Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular profiling of sweet cherry cultivars present in Chile using polymorphic microsatellite markers

Sweet cherry ( Prunus avium (L.) L. ) is one of the most important fruit crops of temperate climates. In Chile, the actual planted area is over 42 000 ha that produce over 260 000 t yearly. The accurate identification of sweet cherry cultivars is key for processes involved both in breeding new cultivars and along the production chain. In this study, we performed the molecular characterization of 87 sweet cherry genotypes cultivated in Chile, using nine microsatellite markers originally described for both peaches and sweet cherries. The analysis showed that 69 of these genotypes corresponded to unique cultivars, each harboring a unique allelic pattern. They could be differentiated using only five markers (BPPCT-037, BPPCT-039, BPPCT-040, PMS-30 and UCD-CH18). The remaining 19 genotypes could correspond to misidentified, mutated or even synonyms of the studied genotypes, since they have allelic patterns identical to one or more of the 69 individualized genotypes. Between 3 and 8 alleles per marker were identified, with a mean of 6, while the expected heterozygosity over the nine polymorphic loci averaged 0.72, ranging from 0.59 in UDP96-001 to 0.78 in BPPCT-040. Phylogenetic and population structure analyses showed that most cultivars were grouped according to their country of origin or the breeding program from where they were released, being also coincident with their presumed pedigrees. These results are the basis for a fingerprinting protocol, based on microsatellite markers, for sweet cherry cultivars. μL Colorless GoTaq reaction buffer (5×), and 0.25 U GoTaq DNA polymerase (Promega, Madison, Wisconsin, USA). PCR reactions were carried out on an XP Cycler thermocycler (Bioer Technology, Hi-tech [Binjiang] District Hangzhou, P.R. China) using the following temperature profile: 94 °C for 5 min, 35 cycles of 94 °C (30 s), 56 °C (30 s), 72 °C (30 s), and a final extension at 72 °C for 7 min. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and silver-staining were done as was described by Narváez et al. (2001). Fragment sizes were estimated by comparison with known allelic patterns.
Digital Commons@Georgia Southern Assessing the Utility of Environmental DNA Techniques to Monitor White Shrimp (LITOPENAEUS SETIFERUS) Abundance on the Georgia Coast

Environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys have developed over the last decade from once being a novel tool to now acting as an effective technology often used in complement to traditional capture surveys for assessing the distribution of organisms in freshwater and marine environments. However, many uncertainties on how to properly develop, operate, and analyze eDNA based techniques still hinder this technology 's effectiveness in the field. The white shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus , is a common, commercially and recreationally important species in the United States, with landings exceeding $254 million in 2020. L. setiferus is also used as a key indicator species to changes in estuarine water quality and habitat. Given the commercial and ecological value of L. setiferus , they represented a useful species to explore the utility of eDNA techniques for fishery monitoring. In this study, I examined how L. setiferus abundance and biomass correlated to the amount of eDNA found in the environment, while investigating how factors like temperature effect eDNA detection over time. However, this study yielded mixed results bearing difficulties with assay specificity, and sample amplification, highlighting the challenges associated with using eDNA sampling on marine crustaceans. Ultimately, these findings emphasized the need for standardized assay validations and the importance of appropriate selection of target species, environment, sampling, and detection method before trying to comprehensively use eDNA technologies for fisheries management. Litopenaeus setiferus as a Useful Indicator/Model/Study Species
Bounds on Efficiency Metrics in Photonics

In this paper, we present a method for computing bounds for a variety of efficiency metrics in photonics, such as the focusing efficiency or the mode purity. We focus on the special case where the objective function can be written as the ratio of two quadratic functions of the field and show that there exists a simple semidefinite programming relaxation for this problem. We provide a numerical example of bounding the maximal mode conversion purity for a device of given size. This paper is accompanied by an open source Julia package for basic simulations and bounds.
Utilisation of Zai pits and soil fertility management options for improved crop production in the dry ecosystem of Kitui, Eastern Kenya

