Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Imposex in Babylonia spirata ( Gastropoda : Babyloniidae ) from Pakistan ( Northern Arabian Sea )

This is the first report of the occurrence of imposex in the neogastropod Babylonia spirata (Linnaeus, 1758) from Pakistani waters. Studies were carried out at Manora Channel, which is situated in the vicinity of Karachi port and fish harbor, the hub of commercial boating activity in Pakistan. Other two sites Buleji and Sonmiani are free of such activity and were therefore considered as reference sites. Specimens of B. spirata were morphologically and histologically examined. Specimens showing imposex were only found at Manora Channel. Incidence of imposex was 73.7% and the vas deferens sequence (VDS) were ranked to be between 1 to 4+. The average VDSI was 0.42 whereas the average relative penis length index (RPLI) was 14.45 and the relative penis size index (RPSI) was 0.32. Both normal and imposex females generally showed normal gonadal development. However, evidence of an ovo-testis was found in histological sections of normal and imposexed female of B. spirata gonads examined from Manora Channel. At Manora Channel the sex ratio was significantly in favour of females whereas at Buleji and Sonmiani, it was close to unity (1:1).
The Use of Process Simulation Methods in Support of Organisational Learning in Availability Contracting

Traditional business models in the aerospace industry are based on a conventional supplier to customer relationship based on the design, manufacture and subsequent delivery of the physical product. Service provision, from the manufacturer's perspective, is typically limited to the supply of procedural documentation and the provision of spare parts to the end user as the product passes through the latter stages of its intended lifecycle. Challenging economic and political conditions have resulted in end users re-structuring their core business activities, particularly in the defense sector. This has resulted in the need for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to integrate and manage support service activities in partnership with the customer to deliver platform availability. This improves the probability of commercial sustainability for the OEM through shared operational risks while reducing the cost of platform ownership for the customer. The need for OEMs to evolve their design, manufacture and supply strategies by focusing on customer requirements has revealed a need for reconstruction of traditional internal behaviors and design methodologies. Application of organizational learning is now a well recognized principle for innovative companies to achieve long term growth and sustained technical development, and hence, greater market command. It focuses on the process by which the organization's knowledge and value base changes, leading to improved problem solving ability and capacity for action. From the perspective of availability contracting, knowledge and the processes by which it is generated, used and retained, become primary assets within the learning organization. This paper will introduce the application of digital methods to asset management by demonstrating how the process of learning can benefit from a digital approach, how product and process design can be integrated within a virtual framework and finally how the approach can be applied in a service context.
Nanomechanical Characterisation of the Wood Cell Wall Using Atomic Force Microscopy

Wood is produced in successive cylindrical layers during the radial secondary growth of a tree by a very thin layer of living cells that divide, called cambium, and located under the bark. Wood is composed of different kinds of cells, with a honeycomb-like cellular organisation, and each plays a particular role for the tree. From a mechanical point of view, fibres are the cells that compose the structure (skeleton) of the tree (Thibaut et al, 2001). Figure 1 shows the idealized multi-layered structure of a typical wood fibre (typically around 1 mm long and around 20 μm in diameter). Each wood cell wall layer plays a particular role in the mechanical behaviour of wood and the elastic properties of wood originate mainly in those of its secondary cell wall layers. Each layer, particularly in the secondary wall, can be seen as a unidirectional long fibre composite whose fibres are cristalline (at around 70%) cellulosic microfibrils (as long as the cell and with some nm in diameter) and the matrix is made up of amorphous polymers: hemicelluloses, lignin and extractives (Salmen, 2004). The microfibrils are inclined to the cell axis by the so-called microfibril angle (MFA).
Does Ownership Matter? Evidence from the Zaibatsu Dissolution Program

