Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Controls of Temporal Variations on Soil Respiration in a Tropical Lowland Rainforest in Hainan Island, China

Soil respiration represents the largest carbon (C) flux from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere. We created a study site in tropical lowland rainforest and used static chamber method to measure the temporal variations of soil respiration and their relationship with environmental factors at monthly time scale. The temporal variations of soil respiration showed a seasonal pattern related to soil temperature (p < .01) and soil moisture (p < .05). We tested different regression models to explore the relationship between soil respiration and environmental factors. Soil respiration had a better fit with soil temperature than with soil moisture in single-factor models. At different temperatures, the Q10 values from different models changed in rather different ways. We found that the mixed quadratic model composite of soil temperature and moisture had the best-fitting effect (R2 = .74) on soil respiration and could better explain the seasonal variation. In a certain soil moisture range close to 15%, soil respiration increased with soil temperature. However, soil respiration became restricted when the moisture was greatly higher or lower than this value. Furthermore, at low soil temperatures (lower than 16°C), higher soil moisture could decrease soil respiration rapidly. Thus, soil respiration in a tropical lowland rainforest is co-controlled by soil temperature and moisture. This study expands our observations of soil respiration in tropical forests and how it responds to environmental factors, which is important for reducing errors in evaluation and scaling up of soil carbon flux in climate change studies.
Tracing of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Isolated from Semen of Iraqi Males with Primary Infertility

Objectives: The main objective of this study was to investigate the bacterial infections of seminal fluid in males with primary infertility. The patients were referred to and/or visiting the Urology Department in Salah Al-Deen Teaching Hospital. Methods: The present study was carried out from May 2017 to June 2018 and the number of the patients group was 60. The patients aged between 20 to 50 years. Semen was collected from infertile men of a couple that female failed to become pregnant after one year of regular and unprotected intercourse of marriage and submitted for seminal fluid analysis for the bacteriological analyses. The control group consisted of 50 fertile male who were selected randomly from Tikrit City during the period of this study. Semen culture was done for all the patients and the control group. Results: There were 30 patients who suffered from bacteriospermia and 16 of them (53.3%) were infected with gram positive organisms, while only 14 (46.7%) patients were infected with gram negative organisms. The most common organism was Staphylococcus aureus which was isolated from bacteriospermia. Escherichia coli, Enterococcus faecalis, Klebsiella pneumoniae, S. saprophyticus, Proteus mirabilis and Niesseria gonorrhoae were also isolated and the frequencies of isolation were 23.3% (7), 13.3% (4), 10.0% (3), 10.0% (3), 6.6% (2), and 6.6% (2) respectively. The present study showed many antibiotics were not active against gram positive bacteria isolated e.g. the resistance frequenciy to rifampcin, vancomycin and clindamycin was 48%, 44% and 40% respectively. Conclusions: The gram positive organisms were more prevalent than gram negative organisms in patients with bacteriospermia and the isolationfrequencies of two groups were 16 (53.3%) and 14 (46.7%) respectively. The most effective antimicrobial agents were amikacin, ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin and the least effective one was ceftazidime, whereas moxifloxacin, norfloxacin, gentamicin, azithromycin, moxifloxacin, norfloxacin, cefotaxime, and ceftriaxone were effective at different levels.
The impact of personal characteristics, quality of working life and psychological well-being on job burnout among Iranian external auditors

Given the negative consequences of job burnout for both individual auditors and audit firms, the present study aims to examine the effect of auditors' personal characteristics, working life quality and psychological well-being on auditors' job burnout. ,We chose 240 auditors (junior, senior, manager and partner) who work at 53 audit and public accounting firms in Mashhad during 2015–2016 as our sample. The respondents were randomly selected and the data were gathered through the distribution of questionnaires of Walton’s (1973) quality of working, Ryff’s (1995) psychological well-being and Maslach and Jackson’s (1984) job burnout. We also employ structural equation modeling (SEM) along with statistical path analysis to test our hypotheses by using R statistical software. ,Consistent with our expectations and prior literature, our findings suggest that auditors' job burnout is significantly and positively influenced by auditors' personal traits, quality of working life and psychological well-being. ,The present study is quite remarkable and unique in that it focuses on a specific audit market where there are significant differences in socio-economic, political and cultural factors with those of Western or European developed markets. The results provided in this paper could be fruitful for auditors, regulators and policymakers.
Driving with and without automation on the motorway – an observational study

