Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Imidacloprid on the Microbial Biodiversity of Soils of Selected Zones of Haryana, India

Imidacloprid is one of the most frequently used insecticide in Haryana having a pivotal role in pest management and improvement in crop yield production. This study was performed to investigate the consequences of Imidacloprid on bacterial, actinomycetes and fugal population in soils of selected zones of Haryana, India. The experiment was conducted for 28 days and the samples were taken after 1st, 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th day of Imidacloprid application at various concentrations like T1(1mg/kg), T2 (2mg/kg) and T3(10mg/kg) doses. The number of CFU (colony forming unit) of microbes were grown on appropriate media using serial dilution and spread plate method. The results obtained showed a negative effect of Imidacloprid at T1 and T2 doses in first two weeks of incubation but non-significant effect in last two weeks of incubation on soil microbial number. Imidacloprid stimulated number of heterotrophic bacteria and fungi at T3 with time but a negative effect of N2- fixing and phosphate solubilizing bacteria was observed at each dose and time point in each soil sample. Obtained results showed that these soil microbes were affected by concentration and treatment time of Imidacloprid significantly in soils of each selected zone of Haryana. The results provide a clue about the possible ecological effects of Imidacloprid.
Fracture behavior of hybrid fiber reinforced normal strength and high strength concrete: comparison with plain and steel fiber reinforced concrete

The paper presents an experimental investigation on the fracture behavior of hybrid-fiber reinforced normal strength concrete (HFRC) and hybrid-fiber reinforced high strength concrete (HFRHSC). The hybrid fiber used in the study constitutes of 0.75% steel fiber and 0.25% polypropylene fiber, by volume of the concrete. A three-point bend test on a notched beam has been performed based on the recommendations of RILEM as well as literature. Fracture parameters like the fracture energy, stress intensity factor, energy release rate and characteristic length has been evaluated from the load-deflection and load-CMOD curves. These were compared with values for the plain and steel fiber reinforced concrete reported in literature for similar type of mixes. Result suggests that hybrid fiber improved the fracture performance in comparison to the steel fiber reinforcement in case of normal strength concrete. For higher strength concrete, replacing steel fiber by hybrid fibers caused marginal reduction in the fracture parameters. Compared to plain unreinforced concrete, the fracture behaviour irrespective of the strength improved by addition of the hybrid fibers.
Searching for narrow absorption and emission lines in XMM-Newton spectra of gamma-ray bursts

We present the results of a spectroscopic search for narrow emission and absorption features in the X-ray spectra of long gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows. Using XMM-Newton data, both EPIC and RGS spectra, of six bright (fluence >10^{-7} erg cm^{-2}) and relatively nearby (z=0.54-1.41) GRBs, we performed a blind search for emission or absorption lines that could be related to a high cloud density or metal-rich gas in the environ close to the GRBs. We detected five emission features in four of the six GRBs with an overall statistical significance, assessed through Monte Carlo simulations, of <3.0 sigma. Most of the lines are detected around the observed energy of the oxygen edge at ~0.5 keV, suggesting that they are not related to the GRB environment but are most likely of Galactic origin. No significant absorption features were detected. A spectral fitting with a free Galactic column density (N_H) testing different models for the Galactic absorption confirms this origin because we found an indication of an excess of Galactic N_H in these four GRBs with respect to the tabulated values.
AN UPDATED ULTRAVIOLET CATALOG OF GALEX NEARBY GALAXIES

