Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preliminary study on in vitro shoot culture of Hibiscus coddii subsp. barnardii , an indigenous South African flowering plant

Abstract In vivo and in vitro grown plants of Hibiscus coddii subsp. barnardii were used as explant source for establishment of in vitro cultures. Nodal shoot explants derived from in vivo grown plants, both naturally and under controlled environmental conditions, showed high sensitivity to the surface disinfection treatment and poor survival in in vitro culture. In vitro grown seedlings proved successful as aseptic source of apical and basal shoot explants to establish contamination-free in vitro cultures. Sprouting of axillary buds was observed on 90% of apical shoot explants after four weeks of culture on full strength, plant growth regulator (PGR)-free Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium. However, further proliferation of short shoots, limited to the bud sprout at the explant base, occurred on only 50% of these explants. In contrast, all basal shoot explants attained 3-5 single primary axillary shoots (30-40 mm in length) while a clump of short (5-10 mm) shoots also formed at the base in 60% of these explants. In both explant types, addition of 0.25-1 mg L-1 6-Benzylaminopurine (BAP) to the MS medium resulted in a low frequency (10%-60%) of explants with short shoots (5-10 mm) that showed no further elongation. Moreover, explants cultured in the presence of BAP showed a high frequency of callus formation (up to 90%) and low survival (20%-60%). A lower frequency of callus formation (30%-40%) and higher survival (90%-100%) of both explant types occurred on BAP-free medium. Further subculturing of primary and secondary axillary shoots onto fresh MS medium (with and without BAP) did not improve shoot multiplication. Regenerated plantlets from PGR-free MS medium were successfully acclimatized and hardened-off.
Gut microbiota characterization in Egyptian patients with hepatocellular carcinoma post-chronic hepatitis C virus genotype 4 infection

Karim Montasser1, Heba Ahmed Osman2, Hanan Abozaid1, Mohammed H. Hassan3*, Abeer M. M. sabry4 1Department of Clinical Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University, Helwan, Egypt. 2Department of Tropical Medicine, Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Faculty of Medicine, South Valley University, Qena, Egypt. 3Department of Medical Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, South Valley University, Qena, Egypt. 4Department of Internal medicine and Gastroenterology, Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University, Helwan, Egypt.
MODELING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESSION AND FAMILY BUSINESS SURVIVAL: AN INTEGRATIVE CONCEPTUAL APPROACH

The paper presents a model of the relationship between entrepreneurial succession and family business survival. The model details the role of personal characteristics of the successor in the survival of family business using business practices as the intermediating factor between entrepreneurial succession and family business survival. Entrepreneurial succession is used as the choice of successor, embodying certain identified personal characteristics of the individual. The relevant personal characteristics is derived from the integration of both psychodemographic characteristics of an individual which determine his/her entrepreneurial behavior at the operational phase of the business.
Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the US

How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrants’ assimilation? This paper offers the first systematic answer to this question by focusing on Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. We digitize and assemble novel data from the Catholic directories, and exploit variation in the timing of arrival of Italian Catholic churches across US counties. We obtain three main results. First, Italian churches reduced the social assimilation of Italian immigrants, lowering intermarriage, residential integration, and naturalization rates. Second, the ethnic content of names chosen by Italian parents for their US born children suggests that churches reduced the vertical transmission of culture across generations, likely due to higher horizontal socialization within the Italian enclave. Third, despite the reduction in Italians’ social assimilation, Italian churches had ambiguous effects on immigrants’ economic outcomes, and raised children’s literacy and ability to speak English. We provide evidence that increased coordination within the Italian community and natives’ backlash are plausible pathways for our results. We also identify patterns of selective migration of Italians following church entries, which, however, are quantitatively small and cannot explain our findings.
Checkout Checkup: Misuse of Payment Data from Web Skimming

—Web skimming poses an increasingly serious threat to online shoppers, with recent cases reportedly occurring on prominent websites like British Airways and Newegg. While prior work largely measures the prevalence of these attacks and explores their technical details, we examine the use of credentials stolen via web skimming. We identiﬁed 50 sites apparently compromised to host payment card skimming code. For each site, we attempted to purchase items using a unique payment card. Over an eleven-month study period, we monitored the payment cards for signs of abuse. We observed attempted misuse of 15 of the 50 payment cards. With a single exception, the time from exposure of a payment card until observed misuse was at least 50 days. Thieves tried to use the 15 cards at least 45 times. These attempted payments ranged from $0.10 to $122.44 and totaled $1,342.91. To place our ﬁndings in context, we compare these results to a separate study in which we exposed payment data directly via an online paste site. Our observations suggest that the impact of web skimming may not be apparent for an extended period following an incident.
Using Flipped Classroom Approach to Teach Adjectives for Malaysian Year 4 Chinese ESL Learners

This study was aimed at investigating the effectiveness of using Flipped Classroom Approach to teach adjectives to Malaysian Year 4 Chinese ESL learners. It was also designed to examine Malaysian Year 4 Chinese ESL learners’ perceptions towards Flipped Classroom Approach. Two classes with 10 Year 4 Chinese ESL learners in Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan X were chosen as the research samples to form the experimental and control groups of this study. This intervention focused on the experimental group using Edmodo to acquire input before the lesson, while the control group followed the traditional classroom approach. This quasiexperimental research used several instruments to collect the data namely preand posttests as well as questionnaires. The results showed that there was a difference in the test scores after the experimental group participants learned adjectives using the Flipped Classroom Approach as compared to the traditional teaching approach. The learners found it more effective to grasp knowledge during face-to-face lesson as they had acquired the relevant input online before the lesson. This study has provided insights for Malaysian primary ESL teachers to implement Flipped Classroom Approach in their classroom settings.
25 Performance Feedback and Emotions

This chapter discusses the relations between performance feedback and emotions in educational settings. First, we define the complex constructs of “feedback” and “emotions. ” Second, we outline existing theoretical approaches and empirical findings of the relations between feedback and emotions and consider potential moderators and mediators of those relations. Third, we summarize the theoretical approaches and existing findings on the relations between performance feedback and emotions in a comprehensive model. Finally, we offer suggestions for future directions.
Peace Education in Societies Involved in Intractable Conflicts: Intervention among the Arab Group as a Case Study

The Israeli society and the relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs have been thoroughly researched as an example of a majority and minority groups who are at a deep-rooted conflict between them that effects mutual attitudes and behaviors and the possibility of peaceful coexistence. Israeli Arabs are at particularly difficult situation where on the one hand they identify themselves as Arabs and Palestinians as such their values and aspirations contradict at least to some level those of the Israeli society (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). The current study attempted to overcome these limitations by conducting a uni-national intervention separately with Arab and Jewish adolescents. The current article will only present the results pertaining to the Arab participants only. In addition, the program focused mostly on fostering emotional skills. The research accompanying the implementation of the program was quasi experimental. The sample include 172 Arab adolescents studying in 10 and 11 grades in northern Israel. Research main hypotheses: 1) The participants' emotional intelligence and empathy towards Arabs will be higher at the end of the program than at its beginning. 2) The participants' Empathy towards Jews will be higher at the end of the program than at its beginning.
Macroeconomic Contractions during Impressionable Years and Entrepreneurship in Later Adulthood

We argue that past events experienced during the critical ages of 18-25 can influence an individual’s future entrepreneurship based on the “impressionable years hypothesis”. Accordingly, we empirically investigate the relationship between bad economic conditions during youth and later-life entrepreneurship using Gallup from 2009 to 2014. The identification is achieved through variations across 77 countries and age cohorts born between 1954 and 1989. Our findings indicate that bad economic conditions when young can significantly predict higher entrepreneurship in later life. For example, experiencing at least one economic contraction during youth increases future self-employment/business ownership propensities by about 6/10% at the outcome means. Graduating from college and entering the job market in a bad economy cannot explain our results. Findings are robust to numerous methods of measuring economic contractions and controlling for behavioural measures as well as economic shocks experienced before and after the impressionable years.
N ON -N EGATIVE B REGMAN D IVERGENCE M INIMIZA - TION FOR D EEP D IRECT D ENSITY R ATIO E STIMATION

This paper aims to estimate the ratio of probability densities using ﬂexible models, such as state-of-the-art deep neural networks. The density ratio estimation (DRE) has garnered attention as the density ratio is useful in various machine learning tasks, such as anomaly detection and domain adaptation. For estimating the density ratio, methods collectively known as direct DRE have been explored. These methods are based on the minimization of the Bregman (BR) divergence between a density ratio model and the true density ratio. However, when using ﬂexible models , such as deep neural networks, existing direct DRE suffers from serious train-loss hacking , which is a kind of over-ﬁtting caused by the form of an empirical risk function. In this paper, we introduce a non-negative correction for empirical risk using only the prior knowledge of the upper bound of the density ratio. This correction makes a DRE method robust against train-loss hacking. It enables the use of ﬂexible models, such as state-of-the-art deep neural networks. In the theoretical analysis, we show the generalization error bound of the BR divergence minimization. In our experiments, the proposed methods show favorable performance in inlier-based outlier detection and covariate shift adaptation.
A Study of Self – Efficacy among Elementary School Teachers

The success of educational system lies on the shoulders of the teacher. Teacher plays a vital role in the curriculum transaction of the various factors that affect the ability of the teacher. Self -efficacy has been recognized as an important variable. The present study has been designed to study the perceived self-efficacy of government elementary school teachers of Punjab in relation to their gender, location, experience and educational qualifications. A sample of 815 elementary school teachers was collected by using multi-stage random sampling technique from six districts of Punjab selected on the basis of their high & low literacy rates. The translated version of General Self-efficacy scale by Jerusalem and Schwarzer (1995) was used. The results revealed that Gender, locale, experience and education qualifications do not have any significant impact on self efficacy of Elementary school teachers.
Family Ties, Geographic Mobility and the Gender Gap in Academic Aspirations

IZA DP No. 14561 JULY 2021 Family Ties, Geographic Mobility and the Gender Gap in Academic Aspirations* This paper provides new evidence supporting that gender differences in post-graduate educational choices contribute to the glass ceiling in the labor market. We study the decision to pursue an advanced degree form an internationally renowned institution, which greatly facilitates access to top jobs. Relying on a unique dataset on applications to a highly selective program that provides merit-based graduate fellowships to Spanish students, we show that women apply for the fellowships at lower rates than observationally equivalent male graduates. We also implemented a large-scale survey on current college students and show that female college graduates have stronger family ties than males, which restricts their geographical mobility and has a negative effect on their educational aspirations. Importantly, the previous pattern is reversed in STEM fields: female graduates in STEM participate in the fellowship program at equal or higher rates than comparable males. In fact, we show that female STEM students originate from more educated families, have higher academic ability, and higher educational and earnings aspirations than women in other fields. JEL Classification: J3, J7
L URING OF TRANSFERABLE ADVERSARIAL PERTUR - BATIONS IN THE BLACK - BOX PARADIGM

The growing interest for adversarial examples, i.e. maliciously modified examples which fool a classifier, has resulted in many defenses intended to detect them, render them inoffensive or make the model more robust against them. In this paper, we pave the way towards a new approach to improve the robustness of a model against black-box transfer attacks. A removable additional neural network is included in the target model, and is designed to induce the luring effect, which tricks the adversary into choosing false directions to fool the target model. Training the additional model is achieved thanks to a loss function acting on the logits sequence order. Our deception-based method only needs to have access to the predictions of the target model and does not require a labeled data set. We explain the luring effect thanks to the notion of robust and non-robust useful features and perform experiments on MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR10 to characterize and evaluate this phenomenon. Additionally, we discuss two simple prediction schemes, and verify experimentally that our approach can be used as a defense to efficiently thwart an adversary using state-of-the-art attacks and allowed to perform large perturbations.
A Firm-Side Perspective on Parental Leave

IZA DP No. 14478 JUNE 2021 A Firm-Side Perspective on Parental Leave* Motherhood and parental leave interrupt employment relationships, likely imposing costs on firms. We document that mothers who are difficult to replace internally take shorter leave and that their firms hire replacements more often. Introducing more generous parental leave benefits erases the link between mothers’ internal replaceability and their leave duration. In firms with few internal substitutes this reduces employment in the short-, but not longer-term. Firms respond by hiring fewer women of childbearing age into occupations where they are difficult to replace internally. Taken together, motherhood and generous parental leave policies burden firms that have few internal substitutes available. JEL Classification: J16, J18, J24
In The Wild Study with “WallBo”-A Robotic Handwashing Buddy with School Children During a Pandemic

In this paper we present a potentially impactful use-case using our social robotic platform“WallBo” a robotic buddy to improve handwashing for children in schools. We report our initial results from the first in-the-wild one-week study in a Scottish school with 16 pupils. The 1:1 interaction with WallBo resulted in 86.25% handwashing compliance, a 33.25% improvement from the baseline handwashing technique pre-WallBo training. We have also highlighted some challenges we faced carrying out a real-life study during COVID-19 pandemic.
Ocular Complications of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), the most common form of sleep-disordered breathing, is characterized by repetitive episodes of paused breathing during sleep, which in turn induces transient nocturnal hypoxia and hypercapnia. The high prevalence of OSA and its associated health consequences place a heavy burden on the healthcare system. In particular, the consequent episodic oxygenic desaturation/reoxygenation series and arousals from sleep in patients with OSA have the potential to trigger oxidative stress, elevated systemic inflammatory responses, and autonomic dysfunction with sympathetic activation. Given these adverse side-effects, OSA is highly correlated to many eye diseases that are common in everyday ophthalmic practices. Some of these ocular consequences are reversible, but they may permanently threaten a patient’s vision if not treated appropriately. Here, this article seeks to review the ocular consequences and potential pathophysiologic associations in patients with OSA. Understanding these OSA-related eye diseases may help clinicians provide comprehensive care to their patients.
Investigating the frequency and factors associated with hot flush in postmenopausal women referred to the Menopausal Clinic of Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ahwaz city in 2018

Introduction and Purpose of the study: Hot flush is one of the most common complications in menopause period. Many factors are involved in this problem. The objective of this study was to evaluate the frequency and factors associated with hot flush in postmenopausal women in Ahwaz in 2018. Methodology: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the frequency and factors associated with hot flush in postmenopausal women. The data were collected using a demographic characteristics form and a hot flush recording checklist, adapted from the Cooperman index. Results: In this study, 196 women with a mean menopausal age of 48.79 were included. 144 (73.5%) had hot flush, of which 35 (17.9%) had mild hot flush, 69 (35.2%) had moderate hot flush, and 40 (20.4%) had severe hot flush. The results of the study showed the effect of factors such as BMI and marital status on hot flush. Conclusion: In this study, the prevalence of hot flush among postmenopausal women was reported 73.5%. It was associated with BMI and marital status.
Synergic effect of cathodic protection and mineral admixture on the corrosion resistance of reinforcements in concrete

The use of agricultural wastes rich in pozzolanic materials such as Fe2O3, SiO2 and Al2O3 is an active area of research in concrete technology. This improves the mechanical and durability properties along with sustainability. One such waste is the Sugar Cane Bagasse Ash (SCBA) generated by sugar mills and usually dumped in open space. The main purpose of the study is to investigate synergic effect of cathodic protection and using SCBA blended cement concrete on the corrosion resistance of embedded reinforcement and compare it with control concrete. The approach involved construction of eight slabs (1 m X 0.1 m X 0.1 m) and monitoring the half cell potential (HCP) for 270 days. In order to simulate the marine atmosphere, two slabs were constructed with 3.5% NaCl by weight of cement and two others were reference slabs. The pure Magnesium anodes 22 mm diameter and 250 mm long were used. The experimental results indicated that the corrosion of embedded reinforcement in slab containing SCBA was more as compared to slab containing both SCBA and anode.
Isometric contraction force measurement of hiPSC-CMs on a movable plate with a feedback-controlled MEMS cantilever probe

We propose a measurement method with a feedback system to evaluate the contraction forces of human iPS cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) in a dynamic mechanical environment. The measurement of the hiPSC-CM contraction forces is important for regenerative medicine; however, conventional methods are not able to evaluate these forces when the cells are subjected to a dynamic load similar to that from the heart. The proposed measurement system is composed of a micromachined piezoresistive cantilever attached to a feedback-controlled piezo stage and a micromachined movable plate where cells are cultured. A high sampling rate (2 kHz) and real-time control of the cell length were realized via the feedback-controlled piezo stage, while the contraction forces were measured by the cantilever. We evaluated the contraction forces of hiPSC-CMs in conditions of isometric and auxotonic contractions. Due to feedback-controlled loading for isometric contraction, the cell shrinkage was controlled to be less than 200 nm. Auxotonic contraction forces of 3.9 μN were measured without feedback control, while the contraction forces of isometric contraction were 6.0 μN with feedback-controlled loading. The results showed that the method leads to a work-loop evaluation of the hiPSC-CM cardiac cycle.
ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP, TURNOVER INTENTION AND PROFITABILITY NEXUS

This study aims to provide insights into entrepreneurial leadership among employees of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) by demonstrating the relationships between entrepreneurial leadership, turnover intention and profitability. The study uses responses from 150 SMEs in Ghana relying on regression analysis techniques to test the research propositions. This study validates the assumptions that entrepreneurial leadership influence turnover intention of employees. This study also affirms that entrepreneurial leadership foster SMEs profitability. While our findings may be limited to the context examined, nonetheless this study adds to the emergent scholarship on entrepreneurial leadership. This study enriches the understanding of the entrepreneurial leadership, turnover intention, and profitability of domesticated SMEs. The absence of entrepreneurial leadership can have a negative effect on turnover intention and profitability.