Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glomus mosseae Promotes Xanthium italicum Invasion

The relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and the invasiveness of alien plants is a controversial issue in plant invasion ecology. In this study, we investigated the influence of the mycorrhizal fungus Glomus mosseae on the physiological ecology, growth, and reproductive capacity of Xanthium italicum Moretti. We found that the relative chlorophyll content and net photosynthetic rate of the leaves of potted X. italicum whose rhizosphere soil was supplemented with G. mosseae was higher than those of the control group. Plants in the treatment group had longer root length and plant height; increased root, stem, and fruit biomass; and more male and female inflorescences and fruits relative to control plants. Additionally, the ratio of female to male inflorescence number was close to 2:1 in the treatment group as compared to 1:1 in the control group, suggesting an enhanced reproductive capacity in the former. G. mosseae applied to the soil also increased phosphorus absorption and accumulation in the roots, stems, and leaves of X. italicum. Thus, G. mosseae promotes the growth and reproduction of X. italicum and thereby enhances its competitiveness and capacity for colonizing a new habitat.
Multi-Task Agents and Incentives: The Case of Teaching and Research for University Professors

This paper exploits a natural experiment to study the effects of providing stronger research incentives to faculty members on universities’ average teaching and research performance. The results indicate that professors are induced to reallocate effort from teaching towards research. Moreover, tighter research requirements affect the faculty composition, as they lead lower-research-ability professors to leave. Given the estimated positive correlation between teaching and research ability, those who leave are also characterized by lower teaching ability. The average effect on teaching for the university is therefore ambiguous, as positive composition effects countervail effort substitution.
Histometrical Changes in the Thyroid Gland of Chabro Chicken Reared during Summer and Winter Seasons

Background: Chabro is a strain of poultry birds especially designed for backyard farming and is more adoptive to climatic variations in the tropics. The thyroid gland plays an important role in controlling basal metabolic rate. The histoarchitectural changes of the gland in association with seasonal changes has not been studied so far in Chabro. The present study describes the season related variations in the histometry of thyroid gland.Methods: Micrometrical studies were conducted on thyroid gland of eight to ten weeks old 24 apparently healthy Chabro chickens procured from Poultry Farm, DUVASU, Mathura after approval of CPCSEA. For this study the chickens were divided into two groups consist of 12 chickens in each group reared in summer and winter seasons.Result: Histologically, the thyroid gland was composed of stroma and parenchyma. The capsule had outer thick adipose and inner thin fibrous layers. The follicles were filled with colloid produced by the follicular cells. The percentage of small follicles was more followed by medium and large follicles. The follicles were lined by simple squamous epithelium in summer and cuboidal epithelial cells in winter. All micrometrical parameters, amount of reticular fibers, percentage of large and active follicles were higher in winter.
Reconsidering Advertising Literacy as a Defense Against Advertising Effects

It is widely assumed that advertising literacy makes children less susceptible to advertising effects. However, empirical research does not provide convincing evidence for this view. In this article, we explain why advertising literacy as it is currently defined (i.e., conceptual knowledge of advertising) is not effective in reducing children's advertising susceptibility. Specifically, based on recent insights on children's advertising processing, we argue that due to the affect-based nature of contemporary advertising, children primarily process advertising under conditions of low elaboration and, consequently, are unlikely to use their advertising knowledge as a critical defense. Moreover, literature on cognitive development suggests that children's ability to use advertising knowledge as a defense will be further limited by their immature executive functioning and emotion regulation abilities. Therefore, we argue that the current conceptualization of advertising literacy needs to be extended with two dimensions: advertising literacy performance, which takes into account the actual use of conceptual advertising knowledge, and attitudinal advertising literacy, which includes low-effort, attitudinal mechanisms that can function as a defense under conditions of low elaboration. We conclude our article with specific directions for future research and implications for the ongoing societal and political debate about children and advertising.
Genetic inhibition of JNK 3 ameliorates spinal muscular atrophy

Mutation of the Survival Motor Neuron 1 (SMN1) gene causes spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), an autosomal recessive neurodegenerative disorder that occurs in early childhood. Degeneration of spinal motor neurons caused by SMN deficiency results in progressive muscle atrophy and death in SMA. The molecular mechanism underlying neurodegeneration in SMA is unknown. No treatment is available to prevent neurodegeneration and reduce the burden of illness in SMA. We report that the c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) signaling pathway mediates neurodegeneration in SMA. The neuron-specific isoform JNK3 is required for neuron degeneration caused by SMN deficiency. JNK3 deficiency reduces degeneration of cultured neurons caused by low levels of SMN. Genetic inhibition of JNK pathway in vivo by Jnk3 knockout results in amelioration of SMAphenotype. JNK3 deficiency prevents the loss of spinal cord motor neurons, reduces muscle degeneration, improves muscle fiber thickness and muscle growth, improves motor function and overall growth and increases lifespan of mice with SMA that shows a systemic rescue of phenotype by a SMN-independent mechanism. JNK3 represents a potential (non-SMN) therapeutic target for the treatment of SMA.
Jobs, Crime, and Votes: A Short-Run Evaluation of the Refugee Crisis in Germany

