Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wetlands In Danger : a World Conservation Atlas

Review: Wetlands In Danger: A World Conservation Atlas Edited by Patrick Dugan Reviewed by Daniel L. Tufford University of South Carolina Dugan, Patrick , editor. Wetlands In Danger: A World Conservation Atlas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 192 pp. US $35.00 cloth ISBN:0-19-520942-7. For sheer excellence of presentation, Wetlands In Danger exceeds the value of its sale price. The work is well-organized and illustrated with high-quality photography. Anyone interested in wetland issues will find useful information here. In addition to physical geography, the authors discuss wetland biology and ecology, anthropogenic pressures on wetlands, and the political, economic, and cultural geography of wetlands. The first four chapters are an introduction to the atlas itself. The first chapter defines wetlands and gives an overview of each type. The authors use the wetland definition agreed to at the 1971 Ramsar convention sponsored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). Many readers will be unfamiliar with the inclusion of lakes as wetlands, but the Ramsar definition includes water up to 6 meters deep. The second chapter introduces wetland ecology, a science still viewed as fundamentally biological. This chapter effectively shows that landscape- scale hydrologic and geochemical processes are essential elements of the role of wetlands in both local and regional ecology. However, the biological ecology of wetlands remains the most obvious and most easily explained to a diverse audience. Thus, the third chapter discusses the unique life in wetlands and the unique role wetlands play in the life cycle of animals not confined to a wetland habitat. The fourth chapter discusses the historical causes and extent of wetland loss worldwide, including the once prevailing notion that wetland use for agriculture was a positive expression of human control over nature. Here, the theme of the book is clarified. Wetland loss is occurring in devastating proportions, and we are only beginning to understand the
Living-With Others, Living-With an ‘Eco-Home’: From Frustration to Transformation in an Eco-Development

Abstract This paper considers how ‘ordinary’ families and individuals who would not consider themselves to have ‘environmental values’ or undertake sustainable practices are being transformed through ‘living-with’ eco-homes. The transformative process is unpicked, showing that frustrations with eco-developments not being ‘eco-enough’ may be more influential on the evolution of environmental values than the components of an eco-home which are prescribed and assessed by policy-makers. The findings are based on a single case study—the extension of Allerton Bywater in West Yorkshire, England. As a Millennium Community, the 520 dwellings were designed to the BRE EcoHomes standard ‘Excellent’. The development was first inhabited in 2007 and the fieldwork for this research was conducted in 2007–2008 while inhabitants were getting acquainted with their eco-homes and adjusting to new ways of living. While other research focuses on scripting, appropriation and normalization, this research proposes the concept of ‘living-with’ as a model for understanding transformation in sustainable practices. The in-depth interviews were undertaken with couples and neighbours who shed new light on how individuals incentivize and motivate one another in the uptake of new sustainable practices, thus demonstrating the contingent and contextual embeddedness of sustainable practices.
A Survey of Collaborative Tools in Software Development

Collaboration is at the heart of software development. Virtually all software development requires collaboration among developers within and outside their project teams, to achieve a common objective. A number of classification frameworks exist that can be used to classify collaborative tools. In addition to placing the various tools in context, developers can use these kind of frameworks to select the right mix of tools for their situation. Each classification framework has a different focus: some provide a detailed taxonomy to compare tools in a particular area, some classify tools based on the functionality of the tools, some classify tools based on the high-level approach to collaboration that the tools take, and so on. However, currently no framework exists that classifies tools based on the user effort required to collaborate effectively. This however is also a critical component in choosing the “right” set of tools for a team. In this survey, we take a look at collaborative tools from the perspective of user effort. For the purposes of this paper, we define user effort as the time expended in setting up the tools, monitoring the tools, and interpreting the information from the tools. While we cannot quantify the efforts required of each tool in detail, it is clear that there is a natural ordering among different groups of tools. We propose a framework that identifies these groups and highlights this ordering. Based on this framework, our survey organizes the individual tools into tiers.
A Novel Cross-Layer QoS Routing Algorithm for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are expected to support various types of applications with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. Existing works are limited to layered approaches that overlook the interaction between medium access control (MAC) and routing algorithms and often fail to satisfy these requirements in such dynamic wireless environments. The inefficiency of current layered schemes to guarantee these demands has recently triggered the interest for new cross-layered approaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed, multi- constrain, cross-layer QoS routing algorithm for wireless mesh networks that can simultaneous satisfy multiple QoS requirements. Studies with different scheduling algorithms and routing protocols have shown that our algorithm successfully guarantees various QoS requirements and achieves higher network throughput when compared with other standard techniques.
Predictors of inconsistent responding in web surveys

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents of inconsistent responding in web surveys. Consistency of responses to personal information questions and scale items were compared, and the influence of perceived social support, social appearance anxiety, academic self-efficacy and social networking habits on inconsistent responding was examined. Design/methodology/approach – A gaming application on Facebook was used to collect data. A repeated-measures design was conducted with 806 respondents in two online survey administrations. After inconsistent responses provided by the same nicknames were identified, consistent and inconsistent respondents were compared with regard to their responding patterns and research variables. Findings – Findings revealed that 45.7 percent of participants misreported their personal information such as age, educational status and gender. Participants were relatively consistent in their responses to attitude scales. Perceived social support led to inconsis.
Improved Small-Signal Analysis for Circuits Working in Periodic Steady State

This paper considers the formulation of the variational model (VM) of autonomous circuits (oscillators) working in periodic steady-state conditions. The shooting method, which is largely used to compute the solution in the time domain when the VM is forced by a small-signal perturbation, is studied. The proposed analytical approach can be exploited to improve accuracy in the simulation of the effects of noise sources. In particular, we justify from an analytical standpoint the adoption of a suitable periodicity constraint in the shooting method. We exploit the properties of block circulant matrices that naturally arise in the description of the problem. We prove that the frequency of the small-signal perturbation must be different from that of the unperturbed oscillator to avoid inaccuracy of the shooting method due to the existence of singularities in the VM formulation, and derive a method that allows us to get closer to the singularity.
Variation Ontology for annotation of variation effects and mechanisms

Ontology organizes and formally conceptualizes information in a knowledge domain with a controlled vocabulary having defined terms and relationships between them. Several ontologies have been used to annotate numerous databases in biology and medicine. Due to their unambiguous nature, ontological annotations facilitate systematic description and data organization, data integration and mining, and pattern recognition and statistics, as well as development of analysis and prediction tools. The Variation Ontology (VariO) was developed to allow the annotation of effects, consequences, and mechanisms of DNA, RNA, and protein variations. Variation types are systematically organized, and a detailed description of effects and mechanisms is possible. VariO is for annotating the variant, not the normal-state features or properties, and requires a reference (e.g., reference sequence, reference-state property, activity, etc.) compared to which the changes are indicated. VariO is versatile and can be used for variations ranging from genomic multiplications to single nucleotide or amino acid changes, whether of genetic or nongenetic origin. VariO annotations are position-specific and can be used for variations in any organism.
Asian Students' Citizenship Values and their Relationship to Civic Understanding: An Exploratory Study Comparing Thai and Hong Kong Students

This article draws on data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) to compare selected citizenship values of students from Thailand and Hong and the relationship of these values to students' civic knowledge. The results indicated considerable differences in the responses of students from each society and differing impacts on their civic knowledge. The models proposed here seem to be more explanatory of the Thai students' responses than they are of Hong Kong students', so additional explanations need to be found for the latter's achievement. This study, for example, has been able to account for just over 32% of the variance in Thai students' civic knowledge, but for only 14% for Hong Kong students. It represents an important start in seeking a fuller explanation of students' civic learning in different cultural, political and social contexts.
Treatment following myocardial infarction in patients with schizophrenia

Background A correlation between excess mortality from myocardial infarctions (MI) and schizophrenia has already been established. What remains unclear is whether the initial communication between the treating doctor and the corresponding patient contributes to this excess mortality. Aim The aim of this study is to investigate whether a patient with schizophrenia receives the same offers for examination and treatment following a MI compared to a psychiatric healthy control (PHC). Methods This cohort study includes patients diagnosed with schizophrenia at the time of their first MI (n = 47) in the years between 1995–2015 matched 1:2 to psychiatric healthy MI patients on gender, age and year of first MI. All existing hospital files for the 141 patients were thoroughly reviewed and the number of offered and accepted examinations and treatments were extracted for comparisons between the two groups. Results In general patients with schizophrenia were less likely to be offered and accept examination and at the same time be offered and accept treatment as compared to PHCs (p<0.01). In addition, there was a statistical trend towards patients with schizophrenia being more likely to decline examination (p = 0.10) and decline treatment (p = 0.09) compared to PHCs, while being offered examination and being offered treatment both contributed statistically insignificantly to the overall discrepancy between the two patient groups. Conclusions Being diagnosed with schizophrenia limits the treatment received following a first MI compared to PHCs. However, we are unable to pinpoint, whether Physician bias, patient’s unwillingness to receive health care or both contribute to the excess mortality seen in these comorbid patients.
Computational studies of the interaction between the HIV‐1 integrase tetramer and the cofactor LEDGF/p75: Insights from molecular dynamics simulations and the Informational spectrum method

A crystal structure of the integrase binding domain (IBD) of the lens epithelium‐derived growth factor (LEDGF/p75) in complex with the dimer of the HIV‐1 integrase (IN) catalytic core domain (CCD) provides useful information that might help in the understanding of essential protein‐protein contacts in HIV‐1. However, mutagenic studies indicated that interactions between the full‐length proteins were more extensive than the contacts observed in the co‐crystal structure of the isolated domains. On the other hand, the biochemical characterization of the interaction between full‐length IN and LEDGF/p75 has recently proved that LEDGF/p75 promotes IN tetramerization with two LEDGF/p75 IBD molecules bound to the IN tetramer. This experimental evidence suggests that to obtain a complete structural description of the interactions between the two proteins, the full‐length tetrameric structure of IN should be considered. Our aim was to obtain a detailed picture of HIV‐1 IN interactions with cellular co‐factors that was of general interest, particularly for the development of small molecule IN inhibitors, which mimic the IBD of LEDGF/p75. To this end, we performed bioinformatics analyses to identify protein sequence domains involved in long‐range recognition. Subsequently, we applied molecular dynamics techniques to investigate the detailed interactions between the complete tetrameric form of IN and two molecules of the IBD of LEDGF/p75. Our dynamic picture is in agreement with experimental data and, thereby, provides new details of the IN‐LEDGF/p75 interaction. Proteins 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Multiple Regression Analysis of mRNA-miRNA Associations in Colorectal Cancer Pathway

Background. MicroRNA (miRNA) is a short and endogenous RNA molecule that regulates posttranscriptional gene expression. It is an important factor for tumorigenesis of colorectal cancer (CRC), and a potential biomarker for diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy of CRC. Our objective is to identify the related miRNAs and their associations with genes frequently involved in CRC microsatellite instability (MSI) and chromosomal instability (CIN) signaling pathways. Results. A regression model was adopted to identify the significantly associated miRNAs targeting a set of candidate genes frequently involved in colorectal cancer MSI and CIN pathways. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to construct the model and find the significant mRNA-miRNA associations. We identified three significantly associated mRNA-miRNA pairs: BCL2 was positively associated with miR-16 and SMAD4 was positively associated with miR-567 in the CRC tissue, while MSH6 was positively associated with miR-142-5p in the normal tissue. As for the whole model, BCL2 and SMAD4 models were not significant, and MSH6 model was significant. The significant associations were different in the normal and the CRC tissues. Conclusion. Our results have laid down a solid foundation in exploration of novel CRC mechanisms, and identification of miRNA roles as oncomirs or tumor suppressor mirs in CRC.
Identifying cooperative transcriptional regulations using protein–protein interactions

Cooperative transcriptional activations among multiple transcription factors (TFs) are important to understand the mechanisms of complex transcriptional regulations in eukaryotes. Previous studies have attempted to find cooperative TFs based on gene expression data with gene expression profiles as a measure of similarity of gene regulations. In this paper, we use protein–protein interaction data to infer synergistic binding of cooperative TFs. Our fundamental idea is based on the assumption that genes contributing to a similar biological process are regulated under the same control mechanism. First, the protein–protein interaction networks are used to calculate the similarity of biological processes among genes. Second, we integrate this similarity and the chromatin immuno-precipitation data to identify cooperative TFs. Our computational experiments in yeast show that predictions made by our method have successfully identified eight pairs of cooperative TFs that have literature evidences but could not be identified by the previous method. Further, 12 new possible pairs have been inferred and we have examined the biological relevances for them. However, since a typical problem using protein–protein interaction data is that many false-positive data are contained, we propose a method combining various biological data to increase the prediction accuracy.
Skinfold Sum: Reference Values for Top Athletes

Las determinaciones de los pliegues subcutaneos de diferentes zonas corporales son utilizadas ocasionalmente en ecuaciones predictivas para calcular la masa grasa. Este es un parametro critico que condiciona el optimo rendimiento deportivo. No existen valores de referencia de pliegues subcutaneos en atletas de elite. Por tanto, el principal objetivo de este estudio es presentar valores de referencia de pliegues subcutaneos de una amplia poblacion de atletas. Los pliegues tricipital, subescapular, suprailiaco, abdominal, muslo y pierna fueron medidos de acuerdo a la normativa ISAK (Sociedad Internacional para el Avance de la Cineantropometria) en 2500 atletas. La suma de los seis pliegues asi como las sumas parciales de diferentes segmentos corporales (superior, troncal e inferior) fueron calculadas. Los datos muestran que los valores mas altos de pliegues subcutaneos fueron observados en el muslo y zona abdominal, siendo el pliegue subescapular el menor. Las mujeres presentaron valores mas altos de pliegues subcutaneos que los hombres. Respecto a las sumas parciales, los segmentos corporales troncal e inferior presentaron las mayores puntuaciones. Los practicantes de hockey, balonmano, futbol sala, remo, submarinismo y tenis de mesa mostraron los mayores porcentajes de grasa. En conclusion, los calculos de masa grasa en atletas deberian de considerar el sumatorio de los seis pliegues subcutaneos. Ademas, la grasa corporal tiende a estar localizada en los segmentos corporales troncal e inferior y varia segun el genero y la disciplina deportiva.
Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and Travelling to Fit

This article aims to respond to recent calls for more material accounts of cosmopolitanism by considering the way the cosmopolitan sensibilities of flexibility, adaptability, tolerance and openness to difference are literally embodied by a specific group of mobile subjects. Drawing on a study of round-the-world travellers and the 'body stories' they publish in their online travelogues, this article explores the various ways travellers embody cosmopolitanism through the concept of 'fit'. Fit refers both to the physical condition required for long-haul travel and to the ability to blend in and adapt to a variety of geographical and cultural environments. By focusing on the way cosmopolitanism is literally embodied, the empirical account offered here draws attention to the notion that cosmopolitanism is not just an abstract, materially iterated orientation to the world as a whole.
Semantic Lexicon Construction: Learning from Unlabeled Data via Spectral Analysis

Abstract : This paper considers the task of automatically collecting words with their entity class labels, starting from a small number of labeled examples ( seed words). We show that spectral analysis is useful for compensating for the paucity of labeled examples by learning from unlabeled data. The proposed method significantly outperforms a number of methods that employ techniques such as EM and co-training. Furthermore, when trained with 300 labeled examples and unlabeled data, it rivals Naive Bayes classifiers trained with 7500 labeled examples.
Interval From Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure to Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes

OBJECTIVE: Previous studies have shown mixed results for pregnancy outcomes after loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP); however, evidence is lacking regarding the pregnancy outcome of spontaneous abortion with respect to time elapsed from LEEP to pregnancy. We investigated risks of spontaneous abortion and preterm birth as they relate to time elapsed from LEEP to pregnancy. METHODS: A 10-year, multicenter cohort study of women who underwent LEEP was performed between 1996 and 2006. Trained research nurses conducted telephone interviews with all patients to complete data extraction unavailable in charts. Median time from LEEP to pregnancy for spontaneous abortion compared with no spontaneous abortion and preterm birth before 34 and before 37 weeks of gestation compared with term birth were estimated. Patients with time intervals less than 12 months compared with 12 months or more from LEEP to pregnancy were then compared with identify adjusted odds ratios for spontaneous abortion and preterm birth. RESULTS: Five hundred ninety-six patients met inclusion criteria. Median time from LEEP to pregnancy was significantly shorter for women with a spontaneous abortion (20 months [interquartile range 11.2–40.9] compared with 31 months [interquartile range 18.7–51.2]; P=.01) but did not differ for women with a term birth compared with preterm birth. Women with a time interval less than 12 months compared with 12 months or more were at significantly increased risk for spontaneous abortion (17.9% compared with 4.6%; adjusted odds ratio 5.6; 95% confidence interval 2.5–12.7). No increased risk was identified for preterm birth before 34 weeks of gestation or before 37 weeks of gestation. CONCLUSION: Women with a shorter time interval from LEEP to pregnancy are at increased risk for spontaneous abortion but not preterm birth. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: II