This study sought to address challenges faced by smallholder farmers in the drylands of Eastern Kenya including soil fertility decline and low profitability resulting from poor soil and water conservation measures. An experiment was set up at Kabati, Kitui County, Kenya in the year 2018/2019 seasons to evaluate the effects of the interaction of zai pits, cattle manure and fertilizer inputs on soil nutrients, sorghum yield and economic returns over two seasons. The field trials were set up in a randomized complete block design (RCBD). Eight treatments were replicated thrice with sorghum gadam variety as the test crop. The results indicated that total nitrogen significantly ( p <0.05) reduced at the end of the two cropping seasons. Organic carbon significantly ( p <0.05) reduced in conventional method without input, zai with fertilizer and zai with manure and fertilizer treatments. Soil electrical conductivity significantly ( p <0.05) increased in zai with fertilizer, zai with manure and zai with manure and fertilizer treatments. Available phosphorous significantly ( p <0.05) increased in conventional with manure, zai with fertilizer and zai with manure. Sorghum grain yields were significantly ( p <05) higher in all zai treatments with fertility inputs compared to their conventional counterparts during the SR2018 season. During the SR2018 season, return to labour was significantly higher ( p =0.0269, p =0.0252, p =0.0379, respectively) in zai treatments with fertility inputs compared to their conventional counterparts. The findings of this research study highlight the importance of using zai pits and the use of manure with mineral fertilizer supplements to improve soil fertility, enhancing crop yields and profitability.
Portal Measures of cardiovascular autonomic nervous function : agreement , reproducibility , and reference values in middle age and elderly subjects

Aims/hypothesis. Currently, three categories of cardiovascular autonomic nervous function measures are used: classic Ewing-test measures, measures of heartrate variability (HRV), and measures of baroreflex sensitivity (BRS). Little is known about the agreement between these measures, and reference and reproducibility values for these measures have not been reported within the same group. Methods. As part of the Hoorn Study, 631 subjects aged 50 to 75 participated in a study of autonomic nervous function. Cardiac cycle duration (RR interval) and continuous finger arterial pressure were measured under three conditions: during spontaneous breathing, during six deep breaths over 1 min, and during an active change in position from lying to standing. From these readings, ten measures of autonomic function were assessed (mean heart rate, three Ewing test measures, five HRV measures and one BRS measure). Results. Regression analysis in a healthy subgroup (n=191) showed sex differences for two of the ten measures and seven measures decreased with age. Therefore, appropriate age-specific and sex-specific reference values were calculated. Reproducibility (n=39) of most measures was moderate, with a reliability coefficient of around 50%. Agreement between the measures of autonomic nervous function varied greatly, between 0% and 87%. The HRV-power ratio measure and the blood pressure changes in the lyingto-standing test showed the lowest agreement with all other measures. Conclusion/Interpretation. This study provides agespecific and sex-specific reference values for a wide range of different autonomic function measures in an elderly population. Agreement among the different measures varied widely and reproducibility was only moderate. [Diabetologia (2003) 46:330–338]
Self-Attention is All You Need

The internet contains the answer to most questions, the challenge mostly lies in finding it. In this report we build a model that approaches a narrower scope of the larger question-answering problem, namely pointing within a provided passage to the answer to a question using the SQuAD 2.0 dataset. We employ various self-attention mechanisms, including those from BiDAF, R-Net, and residual self-attention in order to reveal which types of self-attention work best for question-answering, and analyze why some types improve performance and others do not. Further, we employ a CNN to generate character-derived word embeddings and employ ensembling to improve prediction quality across various model types. With these techniques, we are able to improve on the BiDAF baseline significantly without overfitting to the training and dev splits.
The Impact of National Stereotypes towards Country-of-Origin Images on Purchase Intention: Empirical Evidence from Countries of the Belt and Road initiative

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the country-of-origin image mediates the effect of national stereotypes along two dimensions of perceived competence and warmth, on consumers' consumption behaviors, especially in today's environment, the capricious COVID-19 and the deepening and expanding "The Belt and Road" initiative. Research design, data, and methodology: After collecting 1500 primary data from twelve countries along the 21st - Century Maritime Silk Road, this paper conducts ANOVA and SEM in SPSS25.0 and AMOS 24.0 separately to analyze measurements, structural models, and hypotheses via using 1277 final samples. The mediation results illustrate the asymmetric dominance of the two dimensions of national stereotypes, indicating that the country-of-origin image shows the complementary mediation in the effect of perceived competence on purchase intention;whereas, the country-of-origin image holds the indirect-only mediation in the impact of perceived warmth on purchase intention. The results of the moderation show that the effect of country-of-origin image on purchase intention is more significant for consumers who perceive COVID-19 in China to be of lesser severity than those who believe it to be of higher severity. Eased on the paper's results, some implications for practice and theory are highlighted.
Dialect levelling and language attitudes in a rural Basque town: Intergenerational change meets subjective factors

