Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of PRCD and RPGR Genes in Progressive Retinal Atrophy in Locally Bred Canines

Progressive Retinal Atrophy is a group of genetically inherited diseases in various canine breeds. The disease begins with retinal damage and progresses to blindness. Abnormalities in various genes are linked with different disease variants, and in most cases, involvement of one gene towards PRA is specific to one breed. However, Progressive Rod Cone Degeneration (PRCD) is an outlier. PRCD anomaly is associated with PRA in more than 20 breeds. The same gene mutation which causes PRA-prcd in dogs causes a form of Retinitis Pigmentosa in human. X-Linked Progressive Retinal Atrophy (XLPRA); a type of PRA, is a result of deletion in Retinitis Pigmentosa GTPase Regulator (RPGR). RPGR is a locus homologue of human Retinitis pigmentosa (RP3). We analyzed 22 clinically PRA positive dog samples for PRCD and RPGR association with PRA. We employed PCR-RFLP, capillary gel electrophoresis and sequencing. Experiment data suggests that tested mutation of PRCD has no association with PRA in all 15 Pomeranian and 1 Mongrel dogs which are locally bred by Indian breeders. In contrary, all English Cocker spaniel and Labrador Retriever samples showed PRCD association with PRA. Furthermore, accountability of tested mutations in RPGR has been concluded to be nil in all of the test samples.
Antidiabetic Activity of Bambusa arundinaceae Root Extracts on Alloxan Induced Diabetic Rats

Aqueous ethanolic solvent extracts of Bambusa arundinaceae root (Bambsaceae) were tested for anti-diabetic activity using alloxan induced diabetic rats and compared with standard. The results expressed that aqueous ethanolic extracts had shown significant protection and maximum reduction in blood glucose was observed in alloxan induced diabetic rats. The results of this comprehensive study reveal that Bambusa arundinaceae seed shown statistically significant Anti-Diabetic activity in comparison to the standard glibenclamide.
Investigating the influence of postcapping period on varroa mite infestation

The aim of this study was to assess infestation levels of Varroa destructor in some honey bee colonies from the National breeding program in the central part of Iran, and the relationship between mite infestation levels and postcapping period (PCP) of worker brood cells. Shortening the PCP is an important parameter limiting the success of varroa mite reproduction in honey bee colonies. In the present study, four pure-bred line colonies from isolated areas were selected to investigate the brood capping durations and mite infestation levels. Cages were used to synchronize egg laying of the queens and the time of capping and emerging of the brood cells was recorded at two-hour intervals. The results did not show any significant differences on the average of PCP of brood cells and mite infestation levels among test colonies. In addition, non-significant correlations were found between mite infestation and the capping period during the experiment. A relatively shorter capping period of brood cells was observed in one of the provinces compared to others, corresponding with slightly lower mite levels in the same colonies, which might suggest that reducing capping duration may be one of the factors which can potentially affect mite populations in honey bee colonies and therefore should be considered in breeding programs.
Effects of diet quality on survival of Vanessa atalanta (L., 1758) (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) larvae infected by Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. kurstaki.

Effects of seven artificial diets with varying protein, carbohydrate and tannic acid contents on the survival of Vanessa atalanta larvae infected by Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. kurstaki (Btk) were studied. The highest survival rate among the infected larvae was observed from the group feeding on diet containing 10% of tannic acid. The highest mortality rate was observed among the larvae feeding on artificial diet with the lowest protein amount. Maximum mortality in each diet group was observed on the third day among the larvae infected by bacteria. This mortality was particularly higher among the larvae feeding on diet that contain less amount of protein. Among the infected larvae, the highest number of total haemocytes was found among those that fed on diet containing 2.5% of tannic acid. The lowest number of haemocytes was found in larvae that fed on diet with lower protein amount. The lowest pupal protein amount was found among the infected larvae feeding on artificial diet containing much lower amounts of protein.
Integrated Product Service Offerings for Rail Infrastructure- the Perspectives of the Buyer and the Provider