Abstract User-related assessment of a level 3 automated driving system, providing functions such as lane- and distance-keeping, stop & go driving, lane change and overtaking, was carried out on a motorway in Germany with the aim to assess user-related issues of automated driving, i.e., behavior when driving with automation on motorways, user experiences, reactions and acceptance. Twenty-one persons drove twice along the test route once with the system switched off and once with the system active. Driving data were logged and driving behavior was observed by two observers in the car and the drivers answered questionnaires. The results revealed that the drivers used the system as it was intended to be used and that the system affected driving positively in several ways, resulting in better speed adaptation, less speed variation, better distance keeping, better lane choice, better indicator usage and fewer dangerous lane changes. No differences with regard to subjective workload were shown. The system was perceived as being both useful and satisfactory. However, it was found that the system did not react to other drivers’ intention to make a lane change, especially in situations where they were attempting to merge onto the motorway. Further development is needed to improve the system’s ability to recognize other vehicles’ intention to enter the vehicle’s own lane. Also, the phenomenon of the driver “feeling guilty” because of the system’s reckless behavior by not allowing other drivers to merge onto the motorway or hindering other cars behind due to lengthy overtaking should be investigated further.
Challenges for China’s Sustainable Growth

For more than a quarter of a century, China has experienced a significant economic growth. Yet, this rapid growth has brought on many economic, social and environmental challenges, which might negatively influence the future development of the country. The objective of this paper is to analyse the Chinese economic evolution in order to determine if its growth model is sustainable over time. The research methods consisted in an investigation of the specialized literature, which helped us formulate four research hypotheses, and in a statistical analysis of secondary data, which allowed us develop four models, in order to test the hypotheses. The conclusions show that, to sustain the growth rate, China needs to increase its human capital stock, to keep the pace of attracting the foreign investments, to reduce the size of the government, to diminish the public consumption and to invest in the renewable energy, for increasing the energy efficiency.
Public Expenditure for Education and Economic Growth in Vietnam

This research provides empirical evidence of impact of public expenditure for education on economic growth in Vietnam from 2000 to 2015. In addition, effect of human capital quality is also attacted into the research to examine its impact on economic growth. Specifically, for relating performance of government expenditure for education, we choose enrolment number of pre-primary school, enrolment number of primary school, enrolment number of lower secondary school, enrolment of upper secondary school, percentage of high school graduation as education’s performance. Moreover, we aslo estimate the impact of percentage of government expenditure of GDP for health on GDP growth. Firstly, we estimate the relationship of government capital and regular expenditure for education, its performance mentioned above and human capital quality (HDI as proxy). Secondly, we test the impact of all explanatories of model 1 including HDI plus percentage of government expenditure of GDP for health on GDP growth. Consequently, the first model shows that enrolment number of pre-primary school and regular government spending for education have positive relationship with HDI, whereas, capital spending for education shows negative relationship. For the second model, enrolment number of lower secondary school, enrolment number of primary school, capital expenditure of public budget for education, and HDI are related positively to GDP growth. On the other hand, enrolment number of pre-primary school, percentage of high school graduation, and regular spending for education move negatively way with GDP growth. Keywords : HDI, government expenditure, GDP growth, enrolment DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-6-06 Publication date: March 31 st 2020
Factors Influence on the Quality of Management Accounting Information System and Its Impacts on Good Corporate Governance Implementation

—Poor implementation of Good Corporate Governance (GCG) in sharia banking institutions resulted in many obstacles, such as the low Quality of the Management Accounting Information System (QMAIS) at the institution. Weak human resources, poor organizational culture and the absence of external environment cause the low QMAIS which makes managers unable to carry out their functions properly. This study aims to empirically prove that manager competence, organizational culture and external environmental uncertainty are the factors that influence QMAIS and have an impact on GCG implementation in sharia banking institutions in Bandung city. Survey and verification with data collection methods: 1) distributing questionnaires, 2) in-depth interviews and 3) documentation are used as the research method. There are 15 banks as a total sample in the target population of 42 Sharia Banking Institutions in Bandung. The sampling technique of this study is a non-probability sampling technique with convenience sampling. Furthermore, the research hypothesis was tested using the SEM-PLS statistical technique. The study results showed that manager's competence and organizational culture did not have influence on QMAIS. On the contrary, the uncertainty of the external environment had a positive and significant influence on QMAIS. Thus, QMAIS had a positive and significant influence on GCG implementation.
Assessing Compound Flooding From Landfalling Tropical Cyclones on the North Carolina Coast

Tropical cyclone (TC) events are major drivers of compound flooding due to the interaction of wind‐driven storm surge and TC rainfall. Traditionally, coastal flood risk models have only taken into account surge flooding, even though it is known that the role of rainfall‐runoff is critical. There is limited understanding about the types of TC events that are capable of producing significant compounding and how site conditions at the coast affect the extent to which storm surge and rainfall‐runoff interact. This study investigates a suite of historical TCs making landfall near the Cape Fear River Estuary, NC, through a loosely coupled physical modeling methodology in order to draw conclusions about the spatial and temporal patterns of storm surge and rainfall that are able to induce significant compound impacts. Results indicate that intense outer rain bands falling over inland portions of the study area can be a driver of river‐surge compounding (increasing river levels by up to 0.36 m), while intense eyewall rainfall along the coast can result in localized compound impacts to coastal streams and tributaries if peak rainfall occurs near the time of peak storm tide. These localized compound impacts can result in defined interaction zones, where neither storm tide alone nor rainfall‐runoff alone can fully explain the observed maximum water levels. These results provide insight about the relative timing and spatial patterns of rainfall and storm surge that are capable of inducing compound flooding during TC events.
DM-SLAM: A Feature-Based SLAM System for Rigid Dynamic Scenes

Most Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods assume that environments are static. Such a strong assumption limits the application of most visual SLAM systems. The dynamic objects will cause many wrong data associations during the SLAM process. To address this problem, a novel visual SLAM method that follows the pipeline of feature-based methods called DM-SLAM is proposed in this paper. DM-SLAM combines an instance segmentation network with optical flow information to improve the location accuracy in dynamic environments, which supports monocular, stereo, and RGB-D sensors. It consists of four modules: semantic segmentation, ego-motion estimation, dynamic point detection and a feature-based SLAM framework. The semantic segmentation module obtains pixel-wise segmentation results of potentially dynamic objects, and the ego-motion estimation module calculates the initial pose. In the third module, two different strategies are presented to detect dynamic feature points for RGB-D/stereo and monocular cases. In the first case, the feature points with depth information are reprojected to the current frame. The reprojection offset vectors are used to distinguish the dynamic points. In the other case, we utilize the epipolar constraint to accomplish this task. Furthermore, the static feature points left are fed into the fourth module. The experimental results on the public TUM and KITTI datasets demonstrate that DM-SLAM outperforms the standard visual SLAM baselines in terms of accuracy in highly dynamic environments.
Executive function developmental trajectories kindergarten to first grade: monolingual, bilingual and English language learners

ABSTRACT Many studies examine how bilinguals and monolinguals differ in their executive function abilities at one time-point or cross-sectionally. Fewer examine how these groups of children may differ over time. Using nationally representative data obtained from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS-K:2011), this study examines the developmental trajectories of executive functions among bilingual, monolingual and ELL (English Language Learner) children during their early school years across four time points from the start of kindergarten to the end of first grade while controlling for sex and socioeconomic status. Latent growth curve models show that ELL children start with lower executive function skills on the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) and Numbers Reversed. Yet, have a steeper slope on both tasks. Bilinguals also had a steeper slope on the DCCS Task despite not differing initially. In addition to cognitive assessments, we also evaluated teacher reports of children’s executive function skills. Results from teacher reports showed that bilingual children have an initial higher perceived executive function in comparison to monolinguals. Together, the findings indicate that bilinguals and monolinguals are in some ways different in their cognitive control trajectories. Implications for findings regarding ELLs are further discussed.
Cigarette Smoking Potentiates Endothelial Dysfunction of Forearm Resistance Vessels in Patients With Hypercholesterolemia

Background Risk factors for atherosclerosis such as hypercholesterolemia and hypertension are associated with endothelial dysfunction of conduit and resistance vessels; however, the interaction of these risk factors and underlying mechanisms affecting endothelial function remain to be determined. The present study investigated the role of long-term smoking and hypercholesterolemia and their impact on endothelial function of peripheral resistance vessels in relation to plasma levels of autoantibodies against oxidized LDL, which has been implicated in the development of endothelial dysfunction and atherosclerosis. Methods and Results The vascular responses to the endothelium-dependent agent acetylcholine (7.5, 15, 30, and 60 μg/min) and the endothelium-independent agent sodium nitroprusside (1, 3, and 10 μg/min) were studied in normal control subjects (n=10), patients with hypercholesterolemia (n=15), long-term smokers (n=15), and hypercholesterolemic patients who smoked (n=15). Drugs were infused into the .
Effects of maternal vitamin D3 during pregnancy on FASN and LIPE mRNA expression in offspring pigs

Abstract In this study, sows were fed 200 (LD), 800 (ND) and 3200 (HD) IU of vitamin D3/kg basal diet during pregnancy (from 41 d to birth), respectively. All their offspring pigs were fed the same vitamin D3 replete die. At 150 days of age, a total of 18 offspring pigs (six offspring pigs per maternal diet group, sex balance) were weighed and slaughtered to investigate effects of maternal vitamin D3 during pregnancy on fatty acids synthase (FASN) and hormone-sensitive lipase (LIPE) expression in offspring pigs. The results showed that LD offspring pigs had higher FASN mRNA expression and the ratio of FASN/LIPE mRNA expression in subcutaneous adipose tissue, as well as higher LIPE mRNA expression of longissimus dorsal muscle, whereas, had lower the ratio of FASN/LIPE mRNA expression in longissimus dorsal muscle compared with ND or HD offspring pigs, respectively. Meanwhile, LD offspring pigs had higher carcass fat, average backfat thickness (ABFT), serum insulin and leptin levels, lower intramuscular fat (IMF), serum free fatty acid and triglycerol levels compared with ND or HD offspring pigs. In addition, the ratio of FASN/LIPE mRNA expression was negatively correlated with IMF content, and positively correlated to carcass fat content and ABFT in offspring pigs. Meanwhile, FASN mRNA expression was positively correlated with carcass fat content, while negatively correlated with ABFT in offspring pigs. These results suggested that maternal vitamin D3 affected fat accumulation and meat quality by regulating FASN and LIPE mRNA expression in offspring pigs.
Uptake selectivity of methanesulfonic acid (MSA) on fine particles over polynya regions of the Ross Sea, Antarctica

Abstract. The uptake of methanesulfonic acid (MSA) on existing particles is a major route of the particulate MSA formation, however, MSA uptake on different particles is still lacking in knowledge. Characteristics of MSA uptake on different aerosol particles were investigated in polynya (an area of open sea water surrounded by ice) regions of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Particulate MSA mass concentrations, as well as aerosol population and size distribution, were observed simultaneously for the first time to access the uptake of MSA on different particles. The results show that MSA mass concentration does not always reflect MSA particle population in the marine atmosphere. MSA uptake on aerosol particle increases the particle size and changes aerosol chemical composition, but it does not increase the particle population. The uptake rate of MSA on particles is significantly influenced by aerosol chemical properties. Sea salt particles are beneficial for MSA uptake, as MSA-Na and MSA-Mg particles are abundant in the Na and Mg particles, accounting for 0.43±0.21 and 0.41±0.20 of the total Na and Mg particles, respectively. However, acidic and hydrophobic particles suppress the uptake of MSA, as MSA-EC (elemental carbon) and MSA-SO42- particles account for only 0.24±0.68 and 0.26±0.47 of the total EC and SO42- particles, respectively. The results extend the knowledge of the formation and environmental behavior of MSA in the marine atmosphere.
Physical and chemical variability of Camu-camu fruits in cultivated and uncultivated areas of the Colombian Amazon

5PhD Professor, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), Manaus-AM, Brazil E-mail: cclement@inpa.gov. br (ORCID 0000-0002-84211029) Abstract – Camu-camu (Myrciaria dubia, Myrtaceae) has the highest reported vitamin C concentrations of any native Amazonian fruit tree species, with increasing demand in domestic and international markets. With the goal of aiding management and conservation programs, we studied the diversity of camu-camu in cultivated and uncultivated areas, based on physicochemical characterization of the fruits. We evaluated 2,250 fruits from 87 plants from six localities of the Tarapacá district (Amazonas, Colombia) and from the Amazonian fruit germplasm bank of Agrosavia (Meta, Colombia). We found high physicochemical variability within and among localities, and superior fruits in the localities where non-cultivated plants were sampled, especially Pechiboy. Using correlations and principal component analyses, we identified the variables Brix value, ascorbic acid content, fruit weight and pulp yield as the most useful for intraspecific selection of plants. The most promising plants presented Brix values of 8.2 ± 0.88 (maximum 10.9), fruit mass of 14.4 ± 1.2 g (max. 18.4 g) and pulp yields of 0.82 ± 0.02 (max. 0.87). These plants can be considered as possible sources for future breeding work. We conclude that there are plants in Tarapacá with relevant characteristics for commercialization and improvement of the species.
Altruistic Preferences in the Dictator Game: Replication of Andreoni and Miller (2002) in Japan

We conducted two replication studies of Andreoni and Miller’s (2002) modified dictator game study, which revealed that participants’ altruistic decisions were consistent with the notion of utility maximization. The two studies (Study 1 with small stake sizes and Study 2 with large stake sizes) included 11 modified dictator games, in which participants allocated a fixed number of tokens between themselves and their recipient. In eight of the 11 games, each token’s value was different for each player. In Study 1 (N = 78), 85% of participants did not violate the generalized axiom of revealed preference (GARP) throughout the 11 games. In Study 2 (N = 58), 81% of participants did not violate GARP. These results suggest that participants’ decisions were largely consistent with utility maximization. Following Andreoni and Miller’s analysis, we classified all participants (except one anomalous case) into the Selfish, Leontief (egalitarian), and Perfect Substitutes (utilitarian) groups. The majority of participants were classified into either the Leontief or Prefect Substitutes groups (i.e., non-selfish groups).