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet, little is known about the impact of this inflow on labor markets, crime, and voting behavior. This article uses administrative data on refugee allocation and provides an evaluation of the short-run consequences of the refugee inflow. Our identification strategy exploits that a scramble for accommodation determined the assignment of refugees to German counties resulting in exogeneous variations in the number of refugees per county within and across states. Our estimates suggest that migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find very small increases in crime in particular with respect to drug offenses and fare-dodging. Our analysis further suggests that counties which experience a larger influx see neither more nor less support for the main anti-immigrant party than counties which experience small migrant inflows.
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Determining the Veracity of Rumours on Twitter Conference or Workshop Item

While social networks can provide an ideal platform for upto-date information from individuals across the world, it has also proved to be a place where rumours fester and accidental or deliberate misinformation often emerges. In this article, we aim to support the task of making sense from social media data, and specifically, seek to build an autonomous message-classifier that filters relevant and trustworthy information from Twitter. For our work, we collected about 100 million public tweets, including users’ past tweets, from which we identified 72 rumours (41 true, 31 false). We considered over 80 trustworthiness measures including the authors’ profile and past behaviour, the social network connections (graphs), and the content of tweets themselves. We ran modern machine-learning classifiers over those measures to produce trustworthiness scores at various time windows from the outbreak of the rumour. Such time-windows were key as they allowed useful insight into the progression of the rumours. From our findings, we identified that our model was significantly more accurate than similar studies in the literature. We also identified critical attributes of the data that give rise to the trustworthiness scores assigned. Finally we developed a software demonstration that provides a visual user interface to allow the user to examine the analysis.
Impact of Social Media Promotion on Customer Purchase Intention of Commercial Banks Services

Banking sector these days are providing many products/services to the customers in a competitive way. Using social media promotion is a strong tool to reach the prospective and regular customers in the cost effective and time efficient way. So, in this way this research attempts to measure the impact of social media promotion on customer purchase intention of commercial banks services. Descriptive and causal research design was used. Convenience sampling method was used to collect sample. Primary crosssection data were collected. Two hundred samples were approached and data were collected from them. Partial Least Square Structure Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to measure the research model. The research confirmed customer awareness, customer engagement, product/service perception and trust has significant impact on customer purchase intention of banks services. Banks management should focus on the importance of social media to enhance these factors.
State-of-the-Art Review on Determining Prestress Losses in Prestressed Concrete Girders

Prestressing methods were used to realize long-span bridges in the last few decades. For their predictive maintenance, devices and dynamic nondestructive procedures for identifying prestress losses were mainly developed since serviceability and safety of Prestressed Concrete (PC) girders depend on the effective state of prestressing. In fact, substantial long term prestress losses can induce excessive deflections and cracking in large span PC bridge girders. However, old unsolved problematics as well as new challenges exist since a variation in prestress force does not significantly affect the vibration responses of such PC girders. As a result, this makes uncertain the use of natural frequencies as appropriate parameters for prestress loss determinations. Thus, amongst emerging techniques, static identification based on vertical deflections has preliminary proved to be a reliable method with the goal to become a dominant approach in the near future. In fact, measured vertical deflections take accurately and instantaneously into account the changes of structural geometry of PC girders due to prestressing losses on the equilibrium conditions, in turn caused by the combined effects of tendon relaxation, concrete creep and shrinkage, and parameters of real environment as, e.g., temperature and relative humidity. Given the current state of quantitative and principled methodologies, this paper represents a state-of-the-art review of some important research works on determining prestress losses conducted worldwide. The attention is principally focused on a static nondestructive method, and a comparison with dynamic ones is elaborated. Comments and recommendations are made at proper places, while concluding remarks including future studies and field developments are mentioned at the end of the paper.
Attitudes of Academic Staff towards the Use of Information Communication Technology as a Pedagogical Tool for Effective Teaching in FCT College of Education, Zuba-Abuja, Nigeria