The ultraviolet (UV) catalog of nearby galaxies compiled by Gil de Paz et al. presents the integrated photometry and surface brightness profiles for 1034 nearby galaxies observed by GALEX. We provide an updated catalog of 4138 nearby galaxies based on the latest Genral Release (GR6/GR7) of GALEX. These galaxies are selected from HyperLeda with apparent diameters larger than 1′. From the surface brightness profiles accurately measured using the deep NUV and FUV images, we have calculated the asymptotic magnitudes, aperture (D25) magnitudes, colors, structural parameters (effective radii and concentration indices), luminosities, and effective surface brightness for these galaxies. Archival optical and infrared photometry from HyperLeda, 2MASS, and IRAS are also integrated into the catalog. Our parameter measurements and some analyses are consistent with those of Paz et al. The (FUV − K) color provides a good criterion to distinguish between early- and late-type galaxies, which can be improved further using the concentration indices. The IRX–β relation is reformulated with our UV-selected nearby galaxies.
Implementing a Nurse-Driven Sedation Weaning Protocol and Safety Screening to Increase Daily SATs and SBTs in the ICU: A Quality Improvement Initiative

BACKGROUD: Spontaneous awakening trials and spontaneous breathing trials are completed with patients receiving mechanical ventilation who have passed the safety protocols for initiation and involve a daily trial of turning off sedation and ventilator settings to allow the patient to wake up and breathe spontaneously (Marra et al., 2016). These trials ultimately assist in the weaning of both sedation dosages and ventilator settings over time, leading to eventual extubation for the patient. For the best clinical outcomes, the current recommendations for implementation in practice include the combination of a daily SAT and SBT. Patients who received both an SAT and SBT daily, spent four fewer days in the ICU and had a 14% reduction in 1-year mortality when compared with those who received the SBT only (Stollings et al., 2019). METHODS: Retrospective chart audits were completed for the three-month time period prior the implementation of the intervention in order to collect the baseline data and determine the current rate of daily SATs and SBTs in mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU. A descriptive statistical analysis was completed to identify the percentage increase or decrease of the post-intervention data when compared to the established baseline data. INTERVENTIONS: An online, educational PowerPoint training was assigned to all nurses on the unit for their completion prior to the initiation of the new processes. This PowerPoint included images directly from Meditech in order to maximize nurses’ understanding and implementation of the process and documentation. The training also included information highlighting the impact of daily SATs/SBTs on patient outcomes and the evidence supporting the implementation of nurse driven sedation weaning protocols. A laminated educational sheet was posted at the computer workstation in each patient room in the ICU to serve as a reminder to complete the SAT/SBT safety screen and sedation weaning, if deemed safe and clinically appropriate by the nurse. RESULTS: The baseline rate of daily completion of SATs was 52.3% and the baseline rate of completion of SBTs was 66.6%. In total, over the course of the data collection time period, there was a mean increase of 24.9% in the completion of both SATs and SBTs in the ICU. CONCLUSION: The combined implementation of nurse education, an SAT/SBT safety screening, and a nurse-driven sedation weaning protocol contributed to an increase in the daily rates of completion of both SATs and SBTs for patients receiving mechanical ventilation in the ICU, surpassing the specific aim of a 10% increase.
On a Benefit of Masked Language Model Pretraining: Robustness to Simplicity Bias

Despite the success of pretrained masked lan- 001 guage models (MLM), why MLM pretraining 002 is useful is still a question not fully answered. 003 In this work we theoretically and empirically 004 show that MLM pretraining makes models ro- 005 bust to lexicon-level spurious features, partly 006 answering the question. Our explanation is 007 that MLM pretraining may alleviate problems 008 brought by simplicity bias (Shah et al., 2020), 009 which refers to the phenomenon that a deep 010 model tends to rely excessively on simple fea- 011 tures. In NLP tasks, those simple features 012 could be token-level features whose spurious 013 association with the label can be learned easily. 014 We show that MLM pretraining makes learn- 015 ing from the context easier. Thus, pretrained 016 models are less likely to rely excessively on 017 a single token. We also explore the theoreti- 018 cal explanations of MLM’s efﬁcacy in causal 019 settings. Compared with Wei et al. (2021), we 020 achieve similar results with milder assumption. 021 Finally, we close the gap between our theories 022 and real-world practices by conducting experi- 023 ments on real-world tasks. 024
Case Report Treatment-Resistant Hepatitis C Viral Infection: A Case Report and Literature Review

