and functional diet composition, including feeding type.
CHEMICAL COMPOSITION FOR RIND, FLESH AND SEEDS OF PUMPKIN (Cucurbita pepo L) AND THEIR ANTIVIRAL ACTIVITIES

Rind Extract, flesh extract, seeds oil and defatted seeds meal are four special natural products of Pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo L.). In unique study on the rind; it's chemical analysis outcomes were; fiber 29.62%, protein 23.95% of non polar amino acids 07.46% as well as βcarotene (751.99μg/100g). While, flesh was contained fiber 11.25%, protein 15.50% of acidic amino acids 04.35%, carbohydrates 48.40% and βcarotene (3934.02μg/100g). In the same words, defatted seeds meal was composed of 07.12% fiber and 70.15% protein of 21.07% non polar amino acids. In addition, the studied three products of Pumpkin were rich in minerals (Calcium, Iron, Zinc, Copper and Selenium). On the other hand, the four dominant fatty acids of Pumpkin seeds oil profile are oleic, linoleic, palmitic and stearic acids with relative distribution of about 43.8, 33.1, 13.4 and 07.8% respectively. Which make up 98 ± 0.1% of the total amount of fatty acids as well as; it's ώ6/ώ3 ratio, was 311. In vitro antiviral activities recorded the obviously highly positive effects of rind extract, flesh extract and defatted seeds meal of Pumpkin toward Live NewCastle Disease Virus (NDV) vaccine strains, Komarov & La Sota; & Live infectious Bursitis Viruses (IBDV) vaccine strain D78 while they did not gave any positive effects with the oil of Pumpkin seeds. Furthermore studies must be doing on the four natural products of Pumpkin to evaluate their nutritional and pharmacological values by using in vivo tests, and to demonstrate the applicable values of these compounds for the prophylactic treatment of NDV and IBDV – infection and other viral studies.
SkillExplorer: Understanding the Behavior of Skills in Large Scale

Smart speakers have been popularly used around the world recently, mainly due to the convenience brought from the virtual personal assistant (VPA) which offers interactive actions through the convenient voice commands from users. Besides the built-in capabilities, VPA services can be further extended by third-party developers through skills. Similar to smartphone applications on Android and iOS markets, skills are also available on markets (e.g., Amazon, Google), attracting users together with malicious developers. Recent researches discover that malicious developers are able to route users’ requests to malicious skills without users’ consent by creating skills with similar names of legitimate ones. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior research that systematically explores the interaction behaviors of skills, mainly due to the challenges in handling skills’ inputs/outputs which are in the form of natural languages. In this paper, we propose the first systematic study on behaviors of skills, which is achieved by a suite of new grammar-based techniques including utterance extraction, question understanding, and answer generation specifically designed for skills. We build an interactive system called SkillExplorer and analyze 28,904 skills from the Amazon market and 1,897 actions from the Google market. Among these skills, we find that 1,141 skills request users’ private information without following developer specifications, which are actually demanded by markets. 68 skills continue to eavesdrop users’ private conversations, even after users have sent the command to stop them.
Deconstructing Darwin's Naturalization Conundrum in the San Juan Islands using community phylogenetics and functional traits

Darwin posed a conundrum about species invasions, postulating the importance of functional distinctiveness from the receiving native community to avoid competition, and, at the same time, the importance of shared similarity to pass environmental filters and successfully establish. Using phylogenetic distances and functional traits, we assessed this conundrum in the flora of 80 mostly uninhabited islands, where over 30% of the species are invasive. We highlight the importance of publicly available datasets to disentangle ecological processes that may drive invasion.
The Impact of Cultural Diversity on the International Joint Venture (IJV) Performance: The Case of Top Management Team of IJV Firms in Thailand

This study has focused on the mediating effect of four mediators: conflict, social integration, effective communication, and creativity on the relationship between cultural diversity of top management team and international joint venture (IJV) performance in Thailand. Also, the direct impact of cultural diversity on IJV performance has also been investigated. The Board of Investment of Thailand has provided the original dataset, an official database of IJV firms that operate in Thailand as the population of the study. Mail survey has been adopted as the main mode of data collection. The 650 postal questionnaires in Thai and English were sent to the sample companies, addressed to the target respondents of this study, the chief executive officer (CEO) or managing director of the IJV operating in Thailand. The response rate was 14%. The findings indicated that cultural diversity negatively affected on social integration. Furthermore, social integration and creativity had positive impact on IJV performance. The direct negative effect of cultural diversity on IJV performance has also been found. Last but not least, the findings showed that above-mentioned mediators partially mediated the association between cultural diversity and IJV performance. The results of this study are both consistent and contradict to previous studies. This is an original attempt to fill a knowledge gap in the literature especially in the ASEAN country context of Thailand.
Automated repair of feature interaction failures in automated driving systems

In the past years, several automated repair strategies have been proposed to fix bugs in individual software programs without any human intervention. There has been, however, little work on how automated repair techniques can resolve failures that arise at the system-level and are caused by undesired interactions among different system components or functions. Feature interaction failures are common in complex systems such as autonomous cars that are typically built as a composition of independent features (i.e., units of functionality). In this paper, we propose a repair technique to automatically resolve undesired feature interaction failures in automated driving systems (ADS) that lead to the violation of system safety requirements. Our repair strategy achieves its goal by (1) localizing faults spanning several lines of code, (2) simultaneously resolving multiple interaction failures caused by independent faults, (3) scaling repair strategies from the unit-level to the system-level, and (4) resolving failures based on their order of severity. We have evaluated our approach using two industrial ADS containing four features. Our results show that our repair strategy resolves the undesired interaction failures in these two systems in less than 16h and outperforms existing automated repair techniques.
Internal anatomy of female Paramphiascella fulvofasciata (Copepoda, Harpacticoida)

