Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Formation of Amylose-Lipid Complexes and Effects of Temperature Treatment. Part 2. Fatty Acids

This article is the second part of research on amylose-lipid complexes, where the first article dealt with monoglycerides. Here, a variety of fatty acids with chain lengths between 3 and 22 carbons and with varying degree of unsaturation were studied regarding their ability to form amylose-lipid complexes. In the present paper it is intended to investigate the formation of different fatty acid- amylose complexes under conditions that are not optimised for complex formation. Such conditions are common in the processing of starch. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was used to analyse transition temperatures and enthalpies (H). The transition enthalpy H was taken as a measure of the quantity of the complexes in the samples. Except for the two shortest fatty acids (propionic and butyric acid), all the fatty acids showed DSC-peaks corresponding to transition of amylose-lipid complexes. Form II complexes, i.e. the crystalline form of the complex, were also formed for all fatty acids with a chain length of 12, even with polyunsaturated fatty acids. In this investigation, the amount and type of complexes formed do not reflect equilibrium conditions, but are instead a result of the rate of all the different sub-processes involved in complex formation, and these are influenced by the availability of the fatty acids and the heat treatment. The highest amounts of complexes were created by arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acid when the sample had not been subjected to any previous heat treatment. Heat treatment of the sample changed this and for heat treated samples the saturated palmitic and stearic acid yielded highest total amount of complexes. However, the ratio between complexes of form II and form I differed between the fatty acids complexes and during extended temperature treatment, most form II complexes were created by arachidonic and linoleic acid. Comparing the results from each fatty acid to the corresponding monoglyceride (with chain lengths of 10-18), it can be concluded that fatty acids seem to form complexes more easily than monoglycerides do, but monoglycerides create complex form II more easily than fatty acids, especially in case of shorter-chain lipids. (Less)
PARENTAL CARE OF FLEDGLING WOOD THRUSHES

Abstract We report the study of parental care of Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) fledglings from nest-leaving to independence. From 1993 to 1995, we captured, radio-tagged, and monitored the movements and behavior of 23 fledglings and their parents from 12 broods at the U.S. Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. For pairs that subsequently renested (n = 5), the family group of male, female, and fledglings, remained within 62 (±5 SE) m of the first nest after fledging. During the period of post-fledging parental care, mean maximum distance between parents was 70 (±14) m. Females attended the young 13 (±1.3) days before initiating the incubation of a second clutch. Males continued attending the fledglings for 6 (±0.7) more days until the young achieved independence and dispersed (28–36 days post-hatching). In final clutches (n = 7), brood care was divided between the parents, and the position of the fledglings relative to the nest depended on the parents' choice of molting site (in the nesting area or elsewhere). Division of the brood by the parents has been thought to be a strategy to reduce predation and increase foraging efficiency. However, in the Wood Thrush and other species, joint attendance of initial broods, but division of final broods, suggest that other factors could be important for the parents' decision of whether or not to split the brood.
Age ratios, sex ratios, and a population estimate of Yellow Rails at San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge, Texas

Abstract Yellow rails (Coturnicops noveboracensis) winter along the U.S. coast, from North Carolina to Texas and southeastern Oklahoma. Although this rail is listed as a species of special concern in most of the provinces and states where it breeds, little is known about the winter ecology or population sizes of this secretive species. The goals of our study were to approximate numbers and determine age and sex ratios of yellow rails wintering in selected marshes at San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge (San Bernard NWR) in Brazoria and Matagorda counties, Texas. Yellow rails were banded in Spartina marshes from November 2009–April 2010. Feather samples were collected from each yellow rail for use in DNA sexing. We captured 170 yellow rails at the Cedar Lake Creek Unit of San Bernard NWR and recaptured 17 rails over the course of the study. We estimated that the population in marshes we sampled at San Bernard NWR (224.6 ha) from late November through mid-April consisted of 1,170 ± 300 individuals, or 5.2 ± 1.3 rails/ha. The highest ranked POPAN models suggest that the probability of recapture and the probability of entering the population were both time-dependent, while the probability of survival was time-independent. All yellow rails captured prior to January (n = 17) could be aged, with six (35.2%) aged as HY (Hatch Year), while 11 (64.7%) were aged as AHY (After Hatch Year). However, we were unable to conclusively assign ages to rails captured in January through April. Sufficient DNA was obtained from 59 yellow rails to determine that 33 (55.9%) were male. While the winter range of this species is widespread, it is likely that the coastal prairies of Texas are particularly important for this species given the large numbers and high density of rails encountered during this study.
University of Groningen Social comparison and coping with radiation therapy Bennenbroek, F.T.C

The present study examined the effects of three different kinds of social comparison information using a control group for comparison. Cancer patients were provided with audiotaped social comparison information just prior to undergoing radiation therapy. On the procedural tape, a male and female patient discussed their illness and radiation therapy; on the emotion tape, they focused on emotional reactions; and on the coping tape, they focused on the way they had been coping. More specifically, it was examined whether uncertainty about cancer and radiation therapy influenced the effects of these different kinds of social comparison information. The results indicated that those high in uncertainty seem to benefit the most from the coping tape, and not the procedural tape. These results remain evident even when controlling for the effects of personality characteristics such as social comparison orientation, and neuroticism. ‘One of the most striking features of the journey from health to illness and back again is the nearly constant presence of uncertainty’ (Sanders, 1982, p. 129). Illness is generally accompanied by uncertainty. This may be particularly the case with a life-threatening disease such as cancer, with its uncertain treatment efficacy, unknown consequences for daily activities, diverse side effects, and the possibility of recurrence (Christman, 1990). Van den Borne and Pruyn (1985) indicated that uncertainty (i.e., lack of information) is one of the major psychological problems among cancer patients. Indeed, cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy report a high need for information, especially regarding the disease itself, the prognosis, tests and treatment(s), as well as for information regarding physical care and how to deal with their feelings and concerns (Bilodeau & Degner, 1996; Galloway, et al., 1997; Graydon, et al., 1997; Harrison-Woermke & Graydon, 1993). Patients have many questions, often without clear answers. Information from fellow patients (e.g., how they are doing, feeling, and coping) may help in answering these questions. The notion that information about fellow patients could be advantageous to patients’ well-being can be traced back to Festinger’s social comparison theory (1954). Festinger (1950, 1954) hypothesized that when people experience a shortage of objective (i.e., non-social) information, they will try to accurately evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves with similar others. In several studies it was found that individuals high in uncertainty indeed appear to have a high need for social comparison information. In a study among patients with various forms of cancer, Molleman, Pruyn & Van Knippenberg (1986) found that,
A history of protecting the public interest in a self-interested way

Introduction Accountants and the institutions of accountancy are subject to increasing public scrutiny. Recent research suggests the typical strategy of response to criticism adheres more to the economic self-interest of accountants than their duty to protect a public interest. This article reviews the UK and US histories of accountancy professionalization, and identifies the early origins of the strategy. The analysis suggests accountants use the public interest argument continuously as a means of protecting their economic self-interest. The article is divided into several sections: the nature of professionalization; the birth of the accountancy profession; establishing and defending professionalization; and a retrospect and prospect. The methodology is a traditional one in historical studies of explained narrative using secondary sources (Previts et al., 1990).
Re-engaging with survey non-respondents:

Previous research into the correlates and determinants of non-response in longitudinal surveys has focused exclusively on why it is that respondents at one survey wave choose not to participate at future waves. This is very understandable if non-response is always an absorbing state, but in many longitudinal surveys, and certainly most household panels, this is not the case. Indeed, in these surveys it is normal practice to attempt to make contact with many non-respondents at the next wave. This study differs from previous research by examining the process of re-engagement with previous wave non-respondents. Drawing on data from three national household panels it is found that the re-engagement decision is indeed distinctly different from the decision about continued participation. Further, these differences have clear implications for the way panel surveys should be administered given the desire to enhance overall response rates.
Analyzing Important Corporate Social Responsibility Activities with help of Analytical Hierarchy Process

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept which industries use to improve their societal well-being through discretionary business practices and corporate resource contributions. It is a high profile notion perceived as deliberate by the production world in addition to being a well-known concept in academia and with its practionners. CSR now gets increasing attention in global sourcing and supply chains. Indian SMEs have started adopting CSR activities recently to ensure their social responsibilities. But, Indian SMEs struggle to identify major CSR acts to improve their social standing. Because of this, this study’s objective was fixed as identification of important CSR activities and categories for improving its performance aided by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). This study was undertaken in 47 SMEs in Tamilnadu, South India. The results reveal employee satisfaction to be the most important CSR category followed by social activity rewards, society view and combined social activities to improve CSR performance.
USABLE-SECURITY ATTRIBUTE EVALUATION USING FUZZY ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS

Security has always been a vital research topic since the birth of software. A great deal of research has been conducted to determine the ways for identifying and classifying the security issues or goals. In recent years, it has been noticed that high secure software has less usability and has loosed businesses continuity. Without using the services of software, high security becomes worthless. Hence, there is a need to bridge the gap between security and usability of software. Indeed, security mechanisms must be usable to improve the security as well as the usability of software. Although security and usability are not directly related, some of their attributes impact each other indirectly. Attributes play a key role in bridging the gap between security and usability. In this respect, this paper identiﬁes the main factors of security and usability that aﬀect each other directly and indirectly, including conﬁdentiality, integrity and availability and eﬀectiveness, eﬃciency, and satisfaction. The importance of each attribute in terms of their weight is essential for their impact on the overall security design during the software development process. To evaluate our work, we used the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP). The obtained results and conclusions are useful to software developers to achieve more secure and usable software.
PASAPTO: Policy-aware Security and Performance Trade-off Analysis--Computation on Encrypted Data with Restricted Leakage

This work considers the trade-off between security and performance when revealing partial information about encrypted data computed on. The focus of our work is on information revealed through control flow side-channels when executing programs on encrypted data. We use quantitative information flow to measure security, running time to measure performance and program transformation techniques to alter the trade-off between the two. Combined with information flow policies, we perform a policy-aware security and performance trade-off (PASAPTO) analysis. We formalize the problem of PASAPTO analysis as an optimization problem, prove the NPhardness of the corresponding decision problem and present two algorithms solving it heuristically.We implemented our algorithms and combined them with the Dataflow Authentication (DFAuth) approach for outsourcing sensitive computations. Our DFAuth Trade-off Analyzer (DFATA) takes Java Bytecode operating on plaintext data and an associated information flow policy as input. It outputs semantically equivalent program variants operating on encrypted data which are policy-compliant and approximately Pareto-optimal with respect to leakage and performance. We evaluated DFATA in a commercial cloud environment using Java programs, e.g., a decision tree program performing machine learning on medical data. The decision tree variant with the worst performance is 357% slower than the fastest variant. Leakage varies between 0% and 17% of the input.
Transfer Learning Through Graph-based Skill Acquisition

Since Reinforcement Learning(RL) algorithms suﬀer from the curse of dimensionality in continuous domains, generalization is the most challenging issue in this area. Both skill acquisition and Transfer Learning(TL) are successful techniques to overcome such problem that result in big improvements in agent learning performance . In this paper, we propose a novel graph based skill acquisition method and a skill based transfer learning framework
Malaria outbreak in Riaba district, Bioko Island, in 2019 – Lessons learnt

At the beginning of 2019, a sudden surge of malaria cases was observed in the district of Riaba, Bioko Island. Between January and April, confirmed malaria cases increased 3.8-fold compared to the same period in 2018. Concurrently, anopheline human biting rate (HBR) increased 2.1-fold. During the outbreak, 82.2% of the district population was tested for malaria with a rapid diagnostic test; 37.2% of those tested had a detectable infection and were treated according to national guidelines. Vector control interventions, including indoor residual spraying and larval source management were scaled-up. After the interventions, the number of confirmed cases decreased by 70% and the overall parasite prevalence in the communities by 43.8%. Observed prevalence in a follow up malaria indicator survey, however, was significantly higher than elsewhere on the island and higher than in previous years. There was no significant reduction in HBR, which remained high for the rest of the year. The surge was attributed to various factors, chiefly increased rainfall and a large number of anthropogenic anopheline breeding sites created by construction works. This case study highlights the need for sustained vector control interventions and multi-sector participation, particularly in malaria control and elimination settings with persistently high local malaria receptivity.
Fine mapping of
 qBlsr3d
 , a quantitative trait locus conferring resistance to bacterial leaf streak in rice

Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education for Genetics, Breeding and Multiple Utilization of Crops, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350002, China Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Crop Breeding by Design, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350002, China Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Haixia Applied Plant Systems Biology, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350002, China
“I just shared your responses”

Conversational agents are increasingly becoming integrated into everyday technologies and can collect large amounts of data about users. As these agents mimic interpersonal interactions, we draw on communication privacy management theory to explore people's privacy expectations with conversational agents. We conducted a 3x3 factorial experiment in which we manipulated agents' social interactivity and data sharing practices to understand how these factors influence people's judgments about potential privacy violations and their evaluations of agents. Participants perceived agents that shared response data with advertisers more negatively compared to agents that shared such data with only their companies; perceptions of privacy violations did not differ between agents that shared data with their companies and agents that did not share information at all. Participants also perceived the socially interactive agent's sharing practices less negatively than those of the other agents, highlighting a potential privacy vulnerability that users are exposed to in interactions with socially interactive conversational agents.
Constructing Virtual Patient Cohorts for Simulating Atrial Fibrillation Ablation

Determining the optimal treatment approach for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) is challenging as patient-specific mechanisms underlying the arrhythmia are typically unknown. Virtual patient cohort simulations can be used to investigate these mechanisms and the effects of atrial anatomy, electrical and structural substrate on potential AF ablation treatment outcomes. It is important that virtual cohort models are constructed using a consistent and reproducible approach regardless of the large variability in atrial morphology between patients. This allows comparison of virtual ablation outcomes between cases. In this study we developed a standardised pipeline for constructing personalised biophysical left atrial models using segmented late-gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) data. Fibrotic remodelling was incorporated according to the distribution of LGE intensity values as changes in conductivity and ionic cell model properties. We present a methodology for simulating AF: seeding four spiral wave re-entries at standard locations across the anatomies; and for testing different ablation approaches across a large virtual patient cohort of personalised left atrial models. We simulated pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) ablation across a cohort of 20 paroxysmal and 30 persistent AF patient models.
The Role of Listing Price Strategies on the Probability of Selling a House: Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract The aim of this paper is to measure the dynamic effects of listing price strategies and housing features on the probability of selling a house over the marketing period by adopting a two-stage regression analysis. In the first stage, we define the listing price strategies as the gaps between the actual listing price and expected selling price, estimated by a hedonic model. The Cox Probability Hazard models are applied in the second stage to measure the effects of listing price strategies on the probability of sales over various listing periods, such as 30-day, 90-day, 180-day and 270-day listing periods. We find that overpriced listing strategies have a significant impact on the probability of sale at any point during the first 30 days of marketing time. This effect seems to diminish and disappear after six months of marketing time. This shows that the first 30 days of the marketing time are critical and housing liquidity is strongly affected by pricing strategies. When the time on market is over 30 days, the influence of the seller’s pricing decisions on housing liquidity is diminished.
VERTICAL DIFFUSIVITY COEFFICIENT IN A THERMOCLINE

Two equations are presented giving the vertical eddy diffusivity coefficient K, in the thermocline of a well-stratified lake as a function of its lake mean rate of downward displacement and intensity. Both equations are derived by transforming the heat transport equation onto a quasi-Lagrangian coordinate system, the origin of which moves down with the lake mean thermocline depth. Application of the equations to Lake Ontario yields summer mean values of K, in the thermocline of 0.02 to 0.07 cm”/sec. During an exceptionally quiet period in July and August 1907, K, approached the value of molecular diffusivity. The eddy diffusivity coefficient can bc determined by direct methods, such as dye releases or shear measurements, or by indirect methods making use of changes in the temporal and spatial distribution patterns of naturally occurring parameters. In layers with strong vertical density gradients, such as thermoclines, special problems arise that complicate determination of the eddy diffusivity coefficient by direct measurement; indirect methods, however, may still be applicable. Using thermal data from Lake Ontario, I have developed a quasi-Lagrangian equation to estimate a mean value for the vertical coefficient of eddy diffusivity in the thermocline of a stratified lake. In contrast to the more traditional Eulerian formulations, the quasi-Lagrangian diffusivity equation is written with reference to a moving coordinate system. The origin of this system is fixed with respect to the thermocline rather than the surface, and thus moves up and down with internal waves, seiches, and seasonal changes in thermocline depth. The quasi-Lagrangian l I am indebted to Dr. D. B. Rao who, through many stimulating discussions, greatly contributed to the work described in this paper. I am aIso grateful to the Marine Sciences Branch for their kind permission to let me complete the work started during my earlier assignment with the Inland Waters Branch. equation can take one of two different forms, depending on the number of simplifying assumptions that can be made. In a large, deep lake KZ can be expressed as a function of the lake mean rate of downward movement and the intensity of the thermocline. In shallower lakes an additional heat-flux term is introduced. Derivations of the Eulcrian and both quasi-Lagrangian equations for the diffusivity coefficient are presented below. Lake Ontario data have been interpreted using all three equations; the quasi-Lagrangian equations, within the narrow limits of their applicability, yield more meaningful results than the Eulerian method.