Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cash for Carbon: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Deforestation

This paper evaluates a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program in western Uganda that offered forest-owning households cash payments if they conserved their forest. The program was implemented as a randomized trial in 121 villages, 60 of which received the program for two years. The PES program reduced deforestation and forest degradation: Tree cover, measured using high-resolution satellite imagery, declined by 2% to 5% in treatment villages compared to 7% to 10% in control villages during the study period. We find no evidence of shifting of tree-cutting to nearby land. We then use the estimated effect size and the social cost of carbon to value the delayed CO2 emissions, and compare this benefit to the program's cost.
Evaluation of a Voluntary Control Program for the Detection of Bovine Leukemia Virus Antibodies Based on Agar Gel Immunodiffusion Test in Dairy Farms in Costa Rica

Cattle from 20 dairy farms were serologically tested over a five-year period using agar gel immunodiffusion test (AGIDT) as part of a voluntary Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) control program. After five years of removing infected animals from the herds based on BLV-AGIDT serological status, blood samples from 332 cattle in these farms were collected and analyzed side by side by AGIDT and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect antibodies against BLV. AGIDT detected 29.2% (97) and 16.0% (53) of the animals as positive and weak positive respectively, whereas ELISA detected 58.2% (193) cattle as positive. The prevalence of BLV-antibodies determined with AGIDT in the dairy farms oscillated between 0% and 86%, whereas prevalence determined by ELISA ranged between 28% and 100% in the same farms. Although both techniques showed similarly results in farms with high BLV-prevalence, ELISA detected a larger proportion of BLV-positive, especially in farms with low or no BLV-prevalence based on AGIDT, leading to wrong assumptions in terms of farm level control efforts. Our results strongly suggest that AGIDT alone is inadequate to implement BLV control programs and ELISA is a more adequate test for BLV surveillance and control programs.
A METHOD FOR IMPROVEMENT POTENTIAL ASSESSMENT IN A BATCH PLANNING AND SCHEDULING SITUATION

A method is presented for estimating the improvement potential of planning and scheduling in a batch-wise processing company. It involves a characterization of the actual planning and scheduling situation and supports systematic exploration of improvement options and their benefits. Insights gained in two explorative industrial case studies were used to arrive at a robust method that can be applied in a variety of batch process industries. The method is aimed at supporting industrial decision makers in deciding whether to invest in hardware i.e. production and storage capacity, or software i.e. batch scheduling and sequencing, or to focus on information management i.e. customer order acceptance procedures or planning issues like delivery time policy.
Ontogeny of Immunoreactive Prostaglandin Endoperoxide Synthase Isoforms in Ovine Fetal Pituitary, Hypothalamus and Brainstem

Parturition is initiated in sheep by an increase in the activity of the fetal hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Prostaglandins, known to augment the activity of this endocrine axis, have long been proposed as involved in the initiation of paturition. We have previously demonstrated that endogenously produced prostanoids augment the activity of the HPA axis, and we have proposed that the increased production of prostanoids within the fetal brain or pituitary at the end of gestation might be involved in the initiation of parturition. An important regulatory step in the biosynthesis of prostanoids is the activity of prostaglandin endoperoxide synthase (PGHS). The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that the abundance of one or both isoforms of PGHS (PGHS-1 and PGHS-2) increase in brain and/or pituitary at the end of gestation. We used immunoblot analysis to measure the abundance of immunoreactive PGHS-1 and PGHS-2 in pituitary, hypothalamus and brainstem collected from fetuses of known gestational ages. We found that the abundance of PGHS-1 was weakly but significantly increased at the end of gestation in the pituitary and brainstem. The abundance of PGHS-2, on the other hand, increased exponentially in the pituitary and hypothalamus with highest concentrations found in term fetuses. We conclude that these enzymes are developmentally regulated in pituitary and in brain regions important for HPA axis control. We speculate that the increased enzyme’s abundance results in increased prostanoid biosynthesis near term, and is a link in the chain of events which initiates parturition.
Proteomic comparison defines novel markers to characterize heterogeneous populations of extracellular vesicle subtypes

Significance The last decade has seen a rapid expansion of interest in extracellular vesicles (EVs), proposed to mediate cell–cell communication in patho/physiological conditions. Although heterogeneity of EVs has become obvious, as highlighted recently by the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles, the field is lacking specific tools to distinguish EVs of different intracellular origins, and thus probably different functions. Here, thanks to a comprehensive comparison of different types of EVs isolated from a single cell type, we define proteins generically present in EVs, small EV-specific and -excluded ones, and a few specific of endosome-derived exosomes or nonexosomal small EVs. This work will allow proper evaluation of the molecular mechanisms of biogenesis and secretion and the respective functions of subtypes of EVs. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have become the focus of rising interest because of their numerous functions in physiology and pathology. Cells release heterogeneous vesicles of different sizes and intracellular origins, including small EVs formed inside endosomal compartments (i.e., exosomes) and EVs of various sizes budding from the plasma membrane. Specific markers for the analysis and isolation of different EV populations are missing, imposing important limitations to understanding EV functions. Here, EVs from human dendritic cells were first separated by their sedimentation speed, and then either by their behavior upon upward floatation into iodixanol gradients or by immuno-isolation. Extensive quantitative proteomic analysis allowing comparison of the isolated populations showed that several classically used exosome markers, like major histocompatibility complex, flotillin, and heat-shock 70-kDa proteins, are similarly present in all EVs. We identified proteins specifically enriched in small EVs, and define a set of five protein categories displaying different relative abundance in distinct EV populations. We demonstrate the presence of exosomal and nonexosomal subpopulations within small EVs, and propose their differential separation by immuno-isolation using either CD63, CD81, or CD9. Our work thus provides guidelines to define subtypes of EVs for future functional studies.
Adoptive immunotherapy for cancer

Recent clinical success has underscored the potential for immunotherapy based on the adoptive cell transfer (ACT) of engineered T lymphocytes to mediate dramatic, potent, and durable clinical responses. This success has led to the broader evaluation of engineered T‐lymphocyte‐based adoptive cell therapy to treat a broad range of malignancies. In this review, we summarize concepts, successes, and challenges for the broader development of this promising field, focusing principally on lessons gleaned from immunological principles and clinical thought. We present ACT in the context of integrating T‐cell and tumor biology and the broader systemic immune response.
The B‐Lynch surgical technique for the control of massive postpartum haemorrhage: an alternative to hysterectomy? Five cases reported

Sir, The comments on our paper by P. Brocklehurst addresses two very valid points. First, our paper was deliberately aimed at the assessment of the patient’s view. As such, we acknowledge the scepticism expressed regarding the introduction of a screening programme on the basis of our results, but we did not claim that this was a step that should be taken without further careful evaluation. This evaluation would have to show that the necessary technology was available to perform accurate serological screening and that screening would result in health gain. At present commercial test kits are not available although there are several studies evaluating the reliability of different techniques including a type specific IgG ELISA, results of which are currently awaited. However, a clinically determined demand will most likely influence the effort made to develop these tests further. A second key issue mentioned is of what to do with the different result categories. The main target group for intervention would most likely be those susceptible to infection during pregnancy (i.e. seronegative for HSV type 1 and 2) and the issues around the management of these patients have been discussed in our paper as well as in Brocklehurstis letter. We appreciate that as a result of antenatal HSV screening the clinician may be placed in a clinical dilemma. We believe that understanding the patient’s perception, knowledge and wishes prior to the launch of new technology may resolve such dilemmas.
Title : Plasma cBIN 1 Score ( CS ) Identifies HFpEF and Can Predict Cardiac Hospitalization in Stable Ambulatory Patients

Authors: Yu Xie 1**, Tara C. Hitzeman 1**, Ronit H. Zadikany 1, Andriana P. Nikolova 1, Rachel Baum1, Bing Xu 1, Sosse Agvanian 1, Gil Y. Melmed 2, Dermot T. McGovern 2, Dael R. Geft 1,3, David H. Chang1,3, Jaime D. Moriguchi 1,3, Antoine Hage 1,3, Babak Azarbal 1,3, Lawrence S. Czer 1,3, Michelle M. Kittleson 1,3, Jignesh K. Patel 1,3, Alan H. B. Wu 4, Jon A. Kobashigawa 1,3, Michele Hamilton 1,3, TingTing Hong 1,3*, Robin M. Shaw 1,3* **Co-first authors
A Study of Gamma-Ray Exposure of Cu–SiO$_2$ Programmable Metallization Cells

The Cu-SiO2 based programmable metallization cell (PMC) is a promising alternative to the Ag-chalcogenide glass PMC because of its low power consumption and CMOS-compatibility. Understanding its total ionizing dose (TID) response helps in assessing the reliability of this technology in ionizing radiation environments and benefits its expansion in the space electronics market. In this paper, the impacts of TID on the switching characteristics of Cu-SiO2 PMC are investigated for the first time. The devices were step irradiated with 60Co gamma-rays to a maximum dose of 7.1 Mrad ( SiO2). The results show that gamma-ray irradiation has a negligible impact on the virgin-state and on-state resistance of Cu-SiO2 PMCs. The off-state resistance slightly decreases after the first 1.5 Mrad( SiO2) of exposure, but this reduction saturates after higher levels of TID. Other switching characteristics such as the set voltage, multilevel switching capability and endurance were also studied, all of which did not show observable changes after gamma-ray radiation. The immunity to ionizing radiation is attributed to the suppression of the photo-doping process.
MDCT Angiography With 3D Rendering: A Novel Cinematic Rendering Algorithm for Enhanced Anatomic Detail.

OBJECTIVE The two most widely used postprocessing 3D tools in clinical practice are volume rendering (VR) and maximum intensity projection (MIP). With the use of current-generation MDCT, these techniques enable accurate characterization of arterial anatomy and pathology in all anatomic regions. Recently, the VR algorithm has been enhanced by the incorporation of a new lighting model. This new technique-called cinematic rendering-generates photorealistic images with the potential to more accurately depict anatomic detail. CONCLUSION As an enhancement of the technology championed in VR, cinematic rendering promises to provide additional anatomic detail for MDCT interpretation and display. Future investigations must be conducted to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of cinematic rendering and determine whether interpretative pitfalls result from its unique lighting model in practice.
Functional Complementation of Human Centromere Protein A (CENP-A) by Cse4p from Saccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT We have employed a novel in vivo approach to study the structure and function of the eukaryotic kinetochore multiprotein complex. RNA interference (RNAi) was used to block the synthesis of centromere protein A (CENP-A) and Clip-170 in human cells. By coexpression, homologous kinetochore proteins from Saccharomyces cerevisiae were then tested for the ability to complement the RNAi-induced phenotypes. Cse4p, the budding yeast CENP-A homolog, was specifically incorporated into kinetochore nucleosomes and was able to complement RNAi-induced cell cycle arrest in CENP-A-depleted human cells. Thus, Cse4p can structurally and functionally substitute for CENP-A, strongly suggesting that the basic features of centromeric chromatin are conserved between yeast and mammals. Bik1p, the budding yeast homolog of human CLIP-170, also specifically localized to kinetochores during mitosis, but Bik1p did not rescue CLIP-170 depletion-induced cell cycle arrest. Generally, the newly developed in vivo complementation assay provides a powerful new tool for studying the function and evolutionary conservation of multiprotein complexes from yeast to humans.
Antibacterial Activity of Probiotic Yoghurt and Soy-Yoghurt againstEscherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus

Introduction: Biopreservation systems in food are becoming increasingly interesting for the industry and consumer. Methods: Yoghurt milk and soymilk samples were inoculated separately with E.coli or S. aureus immediately after adding the starter (bifidobacteria and/or yoghurt culture) to investigate the antimicrobial activity of probiotic yoghurt and soy-yoghurt. Results: Probiotic yoghurt containing Bifidobacterium lactis (Bb-12) and Bifidobacterium longum (Bb-46) exhibited a slight pH drop compared with plain yoghurt (without bifidobacteria) during the refrigerated storage period. Plain yoghurt and probiotic yoghurt containing Bb-12 and Bb-46 inoculated with or without test organisms showed a significant (P<0.05) increase in lactic and acetic acids than the probiotic soy-yoghurt containing Bb-12 and Bb-46 which produces not only lactic and acetic acids but also formic acid. From the initial count of E.coli, % decreases were 96.00, 99.43, 99.14, 97.14 and 98.43%, for the plain yoghurt, probiotic yoghurt containing Bb-12 & Bb-46 and soy-yoghurt containing Bb-12 and Bb-46, respectively. E. coli counts were disappeared in probiotic yoghurt, soy- yoghurt and plain yoghurt after 2, 3 and 5 days of storage, respectively . The decrease percentage for the plain yoghurt, probiotic yoghurt containing Bb-12 and Bb-46 and soy-yoghurt containing Bb-12 & Bb-46 were 85.62, 93.36, 95.58, 93.36 and 95.58 from the initial inoculum level, respectively. The growth of S.aureus was not detected in the probiotic yoghurt containing Bb- l 2 and Bb-46 after the 10th day of storage. Low numbers of S.aureus survived in the plain yoghurt and probiotic soy-yoghurt Bb- 12 and Bb-46, after 15 days of cold storage. Conclusion: According to this data probiotic yoghurt, Soy-yoghurt and their antibacterial metabolites can be used to control pathogenic microorganisms
The dynamics of oil prices and valuation of oil derivatives

Over the last three decades financial derivatives, such as futures and options, have become increasingly important to financial institutions for the purposes of trading and risk management. In particular, commodity markets have undergone significant growth in terms of volumes and diversity of traded contracts. The most significant development since 2000 has been in the trading of commodity options. The London International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), as well as other exchanges, regularly introduce futures and options contracts on different commodity products. Further, the growth of over-the-counter trading in physical commodity options, such as oil, is increasing rapidly. The values of most financial derivatives are based on the movement of the underlying assets on which the derivatives are written. Consequently, it is not a trivial task to quantify their price, although mathematics provides a powerful tool in order to do so. Over the last two decades, the behaviour of oil prices (which is one of the most important of the world’s commodities) has become progressively more complex with many factors, such as interest rates, net demand, Middle Eastern conflicts and economic crises influencing its behaviour. The ability to capture the behaviour of oil prices affects the subsequent accurate pricing of derivatives on oil, thereby enabling the creation of successful portfolio investments and hedging strategies. Hence, studying the uncertainty linked to future movements of oil prices and identifying the affective factors on those movements, play an important role in financial decision making. While existing models for underlying assets may be appropriate for certain classes of assets at certain times, they may not be applicable to commodities such as oil. In 2005 its name was changed to the International Commodity Exchange (ICE).
A modified GA classifier for offline Tamil handwritten character recognition

In this paper, we proposed a classifier for Tamil handwritten character recognition using skeletonisation and modified GA to improve the recognition results of offline Tamil handwritten characters. The skeletonised character image is traversed from one endpoint to the other in an order, and based on the path of traversal, skeletonisation is explored to generate feature vector. The operations of conventional GA are modified to allow variable string length of chromosomes in GA. Fitness function is computed by integrating the classification capacity of the string metric Levenshtein distance which measures the dissimilarities between two strings. The experimental results on offline Tamil dataset demonstrates that the proposed classifier can automatically minimise the rate of misclassification and also provide better performance compared to GA with the fixed length chromosome. Our algorithm withstands even noisy data. Its comparison with other approaches is also substantiated and results proved that the proposed algorithm exhibits high accuracy in between 85% to 95%.
How Complexity Pervades Specialization in Canonical Embodied Evolution

Embodied Evolution (EE) is an evolutionary strategy based on natural evolution in which the individuals that make up the population are embodied and situated in an environment where they interact in a local, decentralized and asynchronous fashion. It has been successfully applied in collective problems showing its validity to perform on-line evolution both in simulated and real agents. A key feature of EE is that of emergent specialization, that is, this strategy is able to autonomously generate a distribution of individuals into species if that is advantageous in the scenario. This paper goes in the line of studying such feature in more depth, analyzing how the complexity of the task (fitness landscape) and the complexity of the individuals (control system) affect the emergence of specialization. The analysis is carried out using a canonical EE algorithm in a real problem consisting in a collective surveillance task with simulated Micro Aerial Vehicles.
Cardiovascular Physiology at High Altitude

The role of the cardiovascular system is to deliver oxygenated blood to the tissues and remove metabolic effluent. It is clear that this complex system will have to adapt to maintain oxygen deliver in the profound hypoxia of high altitude. The literature on the adaptation of both the systemic and pulmonary circulations to high altitude is reviewed.
Dual-band branch line coupler with large power division ratios

Design of dual-band branch line couplers with large power division ratios is proposed. Large power division ratio is achieved by replacing the conventional branch lines with shorted parallel-coupled line sections. For dual-band operation, open stubs are attached to the branch lines at the connecting nodes in the circuit. Design equations incorporating arbitrary power division ratios are formulated by imitating the quarter-wave branch-lines at the two designated frequencies with different characteristic impedances. A microstrip coupler operating at 2.45/5.2 GHz with 20/15 dB power division ratios is designed, fabricated and tested to validate the theory. Good agreement is obtained between experiment and simulation results.
Time-frequency masking for large scale robust speech recognition

Time-frequency mask estimation has shown considerable success recently. In this paper, we demonstrate its utility as a feature enhancement frontend for large vocabulary conversational speech recognition. Additionally, we investigate how masking compares with feature denoising, which directly re-constructs clean features from noisy ones. We train a mask estimator that predicts ideal ratio masks. Experimental results on Google voice search evaluation sets demonstrate that masking is superior to feature denoising, and a lightweight masking fron-tend produces signiﬁcant improvements over a strong baseline. We also show that masking improves performance of a multi-condition trained (MTR) acoustic model.
Online suffix trees with counts

This paper extend Ukkonen's online suffix tree construction algorithm to support substring frequency queries, by adding count fields to the internal nodes of the tree. This has applications in the field of sequential data compression. One major problem is that Ukkonen's online construction algorithm does not maintain explicit end of string markers in the tree. The major part of our work concerns quickly determining where the end markers for a particular edge would be, so that frequencies can be correctly obtained. So a complete characterization of all end markers on leaf edges is given. Furthermore we found that edges between two internal nodes can contain at most one end marker. Using these results, the algorithms are given to update the count fields and do frequency queries correctly. All algorithms have been implemented and tested correct in practice.
Finite-Element-Based Generalized Impedance Boundary Condition for Modeling Plasmonic Nanostructures

The superior ability of plasmonic structures to manipulate light has propelled their extensive applications in nanophotonics techniques and devices. Computational electromagnetics plays a critical role in characterizing and optimizing the nanometallic structures. In this paper, a general numerical algorithm, which is different from the commonly used discrete dipole approximation, the finite-difference time-domain, and the surface integral equation (SIE) method, is proposed to model plasmonic nanostructures. In this algorithm, the generalized impedance boundary condition (GIBC) based on the finite element method (FEM) is formulated and converted to the SIE. The plasmonic nanostructures with arbitrary inhomogeneity and shapes are modeled by the FEM. Their complex electromagnetic interactions are accurately described by the SIE method. As a result, the near field of plasmonic nanostructures can be accurately calculated. The higher order basis functions, together with the multifrontal massively parallel sparse direct solver, are involved to provide a higher order accurate and fast solver.