Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gut microbiota differences between paired intestinal wall and digesta samples in three small species of fish

The microbial gut communities of fish are receiving increased attention for their relevance, among others, in a growing aquaculture industry. The members of these communities are often split into resident (long-term colonisers specialised to grow in and adhere to the mucus lining of the gut) and transient (short-term colonisers originated from food items and the surrounding water) microorganisms. Separating these two communities in small fish are impeded by the small size and fragility of the gastrointestinal tract. With the aim of testing whether it is possible to recover two distinct communities in small species of fish using a simple sampling technique, we used 16S amplicon sequencing of paired intestinal wall and digesta samples from three small Cyprinodontiformes fish. We examined the diversity and compositional variation of the two recovered communities, and we used joint species distribution modelling to identify microbes that are most likely to be a part of the resident community. For all three species we found that the diversity of intestinal wall samples was significantly lower compared to digesta samples and that the community composition between sample types was significantly different. Across the three species we found seven unique families of bacteria to be significantly enriched in samples from the intestinal wall, encompassing most of the 89 ASVs enriched in intestinal wall samples. We conclude that it is possible to characterise two different microbial communities and identify potentially resident microbes through separately analysing samples from the intestinal wall and digesta from small species of fish. We encourage researchers to be aware that different sampling procedures for gut microbiome characterization will capture different parts of the microbiome and that this should be taken into consideration when reporting results from such studies on small species of fish.
Energy consumption and thermal properties of drying banana (musa ssp) under varied relative humidity

The drying of banana slices was investigated under different relative humidity (RH) in a convective hot-air dryer. The experiments were conducted using 10, 20, 30 and 40% RH, 75oC and 2.0 m/s air velocity drying conditions. Drying kinetics, energy consumption and thermal properties were investigated. Eight mathematical models describing thin layer drying were employed and results were compared to their goodness of fit in terms of coefficient of correlation (R2), the root mean square error (RMSE) and the reduced chi square (χ2). The Midilli–Kucuk model could satisfactorily describe RH-convective drying of banana slices with R2, RMSE and χ2 in the ranges of 0.99947-0.99986, 0.00002-0.00008, and 0.0142-0.01618 respectively. For energy consumption, RH condition increased the energy consumption such that at every 10% increase in RH, a range of 17.9-41.0% increase in energy consumption was observed. In the case of thermal properties, endothermic peak revealed precise composition, fine particle size, and dispersion in a matrix of banana slices thus altering the transition in solid state. In effect, RH drying present new drying concept with prospecting thermodynamics absorbing properties. However, energy consumption issue needs to be addressed in further research.
Job requirements in the hospitality industry: Technical or general skills? The dilemma for academic education

This paper identifies the professional profiles of graduates for job positions in the accommodation sector, in particular, whether specific skills of the position or skills related to the tourism sector are preferred. A conjoint design is applied, which presents the more realistic context of asking respondents to evaluate potential “product” profiles. Managers of accommodation facilities expressed their preferences on four hypothetical profiles of candidates for five job positions: receptionist, administrative clerk, human resources professional, web marketing specialist, revenue manager. Six attributes (academic degree and level, among others) are used to describe the candidate profiles. The data were analysed through a multinomial logit model and an ordinary least squares regression model that highlighted the preferred characteristics of the candidates for the considered job positions. The main findings show that recruitment in accommodation facilities looks at specialized skills and academic programmes appropriate for the specific job positions. Knowledge of the desired characteristics of graduates, which could affect a possible recruitment, is important for designing effective academic curricula.
Cluster-Based Analysis of Retinitis Pigmentosa Modifiers Using Drosophila Eye Size and Gene Expression Data

The goal of this research is to computationally identify candidate modifiers for retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a group of rare genetic disorders that trigger the cellular degeneration of retinal tissue. RP being subject to phenotypic variation complicates diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In a previous study, modifiers of RP were identified by an association between genetic variation in the DNA sequence and variation in eye size in a well-characterized Drosophila model of RP. This study will instead focus on RNA expression data to identify candidate modifier genes whose expression is correlated with phenotypic variation in eye size. The proposed approach uses the K-Means algorithm to cluster 171 Drosophila strains based on their expression profiles for 18,140 genes in adult females. This algorithm is designed to investigate the correlation between Drosophila eye size and genetic expression and gather suspect genes from clusters with abnormally large or small eyes. The clustering algorithm was implemented using the R scripting language and successfully identified 10 suspected candidate modifiers for RP. This analysis was followed by a validation study that tested seven candidate modifiers and found that the loss of five of them significantly altered the degeneration phenotype and thus can be labeled as a bona fide modifier of disease.
Austerity, outsourcing and the state school workforce: trends from 20,000 English state schools