 Abstract — With numerous advantages of ICT in teaching such as using images to improve the retentive memory of students, academic staff is yet to deliver instructions adequately and effectively due to no power supply, lack of technical supports and non-availability of functional ICT tools. This study was conducted to investigate the attitudes of academic staff towards the use of information communication technology as a pedagogical tool for effective teaching in FCT College of Education, Zuba-Abuja, Nigeria. A sample of 200 academic staff from five schools/faculties was involved in the study. The respondents were selected by using simple random sampling technique (SRST). A questionnaire was developed and validated by the experts in Measurement and Evaluation, and reliability co-efficient of 0.85 was obtained. It was used to gather relevant data from the respondents. This study revealed that the respondents had positive attitudes towards the use of ICT as a pedagogical tool for effective teaching. Also, the uses of ICT by the academic staff included: to encourage closer relationship for attainment of higher academic, and to deliver instructions effectively. The study also revealed that there is a significant relationship between the attitudes and the uses of ICT by the academic staff. Based on these findings, some recommendations were made which include: power supply should be provided to operate ICT facilities for effective teaching, and technical assistance on ICT usage for effective delivery of instructions should be provided among other recommendations.
Lipid Profile in Opium Users: Results of Fasa PERSIAN Cohort Study, First Phase

Background: One of the main health problems in many societies is the increase of opium abuse which correlated with many problems such as cardiovascular disease. The goal of our study is to evaluate the correlation of opium use with blood lipoproteins as risk factors of CVD.Methods: This is a cross-sectional study on participants of the first phase of the PERSIAN Cohort study who were 35 -70 years old. Demographic characteristics, history of smoking, alcohol, and opium consumption, medical history and medications were asked and checklists were filled out. level of physical activity and fat intake was registered. lipoprotein profiles were investigated by blood sampling. IBM SPSS Statistics v21 was used to analyze the correlation of opium and lipid profile and the significant level was <0.05. Results: From 9300 participants with a mean age of 48.06±9.44 years old, 49.6% were male. About 24.1% of participants used opium. The level of total cholesterol (adjusted p= 0.02) and HDL (adjusted p= 0.04) in people who used opium was significantly lower than others. But, the level of triglyceride (p=0.11) and LDL (adjusted p= 0.06) was not different in users and non-users. LDL (OR=0.8, adjusted p= 0.009) and total cholesterol (OR=0.81, adjusted p= 0.007) had normal level in people who used opium than non-consuming people.Conclusion: This study showed that there is correlation between opium usage and lower level of total cholesterol and LDL, however the lower level of HDL in normal range was seen in opium users.
Multiwavelength afterglow light curves from magnetized GRB flows

We use high-resolution relativistic MHD simulations coupled with a radiative transfer code to compute multiwavelength afterglow light curves of magnetized ejecta of gamma-ray bursts interacting with a uniform circumburst medium. The aim of our study is to determine how the magnetization of the ejecta at large distance from the central engine influences the afterglow emission, and to assess whether observations can be reliably used to infer the strength of the magnetic field. We find that, for typical parameters of the ejecta, the emission from the reverse shock peaks for magnetization $\sigma_0 \sim 0.01 - 0.1$ of the flow, and that it is greatly suppressed for higher $\sigma_0$. The emission from the forward shock shows an achromatic break shortly after the end of the burst marking the onset of the self-similar evolution of the blast wave. Fitting the early afterglow of GRB 990123 and 090102 with our numerical models we infer respective magnetizations of $\sigma_0 \sim 0.01$ and $\sigma_0 \sim 0.1$ for these bursts. We argue that the lack of observed reverse shock emission from the majority of the bursts can be understood if $\sigma_0 \simmore 0.1$, since we obtain that the luminosity of the reverse shock decreases significantly for $\sigma_0 \sim 1$. For ejecta with $\sigma_0 \simmore 0.1$ our models predict that there is sufficient energy left in the magnetic field, at least during an interval of ~10 times the burst duration, to produce a substantial emission if the magnetic energy can be dissipated (for instance, due to resistive effects) and radiated away.
CEO Overconfidence and the COVID-19 Pandemic

We examine the impact of CEO overconfidence on firm performance during the COVID-19 pandemic and find that firms with overconfident CEOs exhibit significantly better stock market returns, implying CEO overconfidence helps instill investor confidence during the crisis period. Utilizing a text-based measure of firm-specific exposure to the pandemic, we show that CEO overconfidence substantially mitigates the negative effect of firm exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic. We further show how overconfident CEOs instill confidence by uplifting public sentiment while withholding bad news during the pandemic. However, the impact of CEO overconfidence diminishes when firms are facing ex-ante higher levels of risk with weaker fundamentals. Overall, our finding demonstrates the bright side of CEO overconfidence at times of crises.
‘Crowded out’? Immigration Surge and Residents’ Employment Outcomes in Norway

