Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vingelengde som prediktor for kroppsstørrelse hos granmeis

Vingelengde, stjertlengde og tarslengde samt kroppsvekt ble registrert hos 48 hanner og 43 hunner av juvenile (1K) granmeis i felt. Flere av disse ble gjenfanget og malt i de folgende tre arene. Vingelengden hos hanner okte gjennomsnittlig 0.82 mm fra forste til andre ar og 0.37 mm fra andre til tredje ar. Hos hunner var okningen fra forste til andre ar 0.24 mm. Vingelengden hos juvenile hanner og hunner var klart korrelert med stjert- og tarslengde, men ikke med kroppsvekten. Hos adulte (to ar eller eldre) var vingelengden korrelert bare med tarslengden hos hanner og stjertlengden hos hunner. Vingelengden synes derfor a vaere en god prediktor for kroppsstorrelse hos juvenile granmeiser, mens den er mindre sikker for adulte.
Field performance of a vortex type gross pollutant trap

Abstract The performance of a large vortex type of gross pollutant trap installed in a stormwater drain in Sydney was monitored for about three years. During the first one and a half years after installation the trap removed 600 kg/ha.a, or more than 80% of all the debris from storm flows. After this time its performance deteriorated due to internal blocking of the trap during storm events. By two years from installation the trap had virtually ceased to function. Water only passed through the trap for a few minutes after the initial increase of flow during a storm. It appears that laboratory indications of the effectiveness of this type of gross pollutant trap can be reproduced in field installations provided considerable attention is given to maintenance. The study has shown that monitoring is a key issue in ensuring ongoing performance of water infrastructure.
Methanol Leaf Extract of Desmodium velutinum (Wild.) D.C. and Acarbose Exhibit Additive Pharmacological Effects in Diabetic Wistar Rats

Methanol Leaf and Acarbose Exhibit Additive Pharmacological Effects in Diabetic Wistar Rats. Abstract This study investigated the pharmacological effects of methanol extract of Desmodium velutinum leaves (DVE) administered alone and when co-administered with Acarbose (ACA) in diabetic Wistar rats. Preliminary phytochemical analysis and acute toxicity study were carried out on DVE using standard methods. In the pharmacological study, diabetes was induced in rats by intraperitoneal administration of 150 mg alloxan/kg b.w. Seven groups (6 groups of diabetic rats and 1 group of normoglycemic rats) of four rats each were used for the study. Groups I and II served as normoglycemic (NDC) and diabetic controls (DC) respectively and received 1ml distilled water/kg b.w. Groups III and IV were administered 400 and 800 mg DVE/kg respectively while groups V and VI were administered the same doses (400 and 800 mg/kg respectively) but co- administered with a fixed dose of ACA (150 mg/kg b.w.). Group VII was administered 150 mg ACA/ kg b.w. alone. Weekly fasting blood sugar (FBS) levels and body weight changes were estimated for 28 days. After the 28-day treatment regimen, rats were euthanized, and blood samples collected for serum biochemical analysis. Phytochemical analysis of DVE revealed the presence of alkaloids, phenols, flavonoids, tannins, steroids and terpenoids in varying proportions. Treatment with DVE alone and its co-administration with ACA significantly (p< 0.05) reduced FBS and serum biochemicals parameters of rats compared with diabetic control. DVE alone and its co-administration with ACA also significantly (p< 0.05) increased the serum total protein of rats compared with diabetic control. However, the pharmacological effects of DVE and ACA co-administration were significantly (p< 0.05) higher than that of DVE or ACA administered alone. It was concluded that DVE and ACA exhibited additive pharmacological effects in diabetic Wistar rats and as such could be useful in the management of diabetes.
Biogeography of Southern Ocean prokaryotes: a comparison of the Indian and Pacific sectors

Summary We investigated the Southern Ocean (SO) prokaryote community structure via zero‐radius operational taxonomic unit (zOTU) libraries generated from 16S rRNA gene sequencing of 223 full water column profiles. Samples reveal the prokaryote diversity trend between discrete water masses across multiple depths and latitudes in Indian (71–99°E, summer) and Pacific (170–174°W, autumn‐winter) sectors of the SO. At higher taxonomic levels (phylum‐family) we observed water masses to harbour distinct communities across both sectors, but observed sectorial variations at lower taxonomic levels (genus‐zOTU) and relative abundance shifts for key taxa such as Flavobacteria, SAR324/Marinimicrobia, Nitrosopumilus and Nitrosopelagicus at both epi‐ and bathy‐abyssopelagic water masses. Common surface bacteria were abundant in several deep‐water masses and vice‐versa suggesting connectivity between surface and deep‐water microbial assemblages. Bacteria from same‐sector Antarctic Bottom Water samples showed patchy, high beta‐diversity which did not correlate well with measured environmental parameters or geographical distance. Unconventional depth distribution patterns were observed for key archaeal groups: Crenarchaeota was found across all depths in the water column and persistent high relative abundances of common epipelagic archaeon Nitrosopelagicus was observed in deep‐water masses. Our findings reveal substantial regional variability of SO prokaryote assemblages that we argue should be considered in wide‐scale SO ecosystem microbial modelling.
Lean Body Mass, Body Fat Percentage, and Handgrip Strength as Predictors of Bone Mineral Density in Postmenopausal Women