Large amounts of material are used for rail infrastructure causing significant environmental impact. At the same time the industry’s motivation to innovate is low and the lowest price is the main driver for selecting a tender. The concept of Integrated Product Service Offerings (IPSO), have in several business areas proven to be a mean with potential to reduce the environmental impact of products and services, increase cost efficiency and quality, and act as a driver for change. The business model is based on a life cycle approach and focuses on the function and not the product of an offering.
Saliency is a Possible Red Herring When Diagnosing Poor Generalization

Poor generalization is one symptom of models that learn to predict target variables using spuriously-correlated image features present only in the training distribution instead of the true image features that denote a class. It is often thought that this can be diagnosed visually using attribution (aka saliency) maps. We study if this assumption is correct. In some prediction tasks, such as for medical images, one may have some images with masks drawn by a human expert, indicating a region of the image containing relevant information to make the prediction. We study multiple methods that take advantage of such auxiliary labels, by training networks to ignore distracting features which may be found outside of the region of interest. This mask information is only used during training and has an impact on generalization accuracy depending on the severity of the shift between the training and test distributions. Surprisingly, while these methods improve generalization performance in the presence of a covariate shift, there is no strong correspondence between the correction of attribution towards the features a human expert has labelled as important and generalization performance. These results suggest that the root cause of poor generalization may not always be spatially deﬁned, and raise questions about the utility of masks as “attribution priors” as well as saliency maps for explainable predictions.
A Human in the Loop is Not Enough: The Need for Human-Subject Experiments in Facial Recognition

The deployment of facial recognition systems in high-stakes scenarios has sparked widespread concerns about privacy, fairness, and accountability. A common response to these concerns is the suggestion of adding a human in the loop to provide oversight and ensure fairness and accountability. However, the effectiveness of this approach is seldom studied empirically, and humans are known to have biases of their own. In this position paper, we argue for the necessity of empirical studies of human-in-the-loop facial recognition systems. We outline several technical and ethical challenges that arise when conducting such empirical studies and when interpreting their results. Our goal is to initiate a discussion about ways for AI and HCI researchers to work together on human-centered approaches to empirically studying human-in-the-loop facial recognition systems.
Logistic requirements considering environmental sensitive demand: evidence from the French food distribution sector

As described in the literature, the demand characteristics could influence the food distribution configuration. The aim of this paper is to explain how these demand characteristics can be used to describe the logistic requirements for food distribution configuration. With this aim, the chosen methodological approach integrates a literature review, interviews of stakeholders involved in the distribution system and a survey to the French industrial sector. Results describe the logistic requirements from for food distribution found in the literature review according to the different actors, products and distribution configuration adopted. Furthermore, the logistic requirements extracted from the literature review are compared with the primary data collected to establish the main logistic requirements linked to the conscious demand in the food supply chain for the food distribution configuration. The main logistic requirements defined are linked to facility location, supplier selection and distribution optimization due to the logistic platforms and transportation strategies development. Finally, the results of this research provide information to food supply chain actors when designing the food distribution circuits aiming to answer to conscious demand characteristics that are emerging.
Taxonomic Revision of Chironius bicarinatus (Wied 1820) (Serpentes: Colubridae), with Description of a New Species

Chironius bicarinatus is a conspicuous colubrid snake species, widely distributed in northeastern, southeastern, central-western, and southern Brazil, as well as Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. On the basis of new morphological data of individuals from previously unsampled regions and deoxyribonucleic acid sequences, we reviewed the taxonomy of populations previously referred to as C. bicarinatus, revisiting the species definition with an updated diagnosis, inferring its phylogenetic relationships with closely related lineages in southern Brazil, herein described as a new species restricted to Pampa forests or grasslands and Atlantic Forest semidecidual forests in southern Brazil. The new species can be readily diagnosed from C. bicarinatus and all other congeners on the basis of internal (hemipenis unilobed, unicalyculate, cylindrical, apex with smooth calyces, with spinules restricted to proximal portion, near the medial area; lacrimal foramen with small projection on the anteroventral margin) and external morphology (ventrals 153–165 [153–165 in males, 155–164 in females]; subcaudals 103–146 pairs [129–142 in males, 103–146 in females]; adult dorsal pattern with dark green background, scales sometimes with light blue margin, two conspicuous black dorsal stripes with light green vertebral stripe between them that gradually dissipates to the tail, ventrals with black margin on its edges) and molecular evidence.
Natural Convection Heat Transfer in a Porous Cavity with Sinusoidal Temperature Distribution Using Cu/Water Nanofluid: Double MRT Lattice Boltzmann Method

