Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bipartite synchronization of nonlinear network under signed digraph and switching topologies

The bipartite synchronization problem of nonlinear signed networks with switching topologies is considered in this paper. The node dynamics is a general Lipschitz nonlinear system and the switching signal satisfies the average dwell time condition. It is assumed that the switching directed topology is structurally balanced and always contains a directed spanning tree. By using the coordinate transform method, the bipartite synchronization error system is formulated as a switched system. Then based on algebraic graph theory and multiple Lyapunov function method, sufficient bipartite synchronization conditions are established in terms of linear matrix inequality. The obtained result indicates that the bipartite synchronization of the signed nonlinear network can always be achieved under sufficiently slow switching of network topology if the coupling strength is sufficiently large. The numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the obtained bipartite synchronization control method.
GSTP1 gene polymorphism and susceptibility as well as chemotherapy sensitivity to non-small cell lung cancer

OBJECTIVE:To study the relationship between gene (105) polymorphism of phase Ⅱ metabolizing enzymes glutathione S-transferase GSTP1 and susceptibility to non-small cell lung cancer,and sensitivity to chemotherapy. METHODS:There were 204 cases of non-small cell lung cancer patients and the normal control persons,and by using a polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP),the GSTP1 polymorphism was detected at 105 sites of DNA of peripheral blood of these cases. The 102 cases of non-small cell lung cancer patients chose NP chemotherapy,and the efficiency was evaluated two cycles after chemotherapy. RESULTS:Compared with A/A genotype,in the other two groups G/G and A/G genotype,GSTP1 105 distribution frequencies were of no statistically significant difference (P0.05). Compared with A/A genotype,in the sensitive group,G/G+A/G distribution frequency (46.47%) was higher than that in the non-sensitive group (21.43%),and there was a statistically significant difference (χ2=3.95,P0.05). Individuals with A/G or G/G allele,compared with patients with A/A genotype,were more sensitive to chemotherapy. CONCLUSIONS:There are no relevance between GSTP1 105 polymorphism and the risk of non-small cell lung cancer. The sensitivity of NP chemotherapy in cases of non-small cell lung cancer with GSTP1 AG or GG genotype is higher than that of patients with AA genotype.
Effects of Improvised Teaching-Learning Materials on the Academic Performance of Junior Secondary School Students in Basic Science in Enugu State, Nigeria

The study investigated the Effects of Improvised Teaching-Learning Materials (TLMs) on the academic performance of junior secondary school students in Basic Science in Enugu state, Nigeria. The study employed quasi-experimental research design. The population of the study was 33,548 JSS II Basic Science students, comprising of 14,821 male and 18,727 female students. Purposive sampling technique was used to sample a total of 140JSS II students from four public secondary schools for the study. Two each were purposively assigned to experimental and control group respectively. The 73 students in the experimental group were taught with improvised teaching-learning materials while 67students in the control group were taught without improvised teaching-learning materials. Two research questions guided the study while two null-hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance.Data used for the study was collected through the pretest, treatment and post-test using the researchers’ made instrument (Improvised Basic Science Performance TestIBSPT), the IBSPT consists of 30 objective test items. Data collected were analyzed statistically through the use of both descriptive statistics of frequencies, mean and standard deviation while Independent sample ttest was used to test the two null hypotheses. Major findings drawn from the study among others revealed a positive significant difference in the performance of students taught Basic Science with the use of improvised teaching-learning when compared with those taught Basic Science without the use of improvised teachinglearning materials. Also, finding shows a positive significant difference in the performance of males and females taught Basic Science using improvised teaching aids. It was concluded among others things that since the students taught Basic Science with the use of improvised teaching-learning materialshad a better mean score than those taught without the use of improvised teaching-learning materials, there is need for teachers to be trained to improvise teaching-learning materials as this will enable them acquire the appropriate techniques and skills necessary for improvisation. Hence, it was recommended that teachers should be trained and retrained through workshops, seminars and conferences for the purpose of skill acquisition necessary for effective use of teaching-learning materials.
Predictors of shisha smoking among adolescent females in Western Iran in 2019: Using the Prototype-Willingness Model