The gross internal anatomy of females of a harpacticoid copepod, Paramphiascella fulvofasciata Rosenfield and Coull, 1974, was studied using light and transmission electron microscopy. The central nervous system consists of a protocerebrum, connectives, a subesophageal ganglion, and a ventral nerve chain bifurcating twice in the abdomen. The longitudinal musculature of the trunk consists of ventral and dorsal bilaterally symmetrical bundles of muscle fibres. The protractors and dilatators of a swimming leg are attached to tendons of the exoskeleton and the protopodite. The female genital system comprises an unpaired ovary in the frontal portion of the cephalothorax and a pair of oviducts extending towards a chitinized antrum, which lead to the genital apertures or vulvae. The formation of paired egg sacs is discussed. The alimentary tract consists of an esophagus, midgut, and hind gut. A midgut diverticulum is absent. The anus opens between and dorsal to the caudal rami and is overlapped by an anal opercu.
Comparative bioactivity of Hydnora abyssinica A. Braun against different groups of fungi and bacteria

Root samples of Hydnora abyssinica were collected from Wad Medani city, central Sudan, to examine their antimicrobial potentials. Root extracts, aqueous, methanolic and chloroform, were obtained and bioassayed in vitro for ability to inhibit growth of 6 human pathogenic fungi and 4 types of bacteria, the differences in bioactivity of aqueous, CHCL3 and MeOH extracts were analyzed. Despite extreme fluctuations in activity, the undiluted aqueous extract was the most inhibitory followed by methanolic extract, while the chloroform extract was the least effective. Growth of pathogens was inhibited by all extracts in a concentration dependent manner. Phytochemical analyses showed preponderance of condensed tannins and phenols in the plant root extracts. The results confirmed the antibacterial and antifungal activity of the roots and support the traditional use of the plant in healing bacterial infections, the possibility of therapeutic use of Sudanese H. abyssinica as antimicrobial agent is worthy of further investigations.
Using simulation to assess the potential effectiveness of implementing screening at national borders during international outbreaks of influenza, SARS, Ebola virus disease and COVID-19

The effectiveness of screening travellers for signs of infection during times of international disease outbreak is contentious, especially as the reduction of the risk of disease importation can be very small. Border screening typically consists of arriving individuals being thermally scanned for signs of fever and/or completing a survey to declare any possible symptoms, and while more thorough testing typically exists, these would generally prove more disruptive to deploy. In this paper, we utilise epidemiological data and Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the potential success rate of deploying border screening for a range of diseases (including the current COVID-19 pandemic) in varying outbreak scenarios. We negate the issue of testing precision by assuming a perfect test is used; our outputs then represent the best-case scenario. We then use these outputs to briefly explore the types of scenarios where the implementation of border screening could prove most effective. Our models only considers screening implemented at airports, due to air travel being the predominant method of international travel. Primary results showed that in the best-case scenario, screening has the potential to detect 46.4%, 12.9% and 4.0% of travellers infected with influenza, SARS and ebola respectively, while screening for COVID-19 could potentially detect 12.0% of infected travellers. We compare our results to those already in the published literature.
Mass Mortality of Doctor Fish (Garra rufa obtusa) Caused by Citrobacter freundii Infection

In this paper, we described a case of mass mortality of doctor fish from a private fish hatchery farm in Korea with a history of abnormal swimming behavior, diffuse bleeding on the skin and fins and sudden death caused by fish pathogenic bacteria, Citrobacter freundii. Twelve moribund fish fingerling samples were submitted to College of Veterinary Medicine, Seoul National University in October 2008 for diagnostic examination. Diagnostic results showed that the morphological and biochemical properties of the bacteria isolated from the moribund fish were C. freundii. The remaining diseased fish from the hatchery farm were given treatment based on our recommendation and successfully recovered.
Uptake of N P K and yield of Kharif sorghum as influenced by soil and foliar application of micronutrients

Grain yield of kharif sorghum was significantly affected due to the application of micro nutrients. Application of RDF + 15 kg ZnSO4 + 15 kg FeSO4 ha−1 significantly increased sorghum grain yield to 20.58 q ha−1. Nitrogen content in fodder increased after the addition of recommended dose of fertilizer along with micronutrients, at flowering from (0.23 to 0.52) to (0.23 to 0.65%) at harvest. Phosphorus content also increased at flowering from (0.26 to 0.39) to (0.28 to 0.49) at harvest. Potassium at flowering from (0.50 to 0.78) to (0.61 to 0.82). Application of RDF + 15 kg ZnSO4 + 15 kg FeSO4 ha−1 significantly increased N uptake 50.79 kgha−1, P uptake 31.85 kgha−1 and K uptake 32.29 kgha in−1 kharif sorghum.
Idiap & UAM participation at GermEval 2020: Classiﬁcation and Regression of Cognitive and Motivational Style from Text

In this paper, we describe the participation of the Idiap Research Institute at Ger-mEval 2020 shared task on the Classiﬁ-cation and Regression of Cognitive and Motivational style from Text, speciﬁcally on subtask 2, Classiﬁcation of the Oper-ant Motive Test (OMT). Generally speaking, GermEval 2020 aims at encouraging the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) research community in proposing novel methodologies for assessing the connection between freely written texts and its cognitive and motivational styles. For evaluating this task, organizers provided a large dataset containing textual descriptions, in German language, generated by more than 14,000 participants. Our participation aims at evaluating the impact of advanced language representation, e.g., Bert, XLM, and DistilBERT in combination with some traditional machine learning algorithms. Our best conﬁguration was able to obtain an F1 macro of 69.8% on the test partition, which represents a relative improvement of 7.4% in comparison to the proposed baseline.