This study uses Norwegian public register data in a spatial correlation approach, and analyzes associations between regional variations in immigration and employment outcomes 2004–2015 in a cohort of adult residents (N = 1.3 million). A higher share of immigrants in the regional population and an immigrant population dominated by low-educated were associated with slightly negative work income trends and less employment opportunities for residents, in particular for low- educated natives and earlier immigrants. A steep increase in the immigrant share of the regional population was, on the other hand, associated with better employment outcomes for all analyzed resident categories. Overall, regional immigration differences were only modestly related to the out- comes. Findings indicate that the institutional context has limited the role of market mechanisms in the labor market, and a booming regional economy will tend to neutralize potentially negative effects of immigration on residents’ employment.
Impact angle control guidance synthesis for evasive maneuver against intercept missile

This paper proposes a synthesis of new guidance law to generate an evasive maneuver against enemy’s missile interception while considering its impact angle, acceleration, and field-of-view constraints. The first component of the synthesis is a new function of repulsive Artificial Potential Field to generate the evasive maneuver as a real-time dynamic obstacle avoidance. The terminal impact angle and terminal acceleration constraints compliance are based on Time-to-Go Polynomial Guidance as the second component. The last component is the Logarithmic Barrier Function to satisfy the field-of-view limitation constraint by compensating the excessive total acceleration command. These three components are synthesized into a new guidance law, which involves three design parameter gains. Parameter study and numerical simulations are delivered to demonstrate the performance of the proposed repulsive function and guidance law. Finally, the guidance law simulations effectively achieve the zero terminal miss distance, while satisfying an evasive maneuver against intercept missile, considering impact angle, acceleration, and field-of-view limitation constraints simultaneously.
Inter-Model Di ¤ erences of Future Precipitation Changes in CMIP 3 and MIROC 5 Climate Models

The projected changes in annual mean precipitation and large-scale circulations between the two periods 1981–2000 and 2081–2100 obtained from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) and version 5 of the Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate (MIROC5), which is a newly developed model and not included in CMIP3, are investigated over tropical oceans (30 S–30 N). We first evaluate skill scores for precipitation reproducibility, based on which five highest and lowest score models (HSMs and LSMs) are selected from 24 CMIP3 models. The score of MIROC5 is higher than that of any CMIP3 model without flux adjustment. While the HSMs, the LSMs, and MIROC5 commonly show precipitation increase over the equatorial central to eastern Pacific region, and weakening of the Walker circulation in future projections; the magnitudes of these changes are significantly larger in the HSMs than in the LSMs. This di¤erence in the magnitudes of the changes between in HSMs and in LSMs is consistent with the di¤erent sensitivities of deep convection to the environmental humidity in the mid-lower troposphere. The vertical structure of the vertical velocity changes indicates that the precipitation increase around 160 E–150 W in the HSMs and LSMs is associated with deep convection, whereas that in MIROC5 is associated with middle-level convection.
COST ACTION F3 "STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS" 1997-2001 PRESENTATION AND SOME PRELIMINARY RESULTS

The COST Action F3 “Structural Dynamics” was initiated in 1997 by Professor Jean-Claude Golinval. The main objective of this COST Action is to increase the knowledge required for improving the structural design, the mechanical reliability, and the safety of structures in linear and non-linear dynamics. This research Action is supported by the European Community and is divided into three working groups dealing with the following issues: WG1: “Finite Element Model Updating Methods”; WG2: “Health Monitoring and Damage Detection”; and WG3: “Identification of Non-linear Systems”. This paper presents the objectives of the COST Action F3, the organization of the Action, the members of the management committee, and the scientific program of each working group in more detail. Finally, preliminary results of the COST Action are presented.
Misallocation and Aggregate Productivity Across Time and Space

Productivity is at the core of the large differences in per-capita income across countries. What accounts for international productivity differences? I discuss the possible cross-country differences in the allocation of inputs across heterogeneous production units---misallocation---as a factor in accounting for aggregate productivity. The policies and institutions generating misallocation are prevalent in poor and developing countries, and may also be responsible for differences in the selection and technology use of operating producers, contributing substantially to per-capita income differences across countries.
Legislative Power of the European Parliament Committees:Plenary Adoption of Committee Reports

This paper questions the claim that the European Parliament (EP) is a legislature with strong committees. It examines to what extent the plenary adopts committee reports as the official parliamentary legislative positions under codecision. The committees’ impact is expected to be substantially weakened when an informal early agreement is reached with the Council. Furthermore, following the predictions of congressional theories, committees are expected to be more successful if the legislators drafting their reports have no special outlying interests, have relevant expertise, and are affiliated with big party groups. These hypotheses are tested on an original data set on all codecision reports which passed first reading in the 6th EP so far (2004- 2009). The findings suggests that indeed informal trilogue agreements significantly undermine committees’ legislative influence, which is somewhat counteracted by the expertise of rapporteurs.