Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of foliar application of chemical agents and shading levels on growth and physiological aspects of "malagueta" pepper plants

Foliar application of chemical agents and cultivation in different levels of shading can modify pepper plants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of the application of chemical agents in the growth, partition of photoassimilates and photosynthetic pigments of malagueta pepper in different growing environments. The treatments were arranged in a randomized design with a 2x5 factorial scheme under two cultivation environments [eucalyptus structures measuring 5.0 x 5.0 x 2.5 m (length x width x height), coated with type coverage screens (Sombrite®) with 18% and 35% shading], and five treatments with chemical agents [1 C without application; 2 PBZ (50 mg L-1) + Nut. (1%); 3 Gib. (50 mg L-1) + Nut. (1%); 4 Amin. (50 mg L-1) + Ant. (50 mg L-1) and 5 Gib. (50 mg L-1) + A (50 mg L-1) + Amin. (50 mg L-1) + Ant. (50 mg L-1)] in four replications. We evaluated the stem diameter, the plant height, number of leaves, leaf dimensions, leaf area, accumulation and dry matter partition and chlorophyll contents. The cultivation of pepper plants in environment with 18% of shading provides plants with a higher number of leaves and dry matter, as environment protects plants against climatic agents by controlling temperature, humidity and solar radiation. The application of the Paclobutrazol + Nitrogen promotes shoot growth and increases the green pigmentation in pepper plants.
Production, Recovery and Characterization of an Enterocin with Anti-Listerial Activity Produced by Enterococcus hirae OS1

Background and objective: Lactic acid bacteria, used in food processing for a long time, can produce various metabolites during their growth, including bacteriocins. These antimicrobials, used as natural bio-preservatives, enhance the food safety. The objective of this study was to assess lactic acid bacteria bacteriocins with anti-listerial activity and optimize their production and recovery process. Material and methods: Isolate was identified using conventional assays (morphological and biochemical characteristics) and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Lactic acid bacteria bacteriocins were characterized based on their physicochemical properties (nature, pH stability and thermo-resistance). The production process was based on optimization of media components (growth media and addition of glucose, nitrogen source and tween 20) and culture conditions (temperature, pH, agitation and inoculum size). Furthermore, optimization of the recovery process was studied using ion exchange chromatography on amberlite IRC-50 (effects of resin size and NaCl eluent concentration). Results and conclusion: Enterococcus hirae OS1 was isolated from Moroccan raw cow milk as bacteriocinogenic strain. After optimization of the bacteriocin production process, results showed that the key parameters for increasing of production included temperature of 30°C, pH of 6.5 and inoculum size of 5%. Production with whey-based and economic food-grade substrate allowed high production of enterocin OS1 (1,600 AU ml -1 ) (P<0.001). Simultaneous addition of glucose (1%) and Tween 20 (1%) increased enterocin titer significantly (5,866 AU ml -1 ) (P<0.01). Recovery efficiency increased with use of 70% amberlite IRC-50 resin and elution with 2M NaCl. Indeed, recovery of 75.4% of bacteriocin was achieved in comparison to 15.7% of bacteriocin without optimization. This promises achieving high quantities of enterocin at low costs. Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Evidence of the Development of Pedagogical Content Knowledge Related to Chemical Bonding during a Course for Preservice Chemistry Teachers

The impression that many preservice chemistry teachers demonstrate issues in the application of their pedagogical content knowledge in teaching practice, especially in the area of fundamental chemistry topics, served as motivation for changes to the Chemistry Education 2 course curriculum. In order to stimulate pedagogical content knowledge, the course has been changed in the following areas: intending learning outcomes, the language of chemistry instruction, awareness of “Johnstone’s triangle” of operations, and common alternative conceptions. To obtain evidence of preservice teachers’ in-practice pedagogical content knowledge about chemical bonding, especially pedagogical content knowledge related to the revised areas of the Chemistry Education 2 course, we designed and conducted a case study based on detailed monitoring of one preservice teacher’s pre-teaching, teaching and teaching evaluation activities. The findings demonstrate evidence of growth of the preservice teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge of chemical bonding, with particular characteristics indicating that the source of this growth is almost certainly the revised Chemistry Education 2 curriculum.
Gamer self-perception of moral choices in Dishonored: a study of morality system gameplay in South Africa