In this study, natural convection flow in a porous cavity with sinusoidal temperature distribution has been analyzed by a new double multi relaxation time (MRT) Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). We consider a copper/water nanofluid filling a porous cavity. For simulating the temperature and flow fields, D2Q5 and D2Q9 lattices are utilized respectively, and the effects of different Darcy numbers (Da) (0.0010.1) and various Rayleigh numbers (Ra) (103-105) for porosity (ε) between 0.4 and 0.9 have been considered. Phase deviation (θ) changed from 0 to π and the volume fraction of nanoparticles (∅) varied from 0 to 6%. The present results show a good agreement with the previous works, thus confirming the reliability the new numerical method proposed in this paper. It is indicated that the heat transfer rate increases at increasing Darcy number, porosity, Rayleigh number, the volume fraction of nanoparticles and phase deviation. However, the most sensitive parameter is the Rayleigh number. The maximum Nusselt deviation is 10%, 32% and 33% for Ra= 103, 104 and 105, respectively, with ε= 0.4 to ε= 0.9. It can be concluded that the effect of Darcy number on the heat transfer rate increases at increasing Rayleigh number, yielding a maximum enhancement of the average Nusselt number around 12% and 61% for Ra= 103 and Ra=105, respectively. ∗Corresponding author. Email addresses: Hsajjadi@clarkson.edu (H. Sajjadi), a.a. delouei@gmail.com (A. Amiri Delouei), rasul mohebbi@du.ac. ir (R. Mohebbi), izadi.m@lu.ac. ir (M. Izadi), succi@iac.cnr. it (S. Succi) http://www.global-sci.com/cicp 1 c ©20xx Global-Science Press 2 H. Sajjadi et al. / Commun. Comput. Phys., x (20xx), pp. 1-27 AMS subject classifications: (or PACs) To be provided by authors
Analyzing Redundancy in Pretrained Transformer Models

Transformer-based deep NLP models are trained using hundreds of millions of parameters, limiting their applicability in computationally constrained environments. In this paper, we study the cause of these limitations by defining a notion of Redundancy, which we categorize into two classes: General Redundancy and Task-specific Redundancy. We dissect two popular pretrained models, BERT and XLNet, studying how much redundancy they exhibit at a representation-level and at a more fine-grained neuron-level. Our analysis reveals interesting insights, such as: i) 85% of the neurons across the network are redundant and ii) at least 92% of them can be removed when optimizing towards a downstream task. Based on our analysis, we present an efficient feature-based transfer learning procedure, which maintains 97% performance while using at-most 10% of the original neurons.
Efficient Tuning-Free l 1-Regression of Nonnegative Compressible Signals

In compressed sensing the goal is to recover a signal from as few as possible noisy, linear measurements with the general assumption that the signal has only a few non-zero entries. The recovery can be performed by multiple different decoders, however most of them rely on some tuning. Given an estimate for the noise level a common convex approach to recover the signal is basis pursuit denoising. If the measurement matrix has the robust null space property with respect to the ℓ 2 -norm, basis pursuit denoising obeys stable and robust recovery guarantees. In the case of unknown noise levels, nonnegative least squares recovers non-negative signals if the measurement matrix fulfills an additional property (sometimes called the M + -criterion). However, if the measurement matrix is the biadjacency matrix of a random left regular bipartite graph it obeys with a high probability the null space property with respect to the ℓ 1 -norm with optimal parameters. Therefore, we discuss non-negative least absolute deviation (NNLAD), which is free of tuning parameters. For these measurement matrices, we prove a uniform, stable and robust recovery guarantee. Such guarantees are important, since binary expander matrices are sparse and thus allow for fast sketching and recovery. We will further present a method to solve the NNLAD numerically and show that this is comparable to state of the art methods. Lastly, we explain how the NNLAD can be used for viral detection in the recent COVID-19 crisis.
Will I Sound like Me? Improving Persona Consistency in Dialogues through Pragmatic Self-Consciousness

We explore the task of improving persona consistency of dialogue agents. Recent models tackling consistency often train with additional Natural Language Inference (NLI) labels or attach trained extra modules to the generative agent for maintaining consistency. However, such additional labels and training can be demanding. Also, we find even the best-performing persona-based agents are insensitive to contradictory words. Inspired by social cognition and pragmatics, we endow existing dialogue agents with public self-consciousness on the fly through an imaginary listener. Our approach, based on the Rational Speech Acts framework (Frank and Goodman, 2012), can enforce dialogue agents to refrain from uttering contradiction. We further extend the framework by learning the distractor selection, which has been usually done manually or randomly. Results on Dialogue NLI (Welleck et al., 2019) and PersonaChat (Zhang et al., 2018) dataset show that our approach reduces contradiction and improves consistency of existing dialogue models. Moreover, we show that it can be generalized to improve context-consistency beyond persona in dialogues.
There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip Missing links in explaining government’s ability to shape social expenditure according to its will: an application to the Italian case (1946-2015)

Focusing on the last 70 years of Italian history, the paper investigates to what extent Prime Ministers are able to shape social expenditure according to the policy declarations expressed in their investiture and confidence speeches. Furthermore, the papers addresses some missing links in the existing literature on public spending by shedding light on the role of party factions and trade unions as political actors able to frustrate Prime Ministers’ decision-making powers. In detail, the quantitative content analysis of a wide typology of documents (i.e. Prime Minister’s investiture and confidence speeches, parties’ parliamentary debates, motions presented by factions at party congresses and documents discussed at the congresses of the two most important Italian trade unions, CGIL and CISL) allows us to locate Prime Ministers, coalition parties, parties’ factions and trade unions on a pro-/anti-welfare state scale, thus estimating their relative impact on budgetary choices. Results suggest that intra-party dynamics and trade unions’ preferences are crucial to explain Prime Ministers’ ability to shape social expenditure. In detail, Prime Minister’s ability to cut welfare state provisions vanishes when factions inside his party are highly polarized. Analogously, Prime Minister’s ability to retrench the welfare state diminishes when trade unions are more cohesive, while it increases as CGIL and CISL express divergent preferences.
Symptom Development of Chilling Injury in Pineapple Fruit

Symptoms of chilling injury (Cl) expressed as internal browning (IB) in fresh pineapple [Ananas comosus (L.) Merr. ] began to appear within 2 days at 22°C after a period of storage at temperatures less than 12°. Fruit not subjected to chilling temperatures during storage also developed similiar symptoms when held for 0 to 10 days at between 18° and 30°. Fruit stored for longer than 3 weeks at temperatures of 8° and 3° showed fewer CI symptoms than similar fruit held at 12°. Waxing fruit either before or immediately after exposure to chilling temperatures was equally effective in reducing CI symptoms. Low oxygen (3%), with or without (5%) carbon dioxide during chilling did not reduce symptom expression. Storage of fruit under low oxygen following chilling significantly reduced CI symptom expression. A model for CI symptom development is presented and related to the metabolic events leading to IB of pineapple fruit, stored at chilling temperatures.
Genetic Variability, Correlation and Path Coefficient Analysis of Some Physiological Traits of Transplanted Aman Rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Twenty one rice varieties were assessed for thirteen morphological characters during T. Aman season, 2008 at Sonagazi Regional Station of BRRI. Analysis of variance raveled significant differences among the varieties for all the traits. Plant height, number of effective tillers per square meter, number of spikelets per panicle, number of effective spikelets per panicle, number of ineffective spikelets per panicle, 1000 grains weight, straw yield and grain yield exhibited that they were controlled by additive gene action and selection for the improvement of these traits would be rewarding. The phenotypic variance was higher than the corresponding genotypic variance for all the characters. All the characters showed moderate to low phenotypic and genotypic coefficient of variation. Genotypic coefficient of variation was the highest for number of ineffective spikelets per panicle (39.96) followed by 1000 grains weight (24.33) and number of spikelets per panicle (18.61). Plant height and 1000 grains weight (95.30) had the highest heritability. Considering the correlation and path analysis number of effective spikelets per panicle, 1000 grain weight, number of effective spikelets per panicle, number of effective tillers per square meter and plant height are important characters for yield improvement.
SILAGEM DE MILHO COMO ALIMENTO PARA O PERÍODO DA ESTIAGEM: COMO PRODUZIR E GARANTIR BOA QUALIDADE

