Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of polymer seed coating, fungicide seed treatment and packaging materials on seed quality of chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) during storage

The present storage experiment was conducted at Department of Genetic and Plant Breeding, Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Uttar Pradesh during 2016 2017 with chilli seeds (Cv. Byadagi Dabbi). The seeds were coated with polymer in combination with fungicide (thiram) and maintained untreated seeds (control) where T0 is control, T1 polymer @ 3ml/kg of seeds, T2 is polymer @ 5ml/kg of seeds, T3 is polymer @ 7ml/kg of seeds, T4 is fungicide(thiram) alone 2g/kg of seeds, T5 is polymer @ 3ml + thiram @2g/kg, T6 is polymer @ 5ml/kg + thiram @ 2g/kg and T7 is Polymer @ 7ml + thiram @ 2g/kg of seeds. Treated seeds were packed in polythene bag (700 gauge) and aluminium foil pouch (factor P1 and P2) for the assessment of seed germination, seedling length, seedling dry weight, seedling vigour indices, moisture content and seed infection where data was subjected to factorial experiment laid out in completely randomized design. Germination percentage, seedling length, seedling dry weight, seedling vigour indices were high in seed treatment T7P2 as compared to all other seed treatments. However, seed infection and moisture content were lowest in T7P2.
DATA STRUCTURES FOR DYNAMIC AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL GIS

The concept of embedding a data structure within a space of the same or higher dimension allows us to see the common features between various approaches to multidimensional GIS. Examination of the requirements of those data structures indicates the need for local maintenance, based on clear geometric conditions. This in turn shows how the structures may be made dynamic and kinetic, leading to practical implementations of dynamic and kinetic GIS applications.
Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor: A Multifunctional Cytokine in Rheumatic Diseases

Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) was originally identified in the culture medium of activated T lymphocytes as a soluble factor that inhibited the random migration of macrophages. MIF is now recognized to be a multipotent cytokine involved in the regulation of immune and inflammatory responses. Moreover, the pivotal nature of its involvement highlights the importance of MIF to the pathogenesis of various inflammatory disorders and suggests that blocking MIF may be a useful therapeutic strategy for treating these diseases. This paper discusses the function and expressional regulation of MIF in several rheumatic diseases and related conditions.
Nonparametric Estimation and Symmetry Tests for Conditional Density Functions

We suggest two improved methods for conditional density estimation. The first is based on locally fitting a log-linear model, and is in the spirit of recent work on locally parametric techniques in density estimation. The second method is a constrained local polynomial estimator. Both methods always produce non-negative estimators. We propose an algorithm suitable for selecting the two bandwidths for either estimator. We also develop a new bootstrap test for the symmetry of conditional density functions. The proposed methods are illustrated by both simulation and application to a real data set.
Step-Wise Assembly, Maturation and Dynamic Behavior of the Human CENP-P/O/R/Q/U Kinetochore Sub-Complex

Kinetochores are multi-protein megadalton assemblies that are required for attachment of microtubules to centromeres and, in turn, the segregation of chromosomes in mitosis. Kinetochore assembly is a cell cycle regulated multi-step process. The initial step occurs during interphase and involves loading of the 15-subunit constitutive centromere associated complex (CCAN), which contains a 5-subunit (CENP-P/O/R/Q/U) sub-complex. Here we show using a fluorescent three-hybrid (F3H) assay and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) in living mammalian cells that CENP-P/O/R/Q/U subunits exist in a tightly packed arrangement that involves multifold protein-protein interactions. This sub-complex is, however, not pre-assembled in the cytoplasm, but rather assembled on kinetochores through the step-wise recruitment of CENP-O/P heterodimers and the CENP-P, -O, -R, -Q and -U single protein units. SNAP-tag experiments and immuno-staining indicate that these loading events occur during S-phase in a manner similar to the nucleosome binding components of the CCAN, CENP-T/W/N. Furthermore, CENP-P/O/R/Q/U binding to the CCAN is largely mediated through interactions with the CENP-N binding protein CENP-L as well as CENP-K. Once assembled, CENP-P/O/R/Q/U exchanges slowly with the free nucleoplasmic pool indicating a low off-rate for individual CENP-P/O/R/Q/U subunits. Surprisingly, we then find that during late S-phase, following the kinetochore-binding step, both CENP-Q and -U but not -R undergo oligomerization. We propose that CENP-P/O/R/Q/U self-assembles on kinetochores with varying stoichiometry and undergoes a pre-mitotic maturation step that could be important for kinetochores switching into the correct conformation necessary for microtubule-attachment.
Biological impact of Quantum Dots in rodents