Abstract How have public sector austerity and the outsourcing of school provision under the Academies programme affected the state school workforce in England? Existing research claims that teachers are being substituted by cheaper support staff and that schools are becoming increasingly dominated by managers. However, these claims focus on the period before austerity-induced budget cuts and the outsourcing of more than 9,000 schools under the Academies programme. Using nationally comprehensive data sources, analyses reveal that changes under austerity have been drastic, far surpassing those associated with outsourced Academies. Long-term increases in the number of teachers and support staff have gone into reverse, while managerial teams have continued to grow. This research has important implications for our understanding of how marketization and austerity affect state school workforces.
Chemosensory Proteins Are Associated with Thiamethoxam and Spirotetramat Tolerance in Aphis gossypii Glover

Chemosensory proteins (CSPs) are a class of transporters in arthropods. Deeper research on CSPs showed that CSPs may be involved in some physiological processes beyond chemoreception, such as insect resistance to pesticides. We identified two upregulated CSPs in two resistant strains of Aphis gossypii Glover. To understand their role in the resistance of aphids to pesticides, we performed the functional verification of CSP1 and CSP4 in vivo and in vitro. Results showed that the sensitivity of the thiamethoxam-resistant strain to thiamethoxam increased significantly with the silencing of CSP1 and CSP4 by RNAi (RNA interference), and the sensitivity of the spirotetramat-resistant strain to spirotetramat increased significantly with the silencing of CSP4. Transgenic Drosophila melanogaster expressing CSPs exhibited stronger resistance to thiamethoxam, spirotetramat, and alpha-cypermethrin than the control did. In the bioassay of transgenic Drosophila, CSPs showed different tolerance mechanisms for different pesticides, and the overexpressed CSPs may play a role in processes other than resistance to pesticides. In brief, the present results prove that CSPs are related to the resistance of cotton aphids to insecticides.
Linking Macro and Regional Level Economic Forecasts: Alternative Regional Growth Paths in Hungary

Economic development at the national level is often accompanied by territorial divergence at sub-national levels, which phenomenon became even more noticeable during and after the global financial and economic crisis. Current development policy have to face the well-known equity versus efficiency challenge to sustain the prosperity of the most advanced regions and, at the same time, to tackle the divergence between advanced and lagging regions. For this reason, a comprehensive knowledge is necessary about the long-run, interdependent dynamics of national and regional level growth. Our research contributes to this knowledge through studying alternative growth paths for Hungary in a comparative framework. We focus on the methods that apply a regionalisation procedure in order to downscale national level economic forecasts to the regional level.
Phylogeny of Amorphophallus (Araceae) on Borneo with notes on the floral biology of three species

This study was undertaken on Amorphophallus of Borneo to address two questions: (1) to determine the phylogenetic relations among taxa of Bornean Amorphophallus and (2) to investigate the floral biology and floral visitors of three Amorphophallus species. Phylogenetic analyses were carried out by using one plastid region: matK, and two nuclear regions: ITS and PhyC, with a total of 98 accessions representing 56 taxa of Amorphophallus. Floral biology of three Amorphophallus species (A. hewittii, A. eburneus, and A. julaihii) were investigated. Bornean Amorphophallus is separated into three groups within subgen. Amorphophallus: A. angulatus and A. pendulus of the Paeoniifolius-Manta clade, A. ranchanensis as sister taxon to clade A, clade Pusillus II, and clade B. The anthesis of A. hewittii and A. eburneus lasted for ca. 49 hours and ca. 64 hours respectively. The pistillate anthesis was much longer in A. hewitti (36 hours) than A. eburneus (24 hours) but the staminate anthesis was much shorter in A. hewittii (13 hours) than A. eburneus (40 hours). Floral visitors to A. hewittii are different to those visiting A. eburneus and A. julaihii; the latter two species attract less visitors and belong to clade A where hitherto no species has been investigated.
Competition and Gender Inequality: A Comprehensive Analysis of Effects and Mechanisms

Abstract This study uses data from a series of laboratory experiments to provide a comprehensive analysis of gender differences in performance caused by two different dimensions of competition –rivalry for resources and status ranking. It also examines two mechanisms behind such differences. The results indicate that in the absence of any competitive dimension the performance difference between men and women is not statistically significant at the usual levels. Any competitive dimension, however, leads to women performing statistically significantly worse than men. These results are explained by the two mechanisms: (1) men’s beliefs that they are better than women under competition, and (2) women’s adherence to a prescribed stereotype of not harming others. This suggests that gender differences under competition are endogenous to situational contexts.
G T ] 2 6 Ju n 20 18 Information Elicitation for Bayesian Auctions ∗