INTRODUCTION Given the increasing prevalence of shisha smoking (SS) in adolescent females, it is necessary to determine the factors influencing adolescent’s choice of shisha. This study aimed to determine predictors of shisha smoking among adolescent females in Western Iran based on the Prototype-Willingness Model (PWM). METHODS This cross-sectional study was conducted on 1302 adolescent females in Kermanshah city, western Iran, in 2019. The method was multi-stage sampling with a systematic random approach. Data were collected using a questionnaire consisting of sociodemographic questions, history of shisha smoking, and Prototype-Willingness Model structure-based questions. Data were analyzed using SPSS 22 software. Statistical tests included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation test, and linear and logistic regression analyses. RESULTS The prevalence of current consumers of shisha was 20.4%. Attitude and behavioral willingness and subjective norms were the most important predictors of behavioral intentions, whereas subjective norms, attitudes, and prototypes were the most important predictors for behavioral willingness. The results obtained from the logistic regression analysis revealed that both pathways of PWM constructs (behavioral intention OR=1.37; behavioral willingness OR=1.32) were significant predicting factors for shisha smoking among adolescent females. CONCLUSIONS Given the efficient role of behavioral willingness and intention for shisha smoking (SS) in adolescent females, it is necessary to consider these structures in designing educational strategies for the prevention of adolescent smoking.
A cross-sectional study of sexual health knowledge, attitudes, and reported behavior among Zambian adolescent girl participants in a football program

Limited research has assessed whether sports participation can be linked to decreasing risky sexual behavior among adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa. The current study aimed to assess whether participation in a football league that provides sexual and reproductive health and rights lessons before each football match strengthened adolescent Zambian girls’ sexual health knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Adolescent female participants in the girls-only football league run by the organization Futebol dá Força (FDF, n=120) completed a questionnaire assessing sexual health knowledge, reported attitudes, and reported behavior. Logistic regressions were used to assess associations between participants’ self-reported program exposure and their sexual health knowledge, reported attitudes, and reported behavior. After examining all exposure levels and adjusting for age, participants with at least six months of reported exposure to the FDF program had better sexual health knowledge and attitudes compared to those reporting less than six months exposure (AOR 4.74, 95% CI 1.7013.19). Those in the more exposed group also had higher odds of reporting using a condom at last sex (AOR=11.64, 95% CI=1.08-124.57). These findings suggest that sportsbased educational programs may improve sexual health knowledge and attitudes among African adolescent girls, potentially reducing the risk of sexually transmitted disease and early aged pregnancy.
Uterine contractility in nonpregnant mares

Uterine contractility has been studied by intrauterine pressure transducers - balloons or catheter tip pressure transducers electromyo- graphy (El,/G), transrectal ultrasound, and recently, by scintigraphy. Maxima uterine contractility was seen in ultrasonography durng the late luteal phase (days 13 to 14), at the time of the expected luteolysis. Aso in EMG, frequent spikes of short duration alternating with short periods of inactivity were reported during luteolysis. Total electrical activity was higher in dioestrus than in oestrus. Oestrus was characte rised by shorter spikes of higher intensity separated by longer periods of inactivity as compared to dioestrus. Intrauterine infusion of bacteria increased myometrai electrical activity for 5 hours in all mares and for 18 hours in healthy mares resjstant to uterine infections. Resistant mares exhibited greater uterine activity 10 to 20 h after inoculation than mares susceptible to uterine infections. lnsemination iAl) caused spikes of higher amplitude and more frequent active phases for 2 to 7 hours as recorded by El,4G. Scintigraphy showed how Al induced uterine contractions which were most frequent during the first 10 to 30 min. Rectal palpation caused a transient increase in myometrial activity. Oxytocin increased myometrial activity at all stages of the cycle and prostaglandin Fr" and its synthetic antagonists in cycling and steroid- treated mares. a2-agonists, detomidine, xylazine, and romifidine increased intrauterine pressure and electrical activity. Propantheline and acepromazine suppressed myometrial act vity. war. Die Palpation per rectum verursachte einen vorübergehenden Anstieg der myometrialen AKivität. Die Applikation von Ox). tocin verstärkte die myometr ale AKivität in allen Zyklusphasen, sowie Prostaglandin F2 alpha und seine synthetischen Antagonisten bel zykljschen und steroid-behandelten Stuten. Alpha 2 Agonisten - Detomidin, Xylazin und Romifidin - verstärkten den intrau-terinen Druck und die elektrische AKivität. Propanthelin und Azepromazin unterdrückten dje myometrische Aktivität.
Effects of a contraceptive compound (EP-1) on reproductive organs of male Greater long-tailed hamsters(Tscherskia triton)

We first report the effect of a compound EP-1 (mixture of levonorgestrel and quinestrol) on male greater long-tailed hamsters (Tscherskia triton). Hamsters in the treatment group were provided with wheat baits with 0.001% EP-1 for six consecutive days, while hamsters in the control group were provided with plain wheat. One week and three weeks later, reproductive organs of hamsters of both groups were measured, respectively. We found the size or weight of testis, spermatophore and epididymis of the treatment group were significantly reduced compared to those of the control group, and this reduction was greater in the third week compared to that of the first week. The results indicate that EP-1 is able to reduce the fertility of both male and female hamsters.
DIFFERENCES IN STARFISH OOCYTE SUSCEPTIBILITY TO POLYSPERMY DURING THE COURSE OF MATURATION