The goal of is to achieve a sustained virologic response (SVR-12), deﬁned as undetectable HCV-RNA within 12 weeks after treatment completion. In 2011, approval was given for the ﬁrst direct-acting antiviral agents (DAAs). More recently, in 2013, more eﬀective DAAs, with pan-genomic properties, have been introduced, and these regimens boast increasing rates of SVR. The ultimate goal is that the history of HCV ends with the pan-genotypic eﬃcacy of multiple, easy-to-use and tolerate, combination regimens. These regimens have already demonstrated the ability to cure previously challenging patient groups. However, limitations exist in the current portfolio of agents, with suboptimal outcomes for patients with HCV genotype 3. In addition to this, access to DAAs remains an obstacle for many patients. We present this case of a 61-year-old male with HCV genotype 3 who has had several treatment failures with standard HCV therapy who was eventually approved for compassionate use of a 16-week course of glecaprevir (GLE)/pibrentasvir (PIB), sofosbuvir (SOF), and ribavirin (RBV) which ultimately led to SVR-12.
Water Quality Analysis using Pollution Index Method in Klampok Sub-watershed, Regency,

The Klampok Sub-watershed flows in the Semarang Regency, Central Java, Indonesia, located in the upstream part of the Jragung Watershed, used as a source of irrigation. Klampok Sub-watershed experiences environmental pressures in the form of decreasing water quality because of various human activities. For this reason, this study aims to determine the changes in the water quality and pollution index of the Klampok Sub-watershed in 2016 and 2020. The water quality observations were carried out in 2020 utilizing the Total Suspended Solids (TSS), Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Nitrate, Zinc (Zn) and Copper (Cu) parameters. The laboratory analysis results were compared with water quality standards based on Government Regulation Number 22 of 2021 and the status of water quality based on the pollution index method under the Decree of the Minister of the Environment Number 115 of 2003. The study results showed a change in the quality and index of water pollution in 2016 and 2020. The study results revealed a decrease in the value of water quality on the parameters BOD, COD, Zn and Cu, which indicated that the water quality was improving. Moreover, the Klampok Sub-watershed pollution index decreased in 2016 and 2020 so that the Klampok Sub-watershed had quality criteria for lightly polluted water to moderately polluted to lightly polluted at each sampling point. Therefore, several efforts to control pollution and management of the Klampok Sub-watershed, such as community outreach, water quality monitoring and industrial compliance, are expected to improve so that the Klampok Sub-watershed's sustainability can provide various benefits to the community.
Low-Glu® in Patients Newly Diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Department of Internal Medicine, Unit of Diabetology, Lipidology & Metabolism Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt Department of Internal Medicine, Unit of Endocrinology & Diabetes, Faculty of Medicine, Menoua University, Shebin El Kom, Menoua, Egypt Egyptian National Institute of Diabetes and Endocrinology, Cairo, Egypt Department of Endocrinology, National Research Center, Giza, Egypt Unit of Critical Care Medicine, Fayoum General Hospital, Fayoum, Egypt Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt Unit of Cardiology, Assiut General Hospital, Assiut, Egypt School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University Sains Malaysia, George, Malaysia
Radiation thermo-chemical models of protoplanetary disks. II. Line diagnostics