In this paper we design information elicitation mechanisms for Bayesian auctions. While in Bayesian mechanism design the distributions of the players’ private types are often assumed to be common knowledge, information elicitation considers the situation where the players know the distributions better than the decision maker. To weaken the information assumption in Bayesian auctions, we consider an information structure where the knowledge about the distributions is arbitrarily scattered among the players. In such an unstructured information setting, we design mechanisms for unit-demand auctions and additive auctions that aggregate the players’ knowledge, generating revenue that are constant approximations to the optimal Bayesian mechanisms with a common prior. Our mechanisms are 2-step dominant-strategy truthful and the revenue increases gracefully with the amount of knowledge the players collectively have.
Report on the 1st simulation for information retrieval workshop (Sim4IR 2021) at SIGIR 2021

Simulation is used as a low-cost and repeatable means of experimentation. As Information Retrieval (IR) researchers, we are no strangers to the idea of using simulation within our own field---such as the traditional means of IR system evaluation as manifested through the Cranfield paradigm. While simulation has been used in other areas of IR research (such as the study of user behaviours), we argue that the potential for using simulation has been recognised by relatively few IR researchers so far. To this end, the Sim4IR workshop was held online on July 15th, 2021 in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2021. Building on past efforts, the goal of the workshop was to create a forum for researchers and practitioners to promote methodology and development of more widespread use of simulation for IR evaluation. Around 80 participants took part over two sessions. A total of two keynotes, three original paper presentations, and eight 'encore talks' were presented. The main conclusions from the resultant discussion were that simulation has the potential to offer solutions to the limitations of existing evaluation methodologies, but there is more research needed toward developing realistic user simulators; and the development and sharing of simulators, in the form of toolkits and online services, is critical for successful uptake. Date: 15 July, 2021. Website: https://sim4ir.org.
University of Southern Denmark Estimation of health effects of prenatal mercury exposure using structural equation models

Background: Observational studies in epidemiology always involve concerns regarding validity, especially measurement error, confounding, missing data, and other problems that may affect the study outcomes. Widely used standard statistical techniques, such as multiple regression analysis, may to some extent adjust for these shortcomings. However, structural equations may incorporate most of these considerations, thereby providing overall adjusted estimations of associations. This approach was used in a large epidemiological data set from a prospective study of developmental methyl-mercury toxicity. Results: Structural equation models were developed for assessment of the association between biomarkers of prenatal mercury exposure and neuropsychological test scores in 7 year old children. Eleven neurobehavioral outcomes were grouped into motor function and verbally mediated function. Adjustment for local dependence and item bias was necessary for a satisfactory fit of the model, but had little impact on the estimated mercury effects. The mercury effect on the two latent neurobehavioral functions was similar to the strongest effects seen for individual test scores of motor function and verbal skills. Adjustment for contaminant exposure to poly chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) changed the estimates only marginally, but the mercury effect could be reduced to non-significance by assuming a large measurement error for the PCB biomarker. Conclusions: The structural equation analysis allows correction for measurement error in exposure variables, incorporation of multiple outcomes and incomplete cases. This approach therefore deserves to be applied more frequently in the analysis of complex epidemiological data sets. Background Observational studies in epidemiology often involve several sources of uncertainty, such as measurement error, proxy variables of unknown validity, confounder adjustment, and multiple comparisons with outcome variables. Standard statistical methods are poorly suited to deal with these problems, especially when all of them occur at the same time. During the past decade or so, the technique of structural equation analysis has been advanced and made more easily available through software packages. Studies Published: 14 October 2002 Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source 2002, 1:2 Received: 12 June 2002 Accepted: 14 October 2002 This article is available from: http://www.ehjournal. net/content/1/1/2 © 2002 Budtz-Jørgensen et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.
Resilient Data Augmentation Approaches to Multimodal Veriﬁcation in the News Domain

With the advent of generative adversarial networks and misinformation in social media, there has been increased interest in multimodal veriﬁcation. Image-text veriﬁcation typically involves determining whether a caption and an image correspond with each other. Building on multimodal embedding techniques, we show that data augmentation via two distinct approaches improves results: entity linking and cross-domain local similarity scaling. We refer to the approaches as resilient because we show state-of-the-art results against manipulations speciﬁcally designed to thwart the exact multimodal embeddings we are using as the basis for all of our features.
Experimental study on the effect of the shroud on the performance and flow field of an automotive cooling fan