In 1985, Demsetz & Lehn argued both that the optimal corporate ownership structure was firm-specific, and that market competition would drive firms toward that optimum. Because ownership was endogenous to expected performance, they cautioned, any regression of profitability on ownership patterns should yield insignificant results. To test the Demsetz-Lehn hypothesis, we use the zaibatsu dissolution program from late-1940s Japan as an exogenous shock to the pre-war ownership equilibrium. Through that program, the U.S.-run occupation removed the more prominent shareholders from many of the most successful Japanese companies. By focusing on the effect the program had on profitability and on the way firms responded to the program, we accomplish two goals: (a) we avoid the endogeneity problem that has plagued much of the other research on the subject, and (b) we clarify the equilibrating dynamics by which competitive markets move firms toward their optimal ownership structure. With a sample of 637 Japanese firms for 1953 and 710 for 1958, we confirm the equilibrating mechanism behind Demsetz-Lehn: between 1953 and 1958, the ex-zaibatsu firms did significantly reconcentrate their ownership structure. As of 1953, the unlisted ex-zaibatsu and new firms still had not yet been able to negotiate the transactions necessary to approach their optimum ownership structures, and even the listed firms had not fully undone the effect of the occupation-induced changes on managerial practices. By 1958 they had, and the earlier correlation between profitability and ownership disappeared. By then, firm profitability showed no correlation with ownership, whether under linear, quadratic, or piecewise specifications. We further find no evidence that ex-zaibatsu firms sought to strengthen their ties to banks over 1953-58.
MULTI-SIZE DROPLETS GENERATION VIA SIDE-BRANCH MICROFLUIDIC CHANNELS

This paper reports a multiple monodispersed droplet generation using a side-branch structure in the microchannel. Water-in-oil plugs which are initially formed at a T-junction, are introduced to junction with three side-branch channels, then three organized streams of droplets are generated in the channels. The size of the droplets could be controlled by the size of the original plugs. The ability of generating multi-streams of monodispersed droplets from the same emulsions opens new possibilities for controlling and analyzing the biochemical reactions in a confined spaces.
Management of horse purslane (Trianthema portulacastrum L.) with Gibbago trianthemae Simmons in India.

Horse purslane (Trianthema portulacastrum L., Family Aizoaceae), is an introduced terrestrial weed in India. It has become a noxious weed due to competition for yields in various agricultural and vegetables crops such as mustard, maize, pigeon pea, soybean, potato and onion crops in northern India. Up to 60-70% infestation of this weed has been reported in pigeon pea and soybean fields and 80-90% in maize and brassica fields. Between 1989 and 1998 a series of surveys of plant pathogenic fungi associated with naturally infected horse purslane were conducted in the states of Haryana and Punjab. Infected leaves collected from various sites, yielded a species of Gibbago, identified as Gibbago trianthemae Simmons, a phaeodictyoconidial hyphomycetous fungus reported on horse purslane for the first time in India. In experimental pots, defoliation started after 20 days of inoculum spraying. Percent infection on leaves ranged between 72 and 84 percent, 30 days post inoculation with a conidial suspension at concentration of 2.2x105 conidia/ml. Application of inoculum significantly reduced the production of leaves, height and biomass per plant as compared to control. Germination of Gibbago conidia took place within 6 to 12 hours. Symptoms on leaves initiated as small pin point lesions, 3-4 days after spraying of inoculum. A significant correlation between the growth and sporulation of the pathogen was reported when tested on 10 different culture media. Best sporulation was found on Trianthema extract dextrose agar followed by Potato dextrose agar and Potato dextrose agar+yeast extract (8.6x105 > 8.0x105 > 7.37x105 conidia/ml, respectively). Fungus showed growth but failed to sporulate in all the three broths. Best sporulation was recorded at 25°C. Conidia germinated from between 15 and 35°C, the best recorded at 25°C. G. trianthemae has most of the criteria desirable for development of a biocontrol agent as a mycoherbicide to control horse purslane; it is easly cultured, sporulates well, infection can take place from conidia and/or mycelial fragments.
CHEMICAL ASSESSMENT OF ZINC ENRICHMENT AND DEPLETION IN CONTAMINATED ARABLE SOILS IN NIGERIA, USING ALUMINUM AS A REFERENCE ELEMENT