azler.garcia@ehu.eus Sociolinguists assume that supralocal variants are rapidly gaining influence in the linguistic repertoires of post-industrial societies (Auer 1998; Kerswill 2002; Hernández-Campoy 2003; Pooley 2012). The outcome of this process, typically referred to as dialect levelling, is a gradual loss of regionally marked forms and increased homogenization in young speech due to contact and accommodation between mutually intelligible varieties (Trudgill 1986; Britain 2010). Relatively recently, as Unamuno and Aurrekoetxea (2013) suggest, dialect levelling has become widespread in Basque-speaking areas as well, arguably because of the greater geographical mobility across the Basque Country and the consolidation of Standard Basque in education and the media. This study investigates the patterns of variation in one phonological variable in a small, rural Basque town, with an emphasis on language attitudes as a predictor of linguistic behavior. Significant effects of age group and gender are observed, but when the solidarity index is included in the statistical model, it emerges as the only significant factor. Moreover, the data show that adult females behave most conservatively with respect to the local variant, whereas young females appear to be leading the change into supralocalization. Further support for a change in progress is provided by the fact that intergenerational stability in males seems to be only apparent, with high degrees of heterogeneity in young males. These trends, coupled with current and future scenarios of accommodation and outward orientation, reinforce a hypothesis of regional dialect levelling in Basque LVA despite the strong correlation between the incidence of local forms and positive attitudes towards the town and its
Stochastic infinity norm optimization and self-concordant primal interior-point algorithms

We study the two-stage stochastic infinity norm optimization problem with recourse. First, we explore and investigate the algebraic structure of the infinity norm cone, and utilize its algebra to compute the derivatives of the barrier recourse functions. Then, we prove that the barrier recourse functions and the composite barrier functions for this optimization problem are self-concordant families with reference to barrier parameters. These findings are used to develop interior-point algorithms based on primal decomposition for this class of stochastic programming problems. Our complexity results for the short-and long-step algorithms show that the dominant complexity terms are linear in the rank of the underlying cone. Despite the asymmetry of the infinity norm cone, we also show that the obtained complexity results match (in terms of rank) the best known results in the literature for other well-studied stochastic symmetric cone programs. Finally, we demonstrate the e ffi ciency of the proposed algorithm by presenting some numerical experiments on both stochastic uniform facility location problems and randomly-generated problems
Team Xuber: Question Answering via Modified R-NET Construction

Following the release of the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), rapid innovations have been made in the realm of question answering. The dataset, developed through crowdsourcing, provides a passage and an associated question. The purpose of the dataset is to train deep learning models that can comprehend the provided passage and answer the associated question solely using information found within the passage. To achieve better results than the baseline model, we will augment the algorithm with character-level embeddings to help handle out-of-vocabulary words. More importantly, character-level embeddings are key building block for implementing a self-attention mechanism, which is going to be the main part of our final model. Additionally, we utilize a use a gated recurrent unit (GRU) instead of LSTM to help solve vanishing gradient problems. Although we have yet to fully implement the self-attention mechanism, our intermediate model is already outperforming the baseline, which shows promise for the future. In terms of long-horizon tweaks post self-attention implementation, we are also planning to experiment with hyperparameter tuning, data augmentation, end prediction conditioning, as well as further exploring current research centered around these mechanisms.
The Effect of Project Based Learning on Science Undergraduates’ Learning of Electricity, Attitude towards Physics and

In the study, it was aimed to investigate the effect of project based learning on the first year science undergraduates’ attitudes towards physics, electricity achievement, and development of scientific process skills. In these quasi-experimental nonequivalent groups pretest-posttest design study, the sample consisted of total of 90 first year science undergraduates (prospective teacher) enrolled in the Science Teacher Training Department in Bayburt Education Faculty in 2006–2007 academic year in Turkey. The electricity title was taught through project based learning in the experimental group, while traditional teacher-centered instruction was followed in the control group through the second semester. The data was collected through three different tests; Electricity Achievement Test, Attitude towards Physics Test and Scientific Process Skills Test. The tests were administered to the experimental and the control group students at the beginning and end of the course as pretest and posttest. In addition, to explore further the in-class atmosphere of the experimental group, the observation notes taken by the researcher through ten weeks and the semi-structured interviews of 30-40 min conducted with the purposely selected five students from experimental group. Pretest and posttest scores collected by the three tests were statistically analyzed applying the repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The statistical analysis showed that there were statistically significant differences between experimental and control group with respect to students’ attitude toward physics, electricity achievement and scientific process skills. Furthermore, it was found from the qualitative data that the experimental results support the idea that the project based learning enhanced the students’ learning and helped their attitudes towards physics and research skills to improve.
Machine Prediction of Political Polarization from Circuit Court Judgements

Using a unique dataset of the United States courts of appeals opinions, we examine how prose (writing style), precedent (citations to previous cases), and policy (dis-senting votes) are indicative of a judge’s political afﬁliations by applying an ensemble of supervised learning algorithms on opinion embeddings and citation network embeddings. We ﬁnd that judges of different political parties use different languages, cite different cases, and such differences are persistent over time. Finally, we focus on circuit judges who were later promoted to the U.S. Supreme Court and ﬁnd that our circuit-based partisanship measures are predictive of their decisions as Justices.
Male breast cancer in a Hispanic population sample. Descriptive study Cáncer de mama masculino en una muestra hispana. Estudio

Introduction: Breast cancer in men is a rare disease, accounting for only 0.2 - 1.5% of all malignant tumors in men. Objective: To describe the sociodemographic data, clinical and paraclinical manifestations, treatment, and recurrence in a sample of patients diagnosed with male breast cancer at a private institution. Methods: Descriptive, retrospective study of an institutional database, in the period 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2020. Demographic, clinical and paraclinical data were collected from the medical records and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: The prevalence of breast cancer in men in the sample was 0.44%, median age 73 years. The most frequent symptom was breast mass (n = 5; 100%), median tumor size 2.5 cm (range 1.6 to 5 cm) and ductal histological type (n = 5; 100%). All 5 cases had hormone receptor expression, without HER2 overexpression; stage was locally advanced in 60% (n = 3) (stage IIB-IIIA / B) and metastatic in one case. Mastectomy was performed in 80% of cases (n = 4). The median follow-up was 23 months and relapse was found in 20% (n = 1), with an average time to relapse of 184 months. Conclusions: In the sample studied, breast cancer in men presented in the seventh decade of life as advanced stage mass, with high hormonal sensitivity. Mastectomy was the main treatment, and most required chemotherapy.
Efficacy of the unified protocol for transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral treatment for depressive and anxiety disorders: a randomized controlled trial

Abstract Background The efficacy of the unified protocol of the transdiagnostic treatment for emotional disorders (UP) has been poorly studied in patients with depressive disorders. This study aimed to examine the efficacy of UP for improving depressive symptoms in patients with depressive and/or anxiety-related disorders. Methods This assessor-blinded, randomized, 20-week, parallel-group, superiority study compared the efficacy of the UP with treatment-as-usual (UP-TAU) v. wait-list with treatment-as-usual (WL-TAU). Patients diagnosed with depressive and/or anxiety disorders and with depressive symptoms participated. The primary outcome was depressive symptoms assessed by GRID-Hamilton depression rating scale (GRID-HAMD) at 21 weeks. The secondary outcomes included assessor-rated anxiety symptoms, severity and improvement of clinical global impression, responder and remission status, and loss of principal diagnosis. Results In total, 104 patients participated and were subjected to intention-to-treat analysis [mean age = 37.4, s.d. = 11.5, 63 female (61%), 54 (51.9%) with a principal diagnosis of depressive disorders]. The mean GRID-HAMD scores in the UP-TAU and WL-TAU groups were 16.15 (s.d. = 4.90) and 17.06 (s.d. = 6.46) at baseline and 12.14 (s.d. = 5.47) and 17.34 (s.d. = 5.78) at 21 weeks, with a significant adjusted mean change difference of −3.99 (95% CI −6.10 to −1.87). Patients in the UP-TAU group showed significant superiority in anxiety and clinical global impressions. The improvement in the UP-TAU group was maintained in all outcomes at 43 weeks. No serious adverse events were observed in the UP-TAU group. Conclusions The UP is an effective approach for patients with depressive and/or anxiety disorders.
Reslaj: Religion Education Social Laa Roiba Journal

This study aims to examine the Influence of Attitudes and Perceptions on Decisions to Use Sharia Fintech Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia. With Satisfaction as an Intervening Variable. Data analysis in this research is quantitative analysis using Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis test tool. The object of this research is Peer To Peer Lending Syariah Fintech users in Indonesia. The sample was taken using the proportioned cluster sampling method, where the sample taken was only Sharia peer-to-peer (P2P) fintech users up to 100 samples. From the results of the research conducted, it shows that Attitudes, Perceptions affect the satisfaction of Fintech Syariah Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia. Satisfaction affects the decision to use Sharia Fintech Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia. Attitude influences the satisfaction of Fintech Syariah Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia. Perception does not affect the decision to use Sharia Fintech Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia. Satisfaction can mediate the relationship between attitudes towards the decision to use Sharia Fintech Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia. Satisfaction can mediate the relationship between perceptions of decisions to use Sharia Fintech Peer To Peer Lending in Indonesia.
Attitudes Toward Research in Landscape Architecture: A Study of the Discipline

Questionnaires were sent to 469 educators in North American departments of landscape architecture. Sixty-two percent of the educators returned the questionnaire. Items tapped concepts such as attitudes toward research, perceived rewards and penalties, perceptions of colleagues' attitudes, time management, and self-reported research behavior. As an empirical model for the prediction of research behavior, the study showed that positive attitudes, coupled with training in research methods, were most directly responsible for research productivity. Response distributions to individual items revealed five major obstacles to further development of a research component within landscape architecture. The obstacles are discussed and recommendations for overcoming them are offered.