The effect of the shroud position on the performance of an automotive cooling fan with the radiator mounted at the front end has been studied on a test platform, and the characteristics of the flow field and phase-averaged velocity, vorticity, and turbulence intensity in five phases behind the cooling fan have been acquired by using digital particle image velocimetry. Moreover, a comparison of the flow field behind the fan with the shroud and that behind the fan without the shroud is made. The results of the performance experiment demonstrate that the fan with the shroud covering only the front part of the rotor possesses the highest performance, and the performance of the fan without the shroud seems to be less affected by the system flowrate. Flow field measurements show that the fan with the shroud has a larger exit radial component of the velocity than the fan without the shroud except at low system flowrates, and the vorticity and the turbulence intensity of the fan with the shroud are lower than those of the fan without the shroud.
An Optimized Gaussian Plume Model for Radiological Consequence Analysis Program (RCAP)

As a steady-state atmospheric dispersion model, Gaussian plume model has been widely adopted in nuclear regulation and application for radiological consequence analysis due to accidental release of radiation materials from nuclear facility including Level 3 Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) [1,2,3]. Typical Gaussian plume model has been adopted in Radiological Consequence Analysis Program (RCAP) developed by KAERI for applying Level 3 PSA. Since there are many application regimes in the Gaussian plume model [4], it is necessary to select an appropriate regime and optimal parameters values for practical application. This paper presents the application of the Gaussian plume model focused on the application regime and the selection of optimal parameters values for the RCAP code [5].
Polyhydroxyalkanoate production by Cupriavidus necator with inedible rice

Because of their lower environmental impact, biodegradable polymers such as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) produced within cultured bacteria represent promising alternatives to petroleum-based plastics. PHA production in flasks yielded optimal results with a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of 22. The 5-L scale experimental results revealed that when glucose was used as the carbon source, Cupriavidus necator could produce 4.74 g/L PHA with 77.6% of PHA content in the microorganism 72 h after the initiation of the experiment. When the hydrolysis liquid from inedible rice was used as the carbon source, the highest concentration of PHA and ratio of PHA content in the microorganism were 4.82 g/L and 68.6%, respectively, after 72 h. Using the hydrolysis liquid from inedible rice as the carbon source reduced the culture cost and shortened the culture time, without affecting the structure of the PHA during production. Using the hydrolysis liquid from rice as the carbon source in PHA production (by C. necator) yielded optimal results, and the results may serve as a reference for applications involving other PHA-producing bacteria. Employing alternative carbon sources to culture bacteria might become a means of increasing the productivity and ensuring the quality of PHA products in the future.
Abdominal imaging associates body composition with COVID-19 severity

The main drivers of COVID-19 disease severity and the impact of COVID-19 on long-term health after recovery are yet to be fully understood. Medical imaging studies investigating COVID-19 to date have mostly been limited to small datasets and post-hoc analyses of severe cases. The UK Biobank recruited recovered SARS-CoV-2 positive individuals (n=967) and matched controls (n=913) who were extensively imaged prior to the pandemic and underwent follow-up scanning. In this study, we investigated longitudinal changes in body composition, as well as the associations of pre-pandemic image-derived phenotypes with COVID-19 severity. Our longitudinal analysis, in a population of mostly mild cases, associated a decrease in lung volume with SARS-CoV-2 positivity. We also observed that increased visceral adipose tissue and liver fat, and reduced muscle volume, prior to COVID-19, were associated with COVID-19 disease severity. Finally, we trained a machine classifier with demographic, anthropometric and imaging traits, and showed that visceral fat, liver fat and muscle volume have prognostic value for COVID-19 disease severity beyond the standard demographic and anthropometric measurements. This combination of image-derived phenotypes from abdominal MRI scans and ensemble learning to predict risk may have future clinical utility in identifying populations at-risk for a severe COVID-19 outcome.
From Hoops to Hope: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Political Fandom on Twitter

The study uses political discourse on Twitter as political texts to evidence how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political fandom is fueled by affective structures of power, resistance, gendered power dynamics, political ideologies, culture, hope, and encouragement. The study argues for a more modern approach, amalgamating all three waves of fandom studies, that considers a more holistic and nuanced inquiry of fan studies that is contextual and inclusive. The political fandom of Ocasio-Cortez signals a sociopolitical shift in political fandom in which fans’ affective identification is intrinsically tied to power, resistance, and within-party hierarchies.