During the course of starfish oocyte maturation, the optimum period for insemination is between germinal vesicle breakdown and the first polar body formation. The rate of polyspermy increases with increasing time intervals between the first polar body formation and sperm addition, although the fertilization membrane is formed normally in all oocytes. As long as polyspermy is prevented, however, the oocytes remain viable even after the formation of second polar bodies. Thus, it is postulated that there is some mechanism (s) of protection against polyspermy between the first sperm entry and the fertilization membrane formation. The mechanism(s) may be gradually lost after the first polar body formation and disappear completely after the second polar body formation.
Proper‐walk connection number of graphs

This paper studies the problem of proper‐walk connection number: given an undirected connected graph, our aim is to colour its edges with as few colours as possible so that there exists a properly coloured walk between every pair of vertices of the graph, that is, a walk that does not use consecutively two edges of the same colour. The problem was already solved on several classes of graphs but still open in the general case. We establish that the problem can always be solved in polynomial time in the size of the graph and we provide a characterization of the graphs that can be properly connected with k colours for every possible value of k .
Social Variables and Dropout Tendencies among Secondary School Students in Ikom Education Zone, Cross River State, Nigeria

This study was on social variables and dropout tendencies among secondary school students in Ikom education zone, Cross River State, Nigeria. The social variables considered were substance abuse, family type and teacher/students relationship. Out of population of 7228 students, sample of 506 students were randomly selected for the study. A survey design was adopted. The instrument used for data collection was questionnaires titled ‘Social Variables and Dropout Tendencies Questionnaire’. Three hypotheses were formulated and tested at . 05 level of significant. The statistical tools used are Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient and Independent t-test. The results showed that there was significant relationship between (i) substance abuse and dropout tendencies. (ii) family type and dropout tendencies (iii) teacher/student relationship and dropout tendencies. The results were discussed and the researchers recommended that: (i) students be monitored and counseled against substance abuse both at home and in school. (ii) parents should for the sake of their children stay together and train them. (iii) teachers should create conducive and favourable environment for the students to learn.
Defending Against Imperceptible Audio Adversarial Examples Using Proportional Additive Gaussian Noise

Neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, which are speciﬁc inputs to a network that result in a misclassiﬁcation or an incorrect output. While most past work has focused on methods to generate adversarial examples to fool image classiﬁcation networks, recently, similar attacks on automatic speech recognition systems have been explored. Due to the relative novelty of these audio adversarial examples, there exist few robust defenses for these attacks. We present a robust defense for inaudible or imperceptible audio adversarial examples. This approach mimics the adversarial strategy to add targeted proportional additive Gaussian noise in order to revert an adversarial example back to its original transcription. Our defense performs similarly to other defenses yet is the ﬁrst randomized or probabilistic strategy. Additionally, we demonstrate the challenges that arise when applying defenses against adversarial examples for images to audio adversarial examples.
Scene Attention Mechanism for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generation

Remote sensing images play an important role in various applications. To make it easier for humans to understand remote sensing images, the task of remote sensing image captioning attracts more and more researchers’ attention. Inspired from the way human receives visual information, attention mechanism has been widely used in remote sensing image understanding. To catch more scene information and improve the stability of the generated sentences, a new attention mechanism called scene attention is proposed. Except for the current attention via the current hidden state of the long shortterm memory network (LSTM), our proposed method simultaneously explores the global visual information from the mean feature of all convolutional features. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on UCM-captions, Sydney-captions and RSICD datasets. The results of our experiment show that comparing with some other captioning methods, our method is more stable and obtains a better performance.
Will Palmyra rise again?-War Crimes against Cultural Heritage and Post-war Reconstruction

The destruction of cultural heritage in North-West Africa and the Middle East beginning with the start of civil wars after the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has been devastating. Centuries and millennia old archaeological sites and historic cities are demolished through combat, looting or wanton destruction. Thereby, the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is considered to be a war crime because of its severe effects on identity and cultural capital of a population. How dearly those lost cultural treasures are already missed, is shown in the almost instant debate whether or not destroyed heritage should be reconstructed or not with equally valid arguments on both sides. Many concerns are focused on practical issues such as the sheer financial costs of adequate reconstruction. However, one matter seems to be overrepresented within this discussion: authenticity of reconstructions or the lack thereof. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the role of authenticity of post-war reconstructions, explore ethical implications and discuss the potential of reconstructions as means of post-war regeneration.
Comment on “No consistent ENSO response to volcanic forcing over the last millennium”

Dee et al. (Reports, 27 March 2020, p. 1477) claimed that large volcanic eruptions do not produce a detectable El Niño response. However, they come to the wrong conclusion because they have ignored the fundamental climate response to large volcanic eruptions: Volcanic eruptions cool the surface, thus masking the relative El Niño warming.
Draft Genome Sequence for Frankia sp. Strain BMG5.11, a Nitrogen-Fixing Bacterium Isolated from Elaeagnus angustifolia

Frankia sp. strain BMG5.11, which was isolated from Elaeagnus angustifolia nodules, is able to infect other actinorhizal plants, including Elaeagnaceae, Rhamnaceae, Colletieae, Gymnostoma, and Myricaceae. Here, we report the 11.3-Mbp draft genome sequence of Frankia sp. strain BMG5.11, with a G+C content of 69.9% and 9,926 candidate protein-encoding genes. ABSTRACT Frankia sp. strain BMG5.11, which was isolated from Elaeagnus angustifolia nodules, is able to infect other actinorhizal plants, including Elaeagnaceae, Rhamnaceae, Colletieae, Gymnostoma, and Myricaceae. Here, we report the 11.3-Mbp draft genome sequence of Frankia sp. strain BMG5.11, with a G+C content of 69.9% and 9,926 candidate protein-encoding genes.
Effect of aeration on root growth and nitrogen metabolism in rice.

In order to clarify the effects of aeration on root nitrogen metabolism in rice seedling,root growth,the activities of glutamine synthetase(GS),glutamic acid-pyruvic acid transaminase(GPT),glutamic acid oxaloacetate transaminase(GOT),the contents of nitrate(NO3-N),free amino acids and sugar content in root were investigated under continous aeration treatment in hydroponics with indica hybrid rice combination Guodao 6 and japonica Xiushui 09 as material.The results showed that rice seedlings grown in oxygenation solutions had higher root dry matter,longer root length,stronger root activity and larger root absorption area,compared with the control.In addition,the contents of nitrate,soluble sugar,root vigor,the activities of GS,GOT and GPT of aeration-treated rice plants were higher than those of the control.The activities of enzymes involved in root nitrogen metabolism of "Xiushui 09" were enhanced by oxygenation.However,oxygenation had no significant influence on root nitrogen metabolism of Guodao 6,which suggested that oxygenation effect on rice root nitrogen metabolism might be genotype-specific.
Performance of 3D Morphological Methods in the Machine Learning Assisted Classification of Closely Related Fossil Bivalve Species of the Genus Dreissena

ABSTRACT In recent years, 3D analyses, new indices to describe the complexity of morphological structures and sophisticated machine learning approaches have advanced morphometrical analyses to assist species determination. However, the applicability of these modern approaches to the determination of cryptic species or fossil taxa has rarely been investigated. In this study, fossil and subfossil specimens of the four modern Dreissena species in the Caspian Sea are used to test the performance of 3D-based morphological approaches for machine learning assisted species identification. Specifically, 3D scans of the shells were used to construct 3D models for calculating “traditional” shell dimensions and “modern” shell complexity parameters. Finally, two machine learning approaches were applied to test the determination performance of shell measurements vs. shell complexity and individual vs. combined shell parameters. The results show that (i) there is no superior machine learning approach to species determination based on shell characters, (ii) shell complexity parameters are not per se more suitable for species identification than shell dimensions, (iii) a combination of shell parameters increases determination performance and reduces their species dependence and (iv) shell characters alone do not allow precise determination of all Dreissena species studied. These findings suggest that the most appropriate machine learning approach, the most informative shell characters and the best combination of characters need to be tested individually for different data sets. However, considering that it is difficult even for experts to distinguish Dreissena species based on shell characters, the machine learning assisted classification in the current study has performed comparatively well. Future analyses based on machine learning may therefore help experts to process large sample sizes efficiently and non-specialists to assess species level information with reasonable certainty.
Clarissa Family Age from the Yarkovsky Effect Chronology

The Clarissa family is a small collisional family composed of primitive C-type asteroids. It is located in a dynamically stable zone of the inner asteroid belt. In this work we determine the formation age of the Clarissa family by modeling planetary perturbations as well as thermal drift of family members due to the Yarkovsky effect. Simulations were carried out using the SWIFT-RMVS4 integrator modified to account for the Yarkovsky and Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack (YORP) effects. We ran multiple simulations starting with different ejection velocity fields of fragments, varying proportion of initially retrograde spins, and also tested different Yarkovsky/YORP models. Our goal was to match the observed orbital structure of the Clarissa family which is notably asymmetrical in the proper semimajor axis, ap. The best fits were obtained with the initial ejection velocities ≲20 m s−1 of diameter D ≃ 2 km fragments, ∼4:1 preference for spin-up by YORP, and assuming that ≃80% of small family members initially had retrograde rotation. The age of the Clarissa family was found to be tage = 56 ± 6 Myr for the assumed asteroid density ρ = 1.5 g cm−3. Small variation of density to smaller or larger value would lead to slightly younger or older age estimates. This is the first case where the Yarkovsky effect chronology has been successfully applied to an asteroid family younger than 100 Myr.