Objective: This study was conducted to assess lean body mass, body fat percentage, and handgrip strength in the prediction of bone mineral density (BMD) in postmenopausal women. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study included 102 postmenopausal women aged between 45 and 80 years (mean age 58) who were screened for osteoporosis using a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scan at the lumbar spine. The lean body mass, body fat percentage, and handgrip strength were calculated. Results: The lean body mass, body fat percentage, and handgrip strength were having a positive association (correlation coefficient: 0.48, 0.29, and 0.3, respectively) with BMD. Conclusion: Lean body mass, body fat percentage, and handgrip strength can detect early loss of BMD in postmenopausal women leading to early screening for osteoporosis resulting in early interventions minimizing BMD loss over a much longer period after menopause.
Natural Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning

Natural Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning, D. R. Godschalk, T. Beatley, P. Berke, D. J. Brower, E. J. Kaiser, C. C. Bohl and R. M. Goebel, Washington, DC, Island Press, 1999, xvi + 575 pp., US$45.00Some of the most vociferous critics of proactive measures to tackle global warming are based in the United States of America. Interestingly, the east coast of America is one of the areas most susceptible to the combined impact of post ice age coastal submergence, and the effects of global warming: rising sea levels and greater volatility of weather systems. When this is compounded by moral hazard from legislation guaranteeing flood damage insurance to purchasers of developments in coastal flood zones, it falls to planners to rescue some form of sensible strategic purpose in addressing such threats.Godschalk et al., planners from the universities of North Carolina and Virginia, demonstrate the important contribution the profession can make to a subject area which has traditionally been driven by pre-event civil engineering and post-event emergency relief considerations. They focus in Natural Hazard Mitigation on the 1988 Stafford Act which sets the basis for providing federal assistance following a presidential declaration of disaster. This Act attempts to tie a greater part of the federal aid disbursed through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into state and municipal preevent natural hazard mitigation, rewarding the communities which show foresight in anticipating and taking steps to ameliorate such risks.Between the enactment of this legislation and May 1996, when their research was completed, 295 presidential declarations of disaster were made resulting in disaster relief expenditures of more than $12.6 billion. Over 80 per cent of this funding was directed towards natural events: hurricanes, coastal storms, riverine flooding and earthquakes. Federal funding often provides the bulk of assistance following a disaster, so making grants conditional on prior plans for hazard mitigation should help enforce congressional desires for anticipatory action in this field to lessen the rising burden of property losses. However, the research reporter here suggests that progress in this respect has been slow.The current expert consensus with regard to natural hazards has moved a long way from the belief that these are simply acts of God. Human actions are important in determining the vulnerability of social groups to natural hazards and anticipatory mitigation strategies can be both costeffective and provide the optimal long-term pathway for sustainable development. Two types of mitigation are advocated: structural, which involves hardening of facilities; and non-structural, which uses land use planning and regulatory controls to direct new development away from known hazardous locations. The latter embraces the maintenance of the natural environment by protecting features such as sand dimes, wetlands and forested and vegetated areas along with other ecological elements that absorb and reduce the impact of natural hazards on a community. …
Association between genetic variants and depression in a Romanian cohort

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is beyond doubt a common, disabling, and costly condition. MDD associates hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis alterations. We sought to investigate two candidate variants which could have a role in the genetic susceptibility for stress or corticoid-induced MDD: glucocorticoid receptor (GR) – nuclear receptor subfamily 3 group C member 1 (NR3C1) rs41423247 and brain-derived neurotrophic factor rs6265 BDNF:c.442G>A Val66Met. We enrolled 82 Romanian subjects, 1:2 male to female ratio, 53.54±8.98 years old, diagnosed with an episode of major depression at the Clinical Neuropsychiatry Hospital in Craiova, Romania, and 286 healthy controls, 34.28±16.34 years old. All subjects were genotyped using specific ThermoFisher Scientific assays on a ViiA™ 7 real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system. The impact of certain genetic variants may be ethnic-specific. In our Romanian cohort, rs41423247 NR3C1:c.1184+646C>G has a minor allele frequency of 29.2%, and rs6265 BDNF:c.442G>A of 22.2%. Neither reached significance in our study, under any of the association models – dominant, recessive, or allelic. Interpretation of our negative findings requires caution: literature provides arguably more evidence for the association between the analyzed polymorphisms; our study has sample size challenges, from which refined phenotyping limitations derive.
Robust H∞ Control for Space Teleoperation Systems Based on Linear Matrix Inequality