Aims. In this paper, we explore the diagnostic power of the far-IR fine-structure lines of [Oi] 63.2 mu m, 145.5 mu m, [Cii] 157.7 mu m, as well as the radio and sub-mm lines of CO J = 1-0, 2-1 and 3-2 in application to disks around Herbig Ae stars. We aim at understanding where the lines originate from, how the line formation process is affected by density, temperature and chemical abundance in the disk, and to what extent non-LTE effects are important. The ultimate aim is to provide a robust way to determine the gas mass of protoplanetary disks from line observations. Methods. We use the recently developed disk code ProDiMo to calculate the physico-chemical structure of protoplanetary disks and apply the Monte-Carlo line radiative transfer code Ratran to predict observable line profiles and fluxes. We consider a series of Herbig Ae type disk models ranging from 10(-6) M(circle dot) to 2.2 x 10(-2) M(circle dot) (between 0.5 and 700 AU) to discuss the dependency of the line fluxes and ratios on disk mass for otherwise fixed disk parameters. This paper prepares for a more thorough multi-parameter analysis related to the Herschel open time key program Gasps. Results. We find the [Cii] 157.7 mu m line to originate in LTE from the surface layers of the disk, where T(g) not equal T(d). The total emission is dominated by surface area and hence depends strongly on disk outer radius. The [Oi] lines can be very bright (> 10(-16) W/m(2)) and form in slightly deeper and closer regions under non-LTE conditions. For low-mass models, the [Oi] lines come preferentially from the central regions of the disk, and the peak separation widens. The high-excitation [Oi] 145.5 mu m line, which has a larger critical density, decreases more rapidly with disk mass than the 63.2 mu m line. Therefore, the [Oi] 63.2 mu m/145.5 mu m ratio is a promising disk mass indicator, especially as it is independent of disk outer radius for R(out) > 200 AU. CO is abundant only in deeper layers A(V) greater than or similar to 0.05. For too low disk masses (M(disk) less than or similar to 10(-4) M(circle dot)) the dust starts to become transparent, and CO is almost completely photo-dissociated. For masses larger than that the lines are an excellent independent tracer of disk outer radius and can break the outer radius degeneracy in the [Oi] 63.2 mu m/[C ii] 157.7 mu m line ratio. Conclusions. The far-IR fine-structure lines of [Cii] and [Oi] observable with Herschel provide a promising tool to measure the disk gas mass, although they are mainly generated in the atomic surface layers. In spatially unresolved observations, none of these lines carry much information about the inner, possibly hot regions <30 AU.
Fine-tuning Strategies for Domain Specific Question Answering under Low Annotation Budget Constraints

The progress introduced by pre-trained language models and their fine-tuning has resulted in significant improvements in most downstream NLP tasks. The unsupervised training of a language model combined with further target task finetuning has become the standard QA fine-tuning procedure. In this work, we demonstrate that this strategy is sub-optimal for fine-tuning QA models, especially under a low QA annotation budget, which is a usual setting in practice due to the extractive QA labeling cost. We draw our conclusions by conducting an exhaustive analysis of the performance of the alternatives of the sequential fine-tuning strategy on different QA datasets. Based on the experiments performed, we observed that the best strategy to fine-tune the QA model in low-budget settings is taking a pre-trained language model (PLM) and then fine-tuning PLM with a dataset composed of the target dataset and SQuAD dataset. With zero extra annotation effort, the best strategy outperforms the standard strategy by 2.28% to 6.48%. Our experiments provide one of the first investigations on how to best fine-tune a QA system under a low budget and are therefore of the utmost practical interest to the QA practitioners.
The Effect of Fragile Self-Esteem on Course Completion in Higher Education

Purpose: Successful completion of higher education is a significant factor of both individual and national development. Self-esteem has been neglected in previous empirical research as a constraint in course completion. We investigate this factor as a basis to develop suitable interventions. Design/Method/Approach: We use secondary, administrative data of course completion from fully accredited Bachelor- and Master-courses at an Austrian higher education institution. Findings: Self-Esteem, using measures of social comparison and gender as proxies, lead to reductions of successful completion of higher education. Theoretical Implications: Internal constraints, i.e. fragile self-esteem, impacts course completion in higher education. Practical Implications: National and educational institutions aiming at supporting students should focus on emotional support programs alongside professional support programs. Originality/Value: We offer tentative first evidence of a novel theory on the impact of fragile self-esteem on intertemporal choices, applied to the context of higher education. Research Limitations/Future Research: An empirical analysis of higher education performance based on a model unifying both ability and self-esteem constraints would provide an ambitious, but interesting avenue for further research. Acknowledgement: We thank the participants of the Coffee, Cake & Research seminar in the department for Business Administration Online for insightful comments and feedback. We thank Brigitte Auer, Christina Hackhofer and Maria Pammer for helpful conversations. We thank Jochen Frühwirth for data retrieval. Paper type: Empirical
Dark Energy: Theory and Observations