Devido às condições climáticas, a disponibilidade de forragem nas pastagens ao longo do ano é irregular. Há períodos de excesso de forragem, durante a época chuvosa, alternados com períodos de escassez durante a seca. A produção de leite e carne tende a diminuir, significativamente, se os rebanhos não forem devidamente alimentados. Uma das alternativas para o produtor complementar a alimentação do rebanho durante os períodos de escassez é fornecer silagem, um alimento volumoso, geralmente produzido durante o período chuvoso e conservado através da fermentação. O milho é a cultura mais utilizada para silagem já que é de fácil cultivo, produz grande quantidade de massa verde por área, é de fácil fermentação, contém bom valor energético e é bem consumido pelos animais. A quantidade e qualidade da silagem de milho produzida está relacionada com as técnicas utilizadas na formação e condução da lavoura, bem como na confecção e utilização da silagem. ensilagem, fermentação, forragem, milho, nutrição animal. Due to the climatic condition, the forage availability in the SILAGEM DE MILHO COMO ALIMENTO PARA O PERÍODO DA ESTIAGEM: COMO PRODUZIR E GARANTIR BOA QUALIDADE 1Estudante do curso de Ciências Biológicas do CES-JF; Estagiário da Embrapa Gado de Leite – Rua Eugênio do Nascimento,610 – B. Dom Bosco – Juiz de Fora/MG – CEP: 36038-330 – : 2Eng Agr , PhD. , Pesquisador da Embrapa Gado de Leite – : 3Eng Agr , Dr., Técnico de Nível Superior da Embrapa Gado de Leite – : Eng Agr , Dr. – : E-mail
A poroelastic immersed finite element framework for modelling cardiac perfusion and fluid–structure interaction

Modern approaches to modelling cardiac perfusion now commonly describe the myocardium using the framework of poroelasticity. Cardiac tissue can be described as a saturated porous medium composed of the pore fluid (blood) and the skeleton (myocytes and collagen scaffold). In previous studies fluid–structure interaction in the heart has been treated in a variety of ways, but in most cases, the myocardium is assumed to be a hyperelastic fibre‐reinforced material. Conversely, models that treat the myocardium as a poroelastic material typically neglect interactions between the myocardium and intracardiac blood flow. This work presents a poroelastic immersed finite element framework to model left ventricular dynamics in a three‐phase poroelastic system composed of the pore blood fluid, the skeleton, and the chamber fluid. We benchmark our approach by examining a pair of prototypical poroelastic formations using a simple cubic geometry considered in the prior work by Chapelle et al (2010). This cubic model also enables us to compare the differences between system behaviour when using isotropic and anisotropic material models for the skeleton. With this framework, we also simulate the poroelastic dynamics of a three‐dimensional left ventricle, in which the myocardium is described by the Holzapfel–Ogden law. Results obtained using the poroelastic model are compared to those of a corresponding hyperelastic model studied previously. We find that the poroelastic LV behaves differently from the hyperelastic LV model. For example, accounting for perfusion results in a smaller diastolic chamber volume, agreeing well with the well‐known wall‐stiffening effect under perfusion reported previously. Meanwhile differences in systolic function, such as fibre strain in the basal and middle ventricle, are found to be comparatively minor.