Gamers’ perceptions of their own morality and the morality-based choices that they make in-game have been under-explored to date. An emic perspective of the context of morality-system gameplay proved valuable in providing a thick, rich description of this social phenomenon. The game Dishonored was selected for this research study due to the simplistic morality-system integral to its core mechanics and storytelling engine. Dishonored is a first-person, stealth action-adventure video game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks in 2012.
Gradient-Based Early Termination of CU Partition in VVC Intra Coding

The quaternary tree with nested binary and ternary tree structure is an efficient coding unit (CU) partitioning method adopted in Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Compared with quaternary tree only in HEVC, its flexible block sizes improve the coding performance significantly at the cost of computation load increase due to the recursive and nested searching for the best CU structure. In this paper, an early termination algorithm is proposed to skip unnecessary searches in CU size decision. Based on directional gradients, pre-determine the likelihood of binary partition or ternary partition in horizontal or vertical direction for current block, thus the impertinent partition pattern is skipped. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to save the encoding time up to 51% with about 1.2% BD-rate degradation compared with VVC software reference VTM5.0.
Structural heterogeneity and proximity mechanism of China’s inter-regional innovation cooperation network

ABSTRACT Based on the cooperation patent data between 31 provinces in China from 1985 to 2017, this paper portrays the topological structure, spatial pattern and proximity mechanism of China’s inter-regional innovation cooperation network by the graph theory, spatial statistical methods and the quadratic assignment procedure model. The conclusions are as follows: (1) the topological structure of China’s inter-regional innovation cooperation forms a hierarchical network with Beijing as the core and it exhibits a typical small-world property and ‘core–periphery’ structure. (2) In terms of spatial distribution characteristics, the ‘quadruple’ with the Beijing–Tianjin region, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Sichuan as the peaks has become the backbone of the inter-regional innovation cooperation network in China. At the same time, the spatial differentiation of the three indicators of degree centrality, median centrality and intensity centrality is obvious. (3) In terms of proximity mechanism, geographical, institutional and cognitive proximity exert a significant effect on China’s inter-regional innovation cooperation network linkage. However, there are significant differences in the effects of various proximity elements on China’s regional innovation network.
Effects of ovarian stimulation on oocyte development and embryo quality

Ovarian stimulation plays a pivotal role in assisted reproductive therapies, to increase the number of embryos available for treatment; however, there is no clear consensus from meta-analyses in the literature which, if any, of the preparations in use are superior in terms of clinical outcomes. The aim of this thesis was to examine the effect of common human gonadotrophin preparations with different half lives and LH activity (hMG, rFSH and Pergoveris) on embryo quality and resulting offspring, compared to non- stimulated negative controls and positive PMSG treated controls, using the mouse model. The studies in this thesis indicated that an LH ceiling threshold is evident during folliculogenesis, where the use of long acting LH preparations resulted in higher numbers of fragmented oocytes, absent of cumulus cells (P<0.001), reduced expression of the pro and anti-angiogenic factors, MYHII and PEDF in cumulus cells (P<0.05), increased embryonic developmental arrest (P<0.001) and perturbed IGF2 (P<0.05) and VEGFA gene expression in resulting blastocysts (P<0.01), compared to negative controls. Use of preparations containing LH bioactivity resulted in offspring with altered total body weight trajectories and internal organ weight abnormalities (P<0.05), which were, in some instances, compounded by in vitro culture. In addition, we elucidated a relationship between FSH half life differences between urinary and recombinant preparations and embryo quality. The urinary human gonadotrophin preparation, hMG, could yield developmentally competent embryos at lower concentrations, than the recombinant Pergoveris treatment. In addition to FSH, these preparations contain LH and both low doses of preparations composed of short half life rFSH and rLH and high doses of preparations containing long acting LH bioactivity, resulted in the highest rates of developmental arrest. These groups were observed to have complete absence of H19 expression. The results of this thesis provide clear evidence that ovarian stimulation does negatively impact the embryo and subsequent offspring and provides support for an LH ceiling threshold, above which detrimental effects occur, both on in vitro embryo development and in vivo foetal development, which later effects postnatal growth.
Dispersal of single‐ and double‐brood populations of the European earwig, Forficula auricularia: a mark‐recapture experiment