1. Overview 2. Expansion history of the universe 3. Correlation function and power spectrum 4. Basics of cosmological perturbation theory 5. Observational evidence of dark energy 6. Cosmological constant 7. Dark energy as a modified form of matter I: quintessence 8. Dark energy as a modified form of matter II 9. Dark energy as a modification of gravity 10. Cosmic acceleration without dark energy 11. Dark energy and linear cosmological perturbations 12. Non-linear cosmological perturbations 13. Statistical methods in cosmology 14. Future observational constraints on the nature of dark energy 15. Conclusion and outlook 16. Answers to the problems 17. Mathematical appendix Index.
Accretion flow diagnostics with X-ray spectral timing: the hard state of SWIFT J1753.5-0127

Recent XMM-Newton studies of X-ray variability in the hard states of black hole X-ray binaries (BHXRBs) indicate that the variability is generated in the ‘standard’ optically thick accretion disc that is responsible for the multi-colour blackbody emission. The variability originates in the disc as mass-accretion fluctuations and propagates through the disc to ‘light up’ inner disc regions, eventually modulating the power-law emission that is produced relatively centrally. Both the covariance spectra and time-lags that cover the soft bands strongly support this scenario. Here, we present a comparative spectral-timing study of XMM-Newton data from the BHXRB SWIFT J1753.5−0127 in a bright 2009 hard state with that from the significantly fainter 2006 hard state to show for the first time the change in disc spectral-timing properties associated with a global increase in both the accretion rate and the relative contribution of the disc emission to the bolometric luminosity. We show that, although there is strong evidence for intrinsic disc variability in the more luminous hard state, the disc variability amplitude is suppressed relative to that of the power-law emission, which contrasts with the behaviour at lower luminosities where the disc variability is slightly enhanced when compared with the power-law variations. Furthermore, in the higher luminosity data the disc variability below 0.6 keV becomes incoherent with the power-law and higher energy disc emission at frequencies below 0.5 Hz, in contrast with the coherent variations seen in the 2006 data. We explain these differences and the associated complex lags in the 2009 data in terms of the fluctuating disc model, where the increase in accretion rate seen in 2009 leads to more pronounced and extended disc emission. If the variable signals are generated at small radii in the disc, the variability of disc emission can be naturally suppressed by the fraction of unmodulated disc emission arising from larger radii. Furthermore, the drop in coherence can be produced by disc accretion fluctuations arising at larger radii which are viscously damped and hence unable to propagate to the inner, power-law emitting region.
Experiences of Teachers and Administrators in Three States

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Realization of higher Wess-Zumino-Witten models in spin chains

Building on the generalization of the exactly dimerized Majumdar-Ghosh ground state to arbitrary spin S for the Heisenberg chain with a three-site term (Si-1 . S-i)(S-i . Si+1) + H.c. , we use density-matrix renormalization group simulations and exact diagonalizations to determine the nature of the dimerization transition for S = 1, 3/2, and 2. The resulting central charge and critical exponent are in good agreement with the SU(2)(k=2S) Wess-Zumino-Witten values c = 3k/(2 + k) and eta = 3/(2 + k). Since the three-site term that induces dimerization appears naturally if exchange interactions are calculated beyond second order, these results suggest that SU(2)(k>1) Wess-Zumino-Witten models might finally be realized in actual spin chains. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.87. 140404
Axial Magnetic Effect and Chiral Vortical Effect with free lattice chiral fermions

Following the recent work by Braguta et al., we perform an indirect calculation of the chiral vortical conductivity σV with free lattice overlap fermions by measuring the response of the energy flow to the constant axial magnetic field. We find that the measurements are contaminated by very large finite-volume artifacts. However, the continuum result for finite- temperature contribution to the chiral vortical conductivity σV = T2/12 is still reproduced in the limit of infinite volume at fixed temperature.