A robust H∞ control method based on linear matrix inequality(LMI) is proposed for force feedback space teleoperation systems with large time-varying delays and the uncertainty of the environment model parameters.This method only needs to know the bounds of the delay interval for teleoperation systems with unknown and variable round trip time delays.It also can solve the problem that the parameters of the environment are uncertain and obtain good position and force tracking performances.The master and slave dynamics are respectively transformed to state space equations,and they are incorporated to a uniform form,which is discretized in succession.A state-feedback controller is designed for the whole systems based on LMI method;the stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by defining a Lyapunov function;and sufficient conditions for the controller are presented which enable the closed-loop system to be asymptotic stability as well as guarantee a prescribed position tracking performance under the cases that the parameters of the environment are certain or uncertain.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method enables the teleoperation system not only asymptotic stability,but also taking on good position and force tracking performances.
Off-the-shelf vision based mobile robot sensing

The goal of this research is to enable a mobile robot using vision sensing technology to navigate in both outdoor and indoor environments, following such as a specified path, following a specified person, and detecting doorways to enter a room. The focus is upon real-time algorithm using off-the-shelf cameras. First, a simple approach for vision-based path following for a mobile robot is presented. Based upon a novel concept called the funnel lane, the coordinates of feature points during the replay phase are compared with those obtained during the teaching phase in order to determine the turning direction. The system requires a single off-the-shelf, forward-looking camera with no calibration (either external or internal, including lens distortion). The algorithm is qualitative in nature, requiring no map of the environment, no image Jacobian, no homography, no fundamental matrix, and no assumption about a flat ground plane. Second, by fusing motion and stereo information, Binocular Sparse Feature Segmentation (BSFS) algorithm is proposed for vision-based person following with a mobile robot. BSFS uses Lucas-Kanade feature detection and matching in order to determine the location of the person in the image and thereby control the robot. Matching is performed between two images of a stereo pair, as well as between successive video frames. We use the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) scheme for segmenting the sparse disparity map and estimating the motion models of the person
International Publication Trends and Collaboration Impact on the Scientific Research of Saudi Arabia

International collaborations are assumed to have a positive effect on scientific research advancement, which ultimately affects the economic growth of developing countries. To examine this effect, international collaborations in Saudi Arabia during the last two decades are investigated. Bibliometric and statistical analyses were applied to identify the characteristics of research collaboration using data extracted from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) between 2001 and 2020. After removing records with incomplete information, 158,860 publications were considered in the statistical analysis. The study showed that 64.74% of Saudi Arabia’s scientific output involved international collaborations. Among the different collaboration countries, the United States and Egypt accounted for the highest numbers of collaborations. Over time, the ratio of international collaborations to domestic collaborations continued to increase, indicating the general interest of researchers in Saudi Arabia in international collaborations. The average growth rate of Saudi Arabia’s scientific publications was 17.16% annually, and this growth was attributed more to international collaborations than domestic collaborations. Notably, co-authored publications with international first authors achieve a higher rate of citations than publications with domestic first authors. The analyzed dataset revealed that most scientific publications from Saudi Arabia were owed to international collaborations which have had a constructive effect on the quality of research and perceptibility of Saudi Arabia in the scientific community.
Intellectual Property Rights Awareness by Stakeholders: An Empirical Study

The libraries are moving from traditional library system to the digital environment. In this environment, the stakeholders such as the Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals must have fair amount of knowledge on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). In this paper an attempt has been made to identify the level of awareness and mode of acquiring the knowledge on IPRs in force India by the LIS professionals working in and around Chennai (INDIA). The empirical data were collected through questionnaire method. One 647 questionnaires were distributed among the LIS professionals working in different level such as Colleges and Universities in Chennai. 459 responses (70.94%) were received. An informal data collection method has also been adopted to identify the reality of their knowledge on IPRs. The data thus collected has been analysed using SPSS package. The study shows that most of the respondents have fair knowledge on IPRs and they have acquired knowledge through “Formal courses” as a preferred method. The LIS professionals have more knowledge on “Copyright” and “Trademark” followed by “Designs”. Further the analysis has been extended to gender, domain of institutions and nature of management of institutions. The male respondents have more knowledge on “Trademark” act followed by “Copyright” act whereas the
Experimental Design Approach for Quantitative Expressions of Simultaneous Quantification of Two Binary Formulations Containing Remogliflozin and Gliptins by RP-HPLC

The aim of this study was to develop a fast RP-HPLC method for simultaneous measurement of two antidiabetic formulations (vildagliptin + remogliflozin and teneligliptin + remogliflozin) under identical experimental conditions. Using the Box–Behnken approach and response surface design, the interaction and quadratic influence of three variable parameters, acetonitrile %, pH of the mobile phase, and flow rate, on resolution between the peaks were optimized. To forecast the resolution of peaks (2.7 and 6.5) for the three anti-diabetic medications, the design space with desirability function was used to find the optimal chromatographic conditions. Isocratic elution with 58:42 acetonitrile and phosphate buffer (20 mM KH2PO4, pH adjusted to 4.9 with orthophosphoric acid) over a Zorabx C18 HPLC column with a flow rate of 1.2 mL min−1 separated all three analytes in 2.5 min. In addition, the optimized HPLC process was validated using ICH recommendations. The devised HPLC method’s precision and accuracy were proven by the low percent relative standard deviation (0.60–1.65%), good percentage recovery (98.18–101.50%), and low percentage relative errors (0.20–1.82%). The method’s robustness was also proven by slightly varying the five separate parameters. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed HPLC approach was confirmed using a standard addition method for simultaneous determination of vildagliptin + remogliflozin and teneligliptin + remogliflozin from formulations. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated that experimental design can be successfully used to optimize chromatographic conditions with fewer runs. The devised HPLC method for simultaneous quantification of two binary combinations utilizing the same chromatographic conditions is fast, accurate, precise, and easy, and it might be utilized in laboratories for routine quality control investigations on both formulations.
Weaving sustainability into business education

The imperative for addressing complex sustainability challenges through education underpins the UN declaration of the 2005 to 2014 Decade of education for sustainable development. Sustainability has been burgeoning as a theme for business schools worldwide with increasing numbers of courses and specialisations on sustainability in degrees such as the Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs. However, in the current 2007-08 Beyond Grey Pinstripes Global 100 ranking of social and environmental issues in MBA programs, only one Australian university is listed (Aspen CBE 2007). The aim of this preliminary empirical research is to explore the essential linkage between the sustainability requirements of business and curriculum offerings. The findings in this paper support the call for holistic embedding of sustainability in business education to develop current and future business leaders’ capacities and competencies in shifting towards corporate sustainable development.
Performance of as-built and retrofitted parapets during the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes

Unrestrained unreinforced clay brick masonry (URM) parapets are found atop a large number of vintage URM buildings. Parapets are typically non-structural cantilevered wall elements that form a fire barrier and in most cases form decorative and ornamental features of vintage URM buildings. Parapets are considered to be one of the most vulnerable elements that are prone to out-of-plane collapse when subjected to earthquake induced shaking. An in-depth analysis of the damage database collected following the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes was performed to obtain information about the distribution, characteristics and observed performance of both the as-built and retrofitted parapets in the Christchurch region. Results, statistical interpretation and implications are presented herein.
Maternal and Fetal Risk Factors Associated with Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Admission in Term Neonates

1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Inje University Busan Paik Hospital, 2 Paik Institute for Clinical Research, Inje University Busan Paik Hospital, Busan, Korea Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the risk factors associated with neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admission in term neonates and to provide necessary data for antenatal counseling. Methods: This retrospective case-control study was conducted with 643 singleton pregnancies with term delivery at Inje University Busan Paik Hospital from 2017 to 2019. Patients were divided into the NICU admission and nursery groups. Maternal, antepartum, intrapartum, and placental factors were compared between the 2 groups to evaluate the risk factors for the NICU admission. Neonatal outcomes were analyzed as well. Results: NICU-admitted neonates had lower birth weight (2,971±597 vs. 3,142±418 g, P<0.001), higher incidence of fetal growth restriction (FGR) (21.6% vs. 0.2%, P<0.001), lower Apgar score at 5 minutes (2.7% vs. 0%, P=0.001), and higher incidence of respiratory distress syndrome (23.9%, n=53). Fetal growth restriction (FGR) was the greatest risk factor for the NICU admission (odds ratio [OR], 126.98; 95% confidence interval [CI], 17.17-939.17). Maternal pre-gestational and gestational diabetes mellitus with insulin use were great risk factors for the NICU admission (OR, 33.74; 95% CI, 4.36-260.92 for pre-gestational diabetes; and OR, 24.61; 95% CI, 3.02-200.07 for gestational diabetes, respectively). Emergent cesarean delivery due to prolonged 1st stage of labor and vaginal delivery had similar risk for the NICU admission (OR, 2.18; 95% CI, 1.26-3.77; and OR, 1.85; 95% CI, 1.18-2.91, respectively). Conclusion: Pregnancies that are complicated with FGR, pre-gestational and gestational diabetes mellitus with insulin use, and emergent cesarean delivery due to prolonged 1st stage labor may have higher risk for NICU admission, even among term neonates. Therefore, pregnancies with the above risk factors are advised for possible NICU admission during antenatal counseling.