Quantum Dots (QDs) are fluorescent semiconductor nanocrystals that have a narrow and tunable emission wavelengths across the visible and infrared spectrum. This makes them a promising tool for in vivo, in vitro and ex vivo imaging (Smith et al., 2000). However, the assessment of biocompatibility and biosafety of QDs is a critical issue for further applications as diagnostic and imaging tools on humans. The work of this thesis focuses on non modified QTracker® 800 QDs, which are a commercial type of QDs with a heavy metals core of CdSeTe, specifically designed for in vivo vascular and tumour imaging, for their emission wavelength in the near infrared spectrum (800nm). The biodistribution of QTracker QDs is assessed in Balb-c mice (40pM, 10μl/g) during 3 weeks following an i.v. injection. Accumulation is monitored using inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy, optical imaging, confocal microscopy and electron microscopy, and revealed a major accumulation of QDs in liver and spleen, specifically in the mononuclear phagocytic system. The accumulation in the brain is observed over 3 weeks, suggesting a long biological half-life, in the scale of weeks or months. It is in particularly observed around blood vessels, in different brain areas. QDs are found in neurons, glia and epithelial cells, both in cytosol and nucleus. Animal’s behaviour is investigated and novel object recognition test shows that QDs can significantly impair recognition memory at 3 weeks after treatment (with no locomotory and coordination alterations observed). Such impairment is possibly due to the alteration of physiological conditions in the anatomical regions that encode for recognition memory, such as enthorinal and perirhinal cortices, dentate gyrus and areas CA1-CA3 of hippocampus.
Securing the core with an Enterprise Key Management Infrastructure (EKMI)

The last twenty-five years has witnessed an emphasis on protecting the network and computing host as a proxy for protecting data from unauthorized access. While this was a reasonable strategy at the dawn of network-based computing, given the state of the internet today with its security issues, this strategy is proving to be hopeless. This paper advances the notion that the time has finally come to begin what we should have done initially -- protect the core of our computing infrastructure: the data -- in addition to protecting the network and computing host. The paper describes an architecture - and a specific implementation of that architecture - to enable the encryption of data across the enterprise in a platform and application-independent manner. The architecture describes the use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and a Symmetric Key Management System (SKMS) within an Enterprise Key Management Infrastructure (EKMI), to securely - and centrally - manage the life-cycle of the symmetric encryption keys used for data encryption.
A comparative study of bioactive compounds in primitive wheat populations from Italy, Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria and Armenia.

BACKGROUND In recent years there has been a considerable interest in the consumption of ancient wheats, often referred to as having superior health-promoting properties than modern cultivars. The BaSeFood project allowed us to explore the use of primitive wheats in the Black Sea area region and in Italy, with special regard to emmer (Triticum dicoccum) and einkorn (T. monococcum), and to collect seed samples to be grown and compared for their bioactive content, together with some other primitive wheat genotypes (T. timopheevi, T. palaeo-colchicum, T. macha). RESULTS The data show that genotype was an important factor controlling phytochemical content. Variability ranges were as follows: lipids (18.0-28.5 g kg(-1)), tocols (26.6-72.8 mg kg(-1)), carotenoids (1.6-8.4 mg kg(-1)), sterols (441-929 mg kg(-1)) and phenolic compounds (819-1465 mg kg(-1)) content (dry matter basis). The fraction of individual components, within each class, was also variable; however, the species were well discriminated by their overall composition. CONCLUSIONS The present research represents a further contribution to the available literature about the analytical composition of primitive wheats, including the complete range of relevant bioactives and lesser investigated species. The data do not support an overall superiority of primitive forms, but evidenced interesting, potentially exploitable, between- and within-species variability.
Discriminative adaptive training using the MPE criterion

The paper addresses the use of discriminative training criteria for speaker adaptive training (SAT), where both the transform generation and model parameter estimation are estimated using the minimum phone error (MPE) criterion. In a similar fashion to the use of I-smoothing for standard MPE training, a smoothing technique is introduced to avoid over-training when optimizing MPE-based feature-space transforms. Experiments on a conversational telephone speech (CTS) transcription task demonstrate that MPE-based SAT models can reduce the word error rate over non-SAT MPE models by 1.0% absolute, after lattice-based MLLR adaptation. Moreover, a simplified implementation of MPE-SAT with the use of constrained MLLR, in place of MPE-estimated transforms, is also discussed.
Manipulated Object Proposal: A Discriminative Object Extraction and Feature Fusion Framework for First-Person Daily Activity Recognition

Detecting and recognizing objects interacting with humans lie in the center of first-person (egocentric) daily activity recognition. However, due to noisy camera motion and frequent changes in viewpoint and scale, most of the previous egocentric action recognition methods fail to capture and model highly discriminative object features. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline for first-person daily activity recognition, aiming at more discriminative object feature representation and object-motion feature fusion. Our object feature extraction and representation pipeline is inspired by the recent success of object hypotheses and deep convolutional neural network based detection frameworks. Our key contribution is a simple yet effective manipulated object proposal generation scheme. This scheme leverages motion cues such as motion boundary and motion magnitude (in contrast, camera motion is usually considered as "noise" for most previous methods) to generate a more compact and discriminative set of object proposals, which are more closely related to the objects which are being manipulated. Then, we learn more discriminative object detectors from these manipulated object proposals based on region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN). Meanwhile, we develop a network based feature fusion scheme which better combines object and motion features. We show in experiments that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art recognition performance on a challenging first-person daily activity benchmark.
E-Commerce Adoption in Sri Lankan Small Tourism Enterprises; Evaluation of Strategic Use

The adoption of Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the tourism sector has become one of the choices that seem unavoidable because they bear so directly on the prospects for competing and even surviving in the highly competitive global tourism economy. Despite the enormous attention given to encourage the tourism industry to adopt e-commerce both by academics as well as governments, little research has been carried out in identifying strategies of ecommerce adoption for small tourism enterprises (STEs) in developing countries, especially Sri Lanka. It is, therefore, the aim of this paper to understand the factors and combinations of factors that STEs need to be considered before embracing e-commerce into their business by providing a closer look at actual experience of Sri Lankan STEs. Case study research was carried out to analyse and explain the underlying factors that are likely to determine the varying extent of e-commerce adoption in STEs. The findings of the case studies have further extended into the development of proposed practical framework to illustrate how e-commerce adoption should be carried out from a strategic perspective.
Economic Impact of E.coli 0111 Outbreak in 1995 in Australia

Increased incidence of food-borne illnesses is a matter of significant concern for the community and the government alike. An outbreak of E.coli O111 that occurred in Australia in 1995 affected 200 people of whom 22 developed HUS while one person died. This study analyses the economic costs of the outbreak. The total cost of the outbreak is estimated to be A$5.61 million. Productivity loss represented the highest percentage of outbreak costs (66%) due to death, disability and chronic illness. The direct medical costs contributed 33%. The estimated loss could be even higher if all costs could be quantified. Nevertheless, the findings provide an idea to the policy maker regarding the extent and nature of the damage that could result from an outbreak. The severity of the damage warrants allocation of necessary resources to prevent such occurrences.
Data-Driven Haptic Rendering—From Viscous Fluids to Visco-Elastic Solids

In this article we present extensions of our earlier work on data-driven haptic rendering. Haptic feedback is generated directly by interpolating measured data. The selection of appropriate data dimensions is guided by the structure of the generalized Maxwell model. Material elasticity and viscosity are reproduced, including transient material effects like stress relaxation. All these properties can be nonlinear and mutually dependent. Besides visco-elastic bodies, we also apply our method to viscous fluids. We present results for several materials and compare the errors of the interpolated forces with perceptual thresholds reported in the literature. Moreover, we examine how these errors behave if different subjects perform the recordings on which the data-driven haptic feedback is based.
Substrate Discrimination among Mitogen-activated Protein Kinases through Distinct Docking Sequence Motifs*

Mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) mediate cellular responses to a wide variety of extracellular stimuli. MAPK signal transduction cascades are tightly regulated, and individual MAPKs display exquisite specificity in recognition of their target substrates. All MAPK family members share a common phosphorylation site motif, raising questions as to how substrate specificity is achieved. Here we describe a peptide library screen to identify sequence requirements of the DEF site (docking site for ERK FXF), a docking motif separate from the phosphorylation site. We show that MAPK isoforms recognize DEF sites with unique sequences and identify two key residues on the MAPK that largely dictate sequence specificity. Based on these observations and computational docking studies, we propose a revised model for MAPK interaction with substrates containing DEF sites. Variations in DEF site sequence requirements provide one possible mechanism for encoding complex target specificity among MAPK isoforms.
Advanced Coarsening Schemes for Graph Partitioning

The graph partitioning problem is widely used and studied in many practical and theoretical applications. Today, multilevel strategies represent one of the most effective and efficient generic frameworks for solving this problem on large-scale graphs. Most of the attention in designing multilevel partitioning frameworks has been on the refinement phase. In this work, we focus on the coarsening phase, which is responsible for creating structures similar to the original but smaller graphs. We compare different matching- and AMG-based coarsening schemes, experiment with the algebraic distance between nodes, and demonstrate computational results on several classes of graphs that emphasize the running time and quality advantages of different coarsening schemes.
Using Runtime Traces to Improve Documentation and Unit Test Authoring for Dynamic Languages

Documentation and unit tests increase software maintainability, but real world software projects rarely have adequate coverage. We hypothesize that, in part, this is because existing authoring tools require developers to adjust their workflows significantly. To study whether improved interaction design could affect unit testing and documentation practice, we created an authoring support tool called Vesta. The main insight guiding Vesta's interaction design is that developers frequently manually test the software they are building. We propose leveraging runtime information from these manual executions. Because developers naturally exercise the part of the code on which they are currently working, this information will be highly relevant to appropriate documentation and testing tasks. In a complex coding task, nearly all documentation created using Vesta was accurate, compared to only 60% of documentation created without Vesta, and Vesta was able to generate significant portions of all tests, even those written manually by developers without Vesta.
Semantic Parsing as Machine Translation

Semantic parsing is the problem of deriving a structured meaning representation from a natural language utterance. Here we approach it as a straightforward machine translation task, and demonstrate that standard machine translation components can be adapted into a semantic parser. In experiments on the multilingual GeoQuery corpus we find that our parser is competitive with the state of the art, and in some cases achieves higher accuracy than recently proposed purpose-built systems. These results support the use of machine translation methods as an informative baseline in semantic parsing evaluations, and suggest that research in semantic parsing could benefit from advances in machine translation.
In vivo MR imaging of folate-receptor expression with the folate-specific nanospheres in a C6 glioblastoma model

Abstract Purpose: To assess the ability of magnetic albumin nanospheres conjugated with folate (FA-MAN) to provide FR-specific enhancement of C6 glioblastoma on magnetic resonance (MR) images. Procedures: Active targeting effect of magnetic albumin nanospheres conjugated with folate (FA-MAN) was evaluated based on MR images and histopathological analysis. MR imaging of subcutaneously transplanted C6 glioblastomas was performed after intravenous injection of FA-MAN, non-targeted (magnetic albumin nanospheres, MAN) and FA-inhibited (magnetic albumin nanospheres conjugated with folate plus folate, FA-MAN + FA) agents at designated time points. The T2 relaxation times in tumors were compared among different treatment groups and were correlated with histopathological findings. Prussian blue staining and in vivo toxicology assay were also performed simultaneously. Results: Upon MR imaging in vivo, T2 relaxation time of the tumor sites in the group administrated with FA-MAN (T2 is 49 ms, 46 ms and 45 ms at 24 h, 48 h and 72 h, respectively) has statistical difference compared to those in the groups of MAN (T2 is 56 ms, 56 ms and 61 ms at 24 h, 48 h and 72 h, respectively) and FA-MAN + FA nanospheres (T2 is 56 ms, 57 ms and 56 ms at 24 h, 48 h and 72 h, respectively). Prussian blue-stained results demonstrated that more iron particles accumulated in the tumors of the targeted group than those of the other groups. Toxicology assay showed that no noticeable body weight losses were observed after monitoring 31 days, and the results of routine blood parameters, liver and kidney function biomarkers also demonstrated that the nanoshperes did not influence the respectively physiological index. Besides, no obvious pathological injuries on the major organs were examined. Conclusion: Folate-conjugated magnetic albumin nanospheres were more effective in targeting C6 glioblastoma in vivo.
Thickness evaluation of mesoporous silicon layer using ultrasonic method

The manufacturing processes of porous silicon (PoSi) now allow samples with variable depths and porosities to be obtained. Thickness can be critical to ensure reliability as for microelectronic applications. However, thickness measurement methods are generally destructive or strongly limited by thickness or pore. Therefore in this study a non-destructive ultrasonic method based on an immersion insertion-substitution technique is investigated. Yet wavelength in ultrasonic method is much larger than optical ones, allowing to observe porous silicon layers having larger pore diameter or higher thickness. Total thickness of the wafer (550 microns) and high sound speed in pure silicon (8450 m.s-1) require transducers with high centre frequencies. The acoustic parameters of these samples, such as velocity and attenuation, are measured using time domain analysis. These measurements are compared with those obtained through a one-dimensional multilayer model of the wafer, using a homogenization approach for the porous layer based on Biot’s Theory.
Thrombin Induces Activation of p38 MAP Kinase in Human Platelets (*)

In human platelets a proline-directed kinase distinct from the ERK MAP kinases is stimulated by both thrombin and the thrombin receptor agonist peptide SFLLRN and may be involved in the activation of Ca-dependent cytosolic phospholipase A (Kramer, R. M., Roberts, E. F., Hyslop, P. A., Utterback, B. G., Hui, K. Y., and Jakubowski, J. A.(1995) J. Biol. Chem. 270, 14816-14823). Here we show that this kinase is identical with or closely related to p38 (the mammalian homolog of HOG1 from yeast), a recently discovered protein kinase typically activated by inflammatory cytokines and environmental stress. Further, we demonstrate that activation of this kinase by thrombin is transient (with maximal stimulation at 1 min), is accompanied by tyrosine phosphorylation, and precedes the activation of the ERK kinases. This is the first report to show that p38 kinase is activated by thrombin and to suggest a role for this MAP kinase in the thrombin-mediated signaling events during platelet activation.
A Tool for Subdivision of Quad / Tri Meshes with Sharp Features

Designers often want the added flexibility of having both quads and triangles in their models. It is also well known that triangle meshes generate poor limit surfaces when using a quad scheme, while quadonly meshes behave poorly with triangular schemes. Further, regular subdivision produces smooth surfaces even from sharp-cornered base meshes and sometimes sharpness in the subdivision surface is desrired. In this project we introduce a new tool for subdivision of meshes with triangles and and quadrilaterals, with user-specified sharpness on edges which permits great flexibility in controlling the output subdivision surface. This project essentially integrates two separate algorithms introduced by previous work into one framework, and provides a user-interface for interactive subdivision of quad-tri meshes.