Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impacts of Silvicultural Thinning Treatments on Beetle Trap Captures and Tree Attacks During Low Bark Beetle Populations in Ponderosa Pine Forests of Northern Arizona

ABSTRACT Our research used a combination of passive traps, funnel traps with lures, baited trees, and surveys of long-term thinning plots to assess the impacts of different levels of stand basal area (BA) on bark beetle tree attack and on trap captures of Ips spp. , Dendroctonus spp. , and their predators. The study occurred at two sites in ponderosa pine, Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws. , forests, from 2004 to 2007 during low bark beetle populations. Residual stand BA ranged from 9.0 to 37.0 m2/ha. More predators and bark beetles were collected in passive traps in stands of lower BA than in stands of higher BA; however, significance varied by species and site, and total number of beetles collected was low. Height of the clear panel passive traps affected trap catches for some species at some sites and years. When pheromone lures were used with funnel traps [Ips pini (Say) lure: lanierone, +03/-97 ipsdienol], we found no significant difference in trap catches among basal area treatments for bark beetles and their predators. Similarly, when trees were baited (Dendroctonus brevicomis LeConte lure: myrcene, exo-brevicomin and frontalin ), we found no significant difference for days to first bark beetle attack. Surveys of long-term thinning treatments found evidence of bark beetle attacks only in unthinned plots (≈37 m2/ ha basal area). We discuss our results in terms of management implications for bark beetle trapping and control.
The Effects of Sub-Inhibitory Levels of Chloramphenicol on pBR 322 Plasmid Copy Number in Escherichia coli DH 5 α Cells

While humans use antibiotics at inhibitory levels to prevent microbial growth, antibiotics are normally found at sub-inhibitory concentrations in nature. The role and effects of sub-inhibitory levels of antibiotics is one of the key areas of research in microbial science today. In this experiment, the effects of sub-inhibitory levels of chloramphenicol on pBR322 plasmid copy number in Escherichia coli DH5α cells were examined. E. coli DH5α cells with pBR322 plasmid were grown in different concentrations of chloramphenicol ranging from 1 to 5 μg/ml. The cells were enzymatically lysed and the DNA extracted through a phenol:chloroform:isoamyl alcohol extraction. The total bacterial DNA was run on a 0.8% agarose gel; using the ratio of genomic DNA to pBR322 DNA, the plasmid copy numbers per genome were calculated. It was found that 1 μg/ml chloramphenicol quantities had no significant affect when compared to the control; however, 3-5 μg/ml of chloramphenicol caused pBR322 concentrations to double. Due to assay insensitivity, there was no significant difference between the 3 μg/ml and 5 μg/ml samples. ___________________________________________________________
Peptide-substituted phthalocyanine photosensitizers: design, synthesis, photophysicochemical and photobiological studies

A series of phthalocyanine-peptide-quencher conjugates ( 6-9 ) were synthesized as photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy in cancer treatment. The photophysical, photochemical and photobiological properties of these activatable molecular beacons were also investigated in this study. For this purpose, the fluorescence, singlet oxygen and photodegradation quantum yields and fluorescence lifetime values of the compounds were determined in DMSO solutions. The phototoxicity and cytotoxicity of the systems were studied against the cervical cancer cell line named HeLa for an evaluation of their suitability for photodynamic therapy. The results showed that a maximum of 80% of HeLa cells were killed following light irradiation with photodynamic efficiency. All of the results showed that the novel activatable molecular beacons could be suitable candidates for cancer treatment via PDT technique.
Ego defensiveness, open-closed mindedness, and nurses' attitude toward culturally different patients.

Three hundred actively employed female registered professional nurses representing four cultural groups (white Anglo-Saxon, black, Jewish, and Hispanic) participated in a study to investigate nurses' attitudes toward culturally different patients. Cattell's 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire and Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale were used to measure the independent variables of ego defensiveness and open-closed mindedness. The Cultural Attitude Scale which was used to measure nurses' attitudes was developed by the investigator. Lower ego defensiveness of the nurses was found to result in more positive attitudes toward Hispanic patients regarding cultural attitudes and beliefs (p = .05). The more open minded the nurse, the more positive were attitudes toward all patients regarding nursing care-patient interaction (p = .01 for the white patient, p = .001 for the Hispanic, Jewish, and black patients) and cultural attitudes and beliefs. The data supported the hypothesis that ego defensiveness and open-closed mindedness predict greater variance in attitudes than one variable alone for all patients regarding nursing care-patient interaction and cultural attitudes and beliefs. Implications for nursing research, education, and practice are discussed.
An automatic approach for 3D registration of CT scans

CT (Computed tomography) is a widely employed imaging modality in the medical field. Normally, a volume of CT scans is prescribed by a doctor when a specific region of the body (typically neck to groin) is suspected of being abnormal. The doctors are required to make professional diagnoses based upon the obtained datasets. In this paper, we propose an automatic registration algorithm that helps healthcare personnel to automatically align corresponding scans from 'Study' to 'Atlas'. The proposed algorithm is capable of aligning both 'Atlas' and 'Study' into the same resolution through 3D interpolation. After retrieving the scanned slice volume in the 'Study' and the corresponding volume in the original 'Atlas' dataset, a 3D cross correlation method is used to identify and register various body parts.
Comparison of DC, RF, and dispersion properties of SOI and strained-SOI N-MOSFETs

The operating performance of SOI and strained-SOI N-MOSFETs are compared. In particular, these properties are examined in detail: 1) electron mobility and DC characteristics, 2) high frequency behavior, 3) dispersion and self-heating effects, and 4) buried oxide interface trap density. Our results demonstrate that SSOI technology can improve f/sub t/ and f/sub max/ conservatively by up to 50% without excessive dispersion/self-heating. Furthermore, measurements indicate that the SSOI wafer bonding process can produce an acceptable buried oxide interface trap density.
Exploring Family Recreation Activities in Families That Include Children with Developmental Disabilities.

Based on a larger exploratory investigation that employed a mixed method research design, this paper reports the recreation activities of families that included children with developmental disabilities (N = 65). The most popular and frequent forms of family recreation reflected five general categories of activities: passive (e.g., watching television), play (e.g., board or video games), physical (e.g., swimming), social (e.g., visiting family and friends), and entertainment/special events (e.g., going to the movies). Variations in popularity and frequency of these activities were explored in relation to patterns of family involvement and selected socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., employment status, nature of disability). Although variations were evident, family recreation most often included physical recreation activities-commonly swimming, walking, and bicycling. Methodological considerations and practical applications associated with this research are discussed.
Effects of calcium channel blockers on cellular apoptosis

A small number of well‐publicized, retrospective epidemiologic reports have suggested a causal relation between the use of calcium channel blockers (CCBs) for the treatment of hypertension and an increased risk for cancer. The biologic mechanism proposed to explain this possible relation is that CCBs interfere with apoptosis, an active cell death process required for the regulation of normal cell populations in the body. Because an elevation in cellular calcium (Ca2+) is thought to be involved in apoptosis, it has been argued that CCBs could inhibit apoptosis, leading directly to tumor promotion.
Stenting versus Medical Treatment for Severe Symptomatic Intracranial Stenosis

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Intracranial atherosclerosis is especially prevalent in Asians, but intracranial stent placement and medical treatment for severe intracranial stenosis are controversial. Thus, we compared long-term outcomes of these 2 therapeutic approaches in an Asian population. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Patients with angiographically proved severe (≥70%) symptomatic intracranial atherosclerosis, with or without stent placement, were retrospectively reviewed at a single center between 2002 and 2009, with adjustments for age, sex, vascular risk factors, degree of baseline stenosis, and baseline functional status. RESULTS: Of the 114 patients followed from 3 to 36 months (mean, 17.3 months) after initial diagnosis, 53 received 56 stents in addition to medical treatment (stent-placement group), and 61 matched patients received only medical treatment (medical group). Total clinical events, including stroke, TIA, and vascular death, were 12 (22.6%) and 15 (24.6%) in the stent-placement and medical groups, respectively (P = .99). The stent-placement group had significantly better functional outcomes than the medical group (94.3% versus 78.7% for mRS scores of 0–3, P = .045). Most events in the stent-placement group occurred within the first week of the periprocedural period (17.0%) as minor embolic or perforator infarctions, and the rate of events decreased thereafter (5.7%, P = .07). Stent placement over the perforator-rich MCA and BA independently predicted periprocedural events on multivariate regression analysis. In the medical group, events increased in frequency (21.7%) and severity with time. CONCLUSIONS: Although the total ischemic event rate was similar in the 2 groups during a 3-year follow-up, the stent-placement group had a more favorable functional outcome despite minor periprocedural strokes.
Urbanitas: ancient sophistication and refinement,

Urbanitas was the code of attitudes and behaviour employed by the sophisticated ancient to make the outsider feel small. It was variously used by the townsman against the countryman, the educated against the illiterate, the Roman against the Italian, the Italian (eventually) against the provincial. Other names for it are snobbery, exclusiveness, class-consciousness, and xenophobia. Professor Ramage, who has published many articles connected with this unpleasing phenomenon, has now given us a general book on the subject. He is polite to the gentlemen, and does not indulge in sentimental sympathy for the Arriuses and Suffenuses who found themselves on the receiving end. Ramage casts his net very wide. The Greek background is sketched in two chapters, one oddly relegated to the appendix, while Roman urbanity is taken up to its peak in Pliny, with a few very perfunctory remarks on later developments. This chronological framework might have been better replaced by a treatment under headings; for, as it is, though the main emphasis is on the pair town/ country and on urbanus = 'witty', each chapter is a hotchpotch of different kinds of material, from patriotic simplification to linguistic nicety. If Ramage has gone about it in this way, he might have recognized other distinctions, germane but hardly touched on, such as those between noble and plebeian, master and slave; and he might have found himself consulting the Thesaurus under elegans and liberate as well as urbanus. A separate treatment of Latinitas, too, might have led him to distinguish more carefully evidence relating to voice, pronunciation, and language (it is symptomatic that he glosses elocutio at Quintilian 8.1.1 'oratorical delivery and style'): thus Seneca, Contr. 1, pr. 16, does not seem to me to imply that Latro's pronunciation was faulty, merely that he would not train his voice enough to make it able to bear all the calls made on it; and if Messalla Corvinus said Latro spoke sua lingua (ibid. 2.4.8) that was not necessarily anything to do with Hispanism, and certainly nothing to do with delivery. Ramage's discussion (pp. 107-8) is unclear and misleading.
A Formal Analysis of the Feedback Concept in Climate Models. Part I: Exclusive and Inclusive Feedback Analyses*

AbstractClimate sensitivity and feedback are key concepts if the complex behavior of climate response to perturbation is to be interpreted in a simple way. They have also become an essential tool for comparing global circulation models and assessing the reason for the spread in their results. The authors introduce a formal basic model to analyze the practical methods used to infer climate feedbacks and sensitivity from GCMs. The tangent linear model is used first to critically review the standard methods of feedback analyses that have been used in the GCM community for 40 years now. This leads the authors to distinguish between exclusive feedback analyses as in the partial radiative perturbation approach and inclusive analyses as in the “feedback suppression” methods. This review explains the hypotheses needed to apply these methods with confidence. Attention is paid to the more recent regression technique applied to the abrupt 2×CO2 experiment. A numerical evaluation of it is given, related to the Lyapun.
Nonlocal Means Filter for Polarimetric SAR Data Despeckling Based on Discriminative Similarity Measure

This letter proposed a new nonlocal polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) filter based on discriminative similarity measure (DSM). The DSM, which is implemented in the form of maximum a posteriori (MAP), deals with the speckle and the underlying speckle-free signal of PolSAR data individually. Due to its MAP form, the DSM achieves good balance between the similarity of the speckle and the similarity of the underlying speckle-free signal. And then this balance can lead to excellent performance on both speckle smoothing and detail preservation. Results are shown to demonstrate its competence when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Breastfeeding in Thailand: trends and differentials, 1969-79.

A series of national sample surveys conducted in Thailand between 1969 and 1979 provide documentation of the trends and differentials in breastfeeding practices among Thai women. The results indicate a moderate and relatively steady decline in the duration of breastfeeding among both rural and urban women in different educational categories. Urban/rural differences in breastfeeding practices are prominent throughout the period covered by the analysis. Moreover, there is a negative association between the use of mdoern health services for delivery and breastfeeding, especially in urban areas. Despite the reduction in the average duration of breastfeeding, both infant mortality and marital fertility have continued to decline concurrently with the shifts in infant feeding practices.
Knowledge Level Learning in Soar

In this article we demonstrate how knowledge level learning can be performed within the Soar architecture. That is, we demonstrate how Soar can acquire new knowledge that is not deductively implied by its existing knowledge. This demonstration employs Soar's chunking mechanism - a mechanism which acquires new productions from goal based experience - as its only learning mechanism. Chunking has previously been demonstrated to be a useful symbol level learning mechanism, able to speed up the performance of existing systems, but this is the first demonstration of its ability to perform knowledge level learning. Two simple declarative-memory tasks are employed for this demonstration: recognition and recall.
Genetic Variation of Goat Interferon Regulatory Factor 3 Gene and Its Implication in Goat Evolution

The immune systems are fundamentally vital for evolution and survival of species; as such, selection patterns in innate immune loci are of special interest in molecular evolutionary research. The interferon regulatory factor (IRF) gene family control many different aspects of the innate and adaptive immune responses in vertebrates. Among these, IRF3 is known to take active part in very many biological processes. We assembled and evaluated 1356 base pairs of the IRF3 gene coding region in domesticated goats from Africa (Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa) and Asia (Iran and China) and the wild goat (Capra aegagrus). Five segregating sites with θ value of 0.0009 for this gene demonstrated a low diversity across the goats’ populations. Fu and Li tests were significantly positive but Tajima’s D test was significantly negative, suggesting its deviation from neutrality. Neighbor joining tree of IRF3 gene in domesticated goats, wild goat and sheep showed that all domesticated goats have a closer relationship than with the wild goat and sheep. Maximum likelihood tree of the gene showed that different domesticated goats share a common ancestor and suggest single origin. Four unique haplotypes were observed across all the sequences, of which, one was particularly common to African goats (MOCH-K14-0425, Poitou and WAD). In assessing the evolution mode of the gene, we found that the codon model dN/dS ratio for all goats was greater than one. Phylogenetic Analysis by Maximum Likelihood (PAML) gave a ω0 (dN/dS) value of 0.067 with LnL value of -6900.3 for the first Model (M1) while ω2 = 1.667 in model M2 with LnL value of -6900.3 with positive selection inferred in 3 codon sites. Mechanistic empirical combination (MEC) model for evaluating adaptive selection pressure on particular codons also confirmed adaptive selection pressure in three codons (207, 358 and 408) in IRF3 gene. Positive diversifying selection inferred with recent evolutionary changes in domesticated goat IRF3 led us to conclude that the gene evolution may have been influenced by domestication processes in goats.
Association between Insulin Resistance and Carotid Arterial Stiffness in Nondiabetic Hemodialysis Patients

Background: Patients with end-stage renal disease are known to have insulin resistance and advanced arterial stiffness. The present study was undertaken to investigate whether insulin resistance was correlated with carotid arterial stiffness in hemodialysis patients. Methods: Eighty nondiabetic hemodialysis patients were recruited. Stiffness index β of the common carotid artery was assessed by ultrasound using echo-tracking system. Insulin resistance was evaluated by the homeostasis model assessment method (HOMA-IR). Serum albumin, lipid profile, calcium, phosphorus, intact parathyroid hormone, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and oxidized low-density lipoprotein (ox-LDL) were also measured. Results: Patients with higher HOMA-IR levels had higher BMI, ox-LDL, and stiffness index β than patients with lower HOMA-IR levels. HOMA-IR was independently correlated with stiffness index β (β = 0.260, p = 0.016). BMI and ox-LDL were independent contributors to HOMA-IR. Conclusion: Insulin resistance assessed by HOMA-IR is closely associated with carotid arterial stiffness in nondiabetic hemodialysis patients.
Clustering strategy of Wireless Sensor Networks based on improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization

In this paper, an improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the uneven clustering problem, a difficult problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) area. An uneven clustering result leads to severe energy imbalance in WSNs, which shortens the life time of networks. This paper presents a strategy to obtain good clustering result by directly using an improved DPSO algorithm. The phenomenon of premature stagnation of elementary Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is avoided by proposing mutant strategy and mixed dynamic inertia weight adjustment strategy, heuristic algorithms are also presented to help find global best solution efficiently in this paper. Remaining energy of cluster heads (CHs) is taken into consideration in the process of clustering too. Experiments demonstrate the proposed algorithm obtains much better clustering result in comparison with other classic clustering strategies such as Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and its improved strategy.
Application of BP-ANN and LS-SVM to discrimination of rice origin based on trace metals

In this work, a total of twenty nine rice samples, including nineteen Xiang-shui rice samples and ten non-Xiang-shui rice samples, were employed to establish discrimination models used back propagation artificial neural networks (BP-ANN) and least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) based on the content value of B, Zn, Fe, Cu, Mn, Na, K, Mg and Ca determined by Inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). Although the 100% accuracy of training set achieved by LS-SVM, for test set the accuracy was only 90.91%. So the optimal result, the accuracy of 100% both for Xiangshui rice samples and for non-Xiangshui rice samples in test set, was obtained by BP-ANN models with five nodes in hidden layer. A new discrimination method to discriminate rice from different geography origin was provided, which is significant to detect and prevent fraud and adulteration. And in order to improve expansibility and accuracy of models, a further study through adding the number of samples and comparison of more discrimination methods, was needed.
Serological cross-reactions between Mycoplasma genitalium and Mycoplasma pneumoniae

The recently discovered mycoplasma species Mycoplasma genitalium was isolated from urethral specimens from men with nongonococcal urethritis (Tully et al., Lancet i:1288-1291, 1981). In a previous report (K. Lind, Lancet ii:1158-1159, 1982), prominent serological cross-reactions were demonstrated between this mycoplasma and M. pneumoniae. In the present study, the two mycoplasma species were compared more extensively. In classical mycoplasma medium without thallium acetate, M. genitalium grew more slowly than M. pneumoniae did but finally formed similar amounts of acetic acid and lactic acid from glucose. Although their colonies on solid medium were indistinguishable, transmission electron microscopy showed that the flask-formed cells of M. genitalium (especially their necks) were shorter than those of M. pneumoniae. The two species were distinct since DNA hybridization showed only 1.8% homology in base sequences, and sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis revealed significantly different profiles of the two strains. However, considerable similarities were found in their antigenic reactions in various serological tests. The presence of common or closely related antigens was demonstrated in the two species with rabbit immune sera in complement fixation test with chloroform-methanol-extracted antigens by an indirect immunofluorescence test on microcolonies, and by metabolism inhibition and growth inhibition tests. Cross-reactions were also demonstrated by crossed immunoelectrophoresis. The role of M. genitalium as a human pathogen in the genital tract has not been assessed. If serological tests are to be used in this assessment, caution must be exercised due to the extensive cross-reactions demonstrated. Some of the species-specific antigens which we have demonstrated would be appropriate for use in such tests and would help to circumvent problems caused by cross-reactions.