Zinc (Zn) content was evaluated of the arable soils in the vicinity of mining and dumping sites in Nigeria. Its content in the arable soils assayed by means of atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS) ranged from 48.3 to 280.4mg/kg. The enrichment factor (EF) calculated by using aluminum as a crustal reference element fell within a range of 5.0 –41.5. The mean values of the enrichment factor of 18.02 classified the soil as significantly contaminated with zinc. Anthropogenic activities contribute significantly to the elevated level of zinc in the studied areas.
Image Segmentation by Edge Partitioning over a Nonsubmodular Markov Random Field

Edge weight-based segmentation methods, such as normalized cut or minimum cut, require a partition number specification for their energy formulation. The number of partitions plays an important role in the segmentation overall quality. However, finding a suitable partition number is a nontrivial problem, and the numbers are ordinarily manually assigned. This is an aspect of the general partition problem, where finding the partition number is an important and difficult issue. In this paper, the edge weights instead of the pixels are partitioned to segment the images. By partitioning the edge weights into two disjoints sets, that is, cut and connect, an image can be partitioned into all possible disjointed segments. The proposed energy function is independent of the number of segments. The energy is minimized by iterating the QPBO--expansion algorithm over the pairwise Markov random field and the mean estimation of the cut and connected edges. Experiments using the Berkeley database show that the proposed segmentation method can obtain equivalently accurate segmentation results without designating the segmentation numbers.
Covenants Not to Compete in a Knowledge Economy: Balancing Innovation from Employee Mobility Against Legal Protection for Human Capital Investment

This Article examines a specific policy issue that goes to the heart of the larger debate surrounding the changing employment relationship: How should the law of covenants not to compete adapt to the changing landscape of the U.S. labor market and to the increasing importance of a knowledge-based economy? The author first argues that noncompete policy is of great importance to fostering economic growth and labor markets, and then discusses various theoretical approaches to noncompete enforcement in a knowledge economy. The preferred approach, the author contends, is a hybrid model of selective enforcement that differentiates among workers as “creative” or “service” employees, thereby enhancing the positive spillovers gained from policies at the extremes of the enforcement spectrum.
The identification of indicators of sentiment using a multi-view self-training algorithm

Este artigo apresenta um algoritmo de "multi-view self-training" , que identifica os indicadores de sentimento por: 1. extracao relacoes causais, 2. As relacoes causais classificacao em uma categoria sentimento, 3. agrupamento causas comuns e 4. atribuindo categorias sentimento a causas comuns para criar um distribuicao sentimento para cada causa comum. Uma avaliacao manual global da estrategia descobriu que ele tinha uma precisao de 70,00%.
Bookmaker Consensus and Agreement for the UEFA ChampionsLeague 2008/09

Bookmakers odds are an easily available source of “prospective” information that is thus often employed for forecasting the outcome of sports events. To investigate the statistical properties of bookmakers odds from a variety of bookmakers for a number of diﬀerent potential outcomes of a sports event, a class of mixed-eﬀects models is explored, providing information about both consensus and (dis)agreement across bookmakers. In an empirical study for the UEFA Champions League, the most prestigious football club competition in Europe, model selection yields a simple and intuitive model with team-speciﬁc means for capturing consensus and team-speciﬁc standard deviations reﬂecting agreement across bookmakers. The resulting consensus forecast performs well in practice, exhibiting high correlation with the actual tournament outcome. Furthermore, the teams’ agreement can be shown to be strongly correlated with the predicted consensus and can thus be incorporated in a more parsimonious model for agreement while preserving the same consensus ﬁt.
Membership Function Extraction from Software Development Project Managers

Software metrics are measurements of development processes, products, and resources. Once these measurements have been specified and collected they can be used as variables in empirically calibrated models for a wide range of project management purposes; including the task of predicting development effort based on some combination of size, complexity, and developer experience metrics. One difficulty encountered when using traditional algorithmic approaches to estimation has been the collection of the appropriate metrics required to use the model in its predictive capacity. Project managers are generally unable to make precise quantitative estimates for the independent variables, especially early in system development when these models are at their most valuable. The alternative of using qualitative values for the inputs, as in fuzzy logic, has been suggested but the stability and consistency of such labels has yet to be established, as well as considering the elicitation techniques available for deriving the membership functions. In this paper we examine the perceptions of data model size, functionality size, developer experience, and project effort in terms of three fuzzy membership functions from two separate surveys of project managers, each with a very different approach. The consistency of results across the two surveys is examined, and some discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches is provided.
Finite-size effects at the hadron-quark transition and heavy hybrid stars