Quantitative information on dispersal of insects should be taken into consideration for making efficient pest management decisions. Such information was not available for the European earwig, Forficula auricularia L. (Dermaptera: Forficulidae), an important biocontrol agent in fruit orchards. A mark‐recapture experiment was carried out in Belgian orchards, where marked earwigs were released at a single point and recaptured after 1 month. Dispersal from this release point was analysed using an analytical formula of a simple diffusion model with disappearance (e.g., as a result of death) derived by Turchin & Thoeny (1993; Quantifying dispersal of southern pine beetles with mark‐recapture experiments and a diffusion model. Ecological Applications 3: 187) . The cumulative number of recaptured earwigs as a function of the distance of release was used to fit the model and estimate parameters. A derived expression, in terms of these parameters, was used to estimate the frequency distribution of the population, as the radius of a circle enclosing various proportions of the earwigs’ dispersal distances. In Belgium, populations of the European earwig can have two life‐history strategies, single‐ (SBP) and double‐brood populations (DBP). Therefore, mark‐recapture experiments were carried out on both population types. We fitted data from SBP (n = 10) and DBP (n = 16) successfully in both the diffusion model and in an exponential curve. Because of the biological relevance, estimates of the diffusion model were used for calculating the frequency distributions. Males and females dispersed the same distances. No differences were found between orchards with different spatial structures (apple and pear). According to literature data, mobility of earwigs is very low compared with other arthropods, which has consequences for the efficiency of biocontrol interventions, like mass releases of earwigs or the use of hedgerows for the establishment of healthy (source) populations. Quantitative results revealed that earwigs of SBP dispersed four times further than earwigs of double‐brood populations. For instance, 95% of the population remained within a radius of 28.6 m in SBP and 7.54 m in DBP.
Prevalence of Ectoparasitism on Small Ruminants in Kelantan, Malaysia

Kelantan is a chiefly agrarian state with abundant small-holder ruminant farms in the East Coast economic Region of Malaysia. Ectoparasitism affects small ruminant production in Malaysia. It often causes reduction in meat quality and milk production which affect the farmers’ income. To date, no report for the prevalence of ectoparasitism on small ruminant in Kelantan compared to other state in Malaysia. This study aims to determine the prevalence and associated risk factor of ruminant ectoparasitism in Kelantan. Ectoparasites were collected by manual picking and skin scrapping from 462 sheep and goats in Kelantan between April and September 2017 (during dry season). 60% of the sampled animals were infested with at least one species of the ectoparasites. In this study, lice and ticks were the most prevalent ectoparasites on small ruminant, which were 43.64% and 22.98%, respectively. The high biotic potential of lice population on host might be one of the factors they become the most prevalent species found on the animals. There was no significant relationship between ectoparasitism prevalence and species of small ruminants (χ2 = 1.12, p = 0.293). However, there was significant variations in prevalence between the regions where the animals were sampled from (χ2 = 30.25, p = 0.002) and farm management system for both species. This present study provides baseline epidemiological data on the prevalence of ectoparasitism in small ruminant. This information is useful for the formulation of prevention and control measures in order to enhance ruminant productivity in Kelantan.
Parasitism and the Platyhelminths

The platyhelminth panorama. Symbiosis and the turbellarians. Origins of the major groups of parasites. The biology of the monogenean fish skin parasite Entobdella soleae. Other monogeneans parasitizing the skin of fishes. Monogeneans parasitizing the gill chambers of fishes. Endoparasitic monogeneans. Unravelling the cestode life cycle. The biology of Hymenolepis dimunuta. The fish tapeworms. The cyclophyllideans. Unravelling the digenean life cycle. The biology of Fasciola hepatica. Digenean germinal sacs, germinal lineage and genetic events. Digeneans with two hosts. Digeneans with invertebrates as second intermediate hosts. Digeneans with vertebrates, especially fishes, as second intermediate hosts. The schistosomes. Lesser lights - didymozoideans and aspidogastreans. Conclusions. References. Appendix.
Training emotional intelligence: Does training in basic emotional abilities help people to improve higher emotional abilities?

ABSTRACT Based on the cascading model of EI that proposes that emotion regulation is indirectly influenced by emotion perception, we compared two training approaches. We examined whether including basic abilities when training emotion regulation (mixed approach) leads to better outcomes than training emotion regulation directly (pure approach). Participants were students of business administration and management (n = 187 and n = 127 for different analyses) who received pure, mixed, or control training. Self-report and performance-based measures of ability-based EI were collected before and after training. Multiple group SEM found that the pure approach increased participants’ self-perceived ability to regulate emotions, whereas the mixed approach increased performance. These effects were stable for over 4 months. The results support the cascading model and suggest through training of more basic abilities can improve higher order abilities and that emotional abilities can improve even when they are not at the focus of a training.
The (time-varying) Importance of Oil Prices to U.S. Stock Returns: A Tale of Two Beauty-Contests

We evaluate the probability that oil prices affect excess stock returns for U.S. listed firms. The probabilities are obtained from a time-varying multi-factor asset pricing framework estimated using dynamic model averaging techniques, including oil price information among several other possible risk factors. Two widely used oil price measures are considered, one based on raw oil price changes and another based on disentangling the source of oil price changes due to supply-side or demand-side effects. As far as we know our dataset, which comprises 10,118 stock price series with up to 25,372,588 observations between 1995-2018, is the most comprehensive used for this purpose. We develop two “beauty-contests” in which we estimate the multi-factor models separately for individual stocks, for each of the two oil price measures. The results suggests that, when working with daily data (beauty contest 1), oil price changes are a significant (important) determinant for around 1-3% of the sample. When using oil price shocks-as opposed to oil price changes-(beauty contest 2) this percentage increases to 27-45%, suggesting that oil supply and demand shocks (as opposed to oil price changes) can better explain firm-level excess returns, at least for monthly frequency data where such a decomposition is available. We provide evidence that the increase in percentage is only partially attributable to data-frequency, and more likely attributed to the decomposition into supply/demand driven oil price changes. We reconcile differences between our findings and those reported in previous literature on the basis of the fully dynamic nature of our adopted methodology.
TOX3 : a candidate breast cancer predisposition gene

Deux tiers des cancers du sein expriment le recepteur a l’estrogene alpha (REα) et leur croissance depend des estrogenes alors que l’expression de REα induit la differenciation et la senescence des cellules humaines mammaires epitheliales normales. Le developpement embryonnaire et la differenciation de la glande mammaire adulte sont controles par des facteurs de transcription, dont beaucoup sont aussi impliques dans la tumorigenese. Plusieurs etudes d'association pan-genomiques ont identifie le putatif facteur de transcription TOX high mobility group box family member 3 (TOX3) comme un nouveau gene de predisposition au cancer du sein.L’objectif de cette etude etait la caracterisation fonctionelle de TOX3 dans l’epithelium mammaire normal et le cancer du sein.J’ai examine l’expression de TOX3 dans des tumeurs du sein humaines et dans le sein normal par analyse des donnees d’expression issues de puces a ADN. L’effet de TOX3 sur la differenciation des cellules epitheliales mammaires etait analyse par des assays CFC et FACS. De plus, j’ai effectue une analyse microarray des cellules luminales cancereuses MCF-7 exprimant TOX3 afin d’identifier les genes cibles de TOX3 ainsi que la methode de purification d’affinite en tandem (TAP) combinee a la spectrometrie de masse afin d’identifier des proteines interactants de TOX3. Finalement, j’ai etudie le potentiel oncogenique de TOX3 dans un modele de xenogreffe.
Antibacterial and antifungal activity of Dodonaea viscosa (L.) Jacq., a wild plant of Azad Jammu and Kashmir

I In present study, chloroform, ethanol and methanol crude extracts of stem bark and leaves of Dodonaea viscosa were investigated for their antibacterial and antifungal potential against two gram positive bacteria (Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus), one gram negative bacterium (Escherichia coli) and two yeast strains (Candida albicans, Sccharomyces cervisiae). Ethanol and methanol extracts were found to be active against the tested bacteria (gram positive and gram negative). None of the extracts inhibited the growth of Candida albicans and Sccharomyces cervisiae). All the tested microorganisms were resistant to chloroform extracts. Amongst the gram positive and gram negative bacteria, gram positive bacteria were more sensitive than gram negative bacterium used. Commercially available standard reference antibiotics discs Tetracycline (30 µg), Ciprofloxacin (5 µg) and Nystatin (100 units) were used to compare the zones of inhibition produced by the antibiotics with that of the extracts used.
Novel Face Index for Benzenoid Hydrocarbons

A novel topological index, the face index ( F I ), is proposed in this paper. For a molecular graph G, face index is defined as F I ( G ) = ∑ f ∈ F ( G ) d ( f ) = ∑ v ∼ f , f ∈ F ( G ) d ( v ) , where d ( v ) is the degree of the vertex v. The index is very easy to calculate and improved the previously discussed correlation models for π - e l e c t r o n energy and boiling point of benzenoid hydrocarbons. The study shows that the multiple linear regression involving the novel topological index can predict the π -electron energy and boiling points of the benzenoid hydrocarbons with correlation coefficient r > 0.99 . Moreover, the face indices of some planar molecular structures such as 2-dimensional graphene, triangular benzenoid, circumcoronene series of benzenoid are also investigated. The results suggest that the proposed index with good correlation ability and structural selectivity promised to be a useful parameter in QSPR/QSAR.
ÖĞRETMEN VE ÖĞRENCİ GÖZÜNDEN BİR EV ÖDEVİ PORTRESİ

Bu arastirmada, tipik ev odevi uygulamalarinin yurutuldugu ilkokul dorduncu siniftaki ev odevi portresinin ortaya konmasi amaclanmaktadir. Bu amaca yonelik olarak, ogretmenin Trafik Guvenligi dersinde verilen uc farkli turdeki odevden beklentilerinin ne oldugu ve bu beklentilerin ogrencilerde karsiligini bulup bulmadigi arastirilmistir. Bu nedenle de arastirma nitel arastirma deseninde yurutulmustur. Katilimcilar, Ic Anadolu Bolgesi’nde 2016-2017 egitim ogretim yilinda dorduncu sinifta ogrenim goren 25 ogrenci ve bir ogretmendir. Arastirmanin veri toplama araci, arastirmaci tarafindan hazirlanan gorusme formlaridir. Biri ogretmene, digeri ogrencilere yonelik olmak uzere iki farkli gorusme formu hazirlanmistir. Verilerin analizinde betimsel analiz yonteminden yararlanilmistir. Buna gore ogretmen odevleri egitsel (derse hazirlik, ders tekrari, degerlendirme ve genisletme) ve egitsel olmayan (sorumluluk bilinci asilama, arastirma becerisini gelistirme ve veli ile etkilesimi artirma) amaclara yonelik olarak vermektedir. Ogrenciler ise ev odevlerine yonelik genel olarak olumlu goruslere sahiptir. Ogretmenin ev odevi verirken olusturdugu beklentilerin de genel anlamda ogrencilerde karsiligini buldugu ifade edilebilir.