We study the role of finite-size effects at the hadron-quark phase transition in a new hybrid equation of state constructed from an ab initio Bruckner-Hartree-Fock equation of state with the realistic Bonn-B potential for the ¨ hadronic phase and a covariant nonlocal Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model for the quark phase. We construct static hybrid star sequences and find that our model can support stable hybrid stars with an onset of quark matter below 2M and a maximum mass above 2.17M in agreement with recent observations. If the finite-size effects are taken into account the core is composed of pure quark matter. Provided that the quark vector channel interaction is small, and the finite size effects are taken into account, quark matter appears at densities 2–3 times the nuclear saturation density. In that case the proton fraction in the hadronic phase remains below the value required by the onset of the direct URCA process, so that the early onset of quark matter shall affect on the rapid cooling of the star.
Carboxylated capped carbon nanotubes interacting with nimesulide molecules: applied electric fields effects

Interactions of carboxylated capped carbon nanotubes with nimesulide molecules under electric fields were investigated by ab initio simulations. Repulsive forces between the nimesulide molecules and the carboxyl group of the carbon nanotubes, except for the nimesulide radical configuration, were observed. To keep the original molecule in the pristine form, electric fields with different intensities were applied, where changes in the behavior of the interactions between the molecules were noticed. It was shown that the intensity of the interaction between the nimesulide and the hydrophilic carboxylated capped carbon nanotube can be modulated by the action of the external electric fields making promising systems for drug delivery applications.
EVALITA 2011 Super Sense Tagging Task

Super-sense tagging (SST) is a Natural Language Processing task that consists of annotating each significant entity in a text, like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, within a general semantic taxonomy defined by the WordNet lexicographer classes (called super-senses) [1]. SST can be considered as a task half-way between Named-Entity Recognition (NER) and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD): it is an extension of NER, since it uses a larger set of semantic categories, and it is an easier and more practical task with respect to WSD, that deals with very specific senses.
Health information technology use and the decisions of altruistic physicians

Rationale, aims and objectives: Knowledge is the basis and mediator of medical care. Health information technology (HIT) can help in improving care only if physicians faithfully apply their knowledge during its use. A measure of judicious HIT use has recently been proposed. Behavioural research and the oft-cited technology acceptance model suggest that beliefs/perceptions may also represent decision factors. This paper proposes a perception scale and an alternative measure of judicious HIT use. Methods: Statistical analyses were performed on a subset of survey data collected for developing an eHealth success model. This paper focuses on deriving a structural equation model that can explain the associations among intent to use HIT, professional concerns and perceptions about the impacts of HIT on care benefits. Results: The statistical results show that altruism, autonomy, the physician-patient relationship, (subconscious) autonomy, efficiency and efficacy significantly associate with each other to different extents. Only altruism and efficacy appear to be significant determinants of intent to use at p <0.01 and p <0.05, respectively. The scaled χ 2 difference test shows that this model is not significantly different from Tsang’s model. Conclusion: Physician performance cannot be reliably evaluated and monitored when based purely on direct observations. The statistical results indicate that professional concerns associate with physicians’ perceptions about the impacts of HIT and influence intent to use HIT. This paper shows a tendency of physicians to internalise factors that cannot be directly observed in the evaluation of HIT use. The study is advanced as of use in deriving policies that aim at coalescing evidence-based medical practice with humanism and thus as a significant contribution to the advancement of person-centered medicine.
Minimum Distance of a Triangle Vertices for Face Classification

This paper proposes a novel method for face classification based on principal component analysis (PCA) of a grayscale image. The proposed method classifies image by using the minimum distance between vertices of a triangle and the tested image. Vertices of a triangle are created from three distinct points obtained from the combination of a number of images per class. The recognition rate compares the proposed method with the nearest feature line (NFL), the shortest feature line segment (SFLS), the restricted nearest feature line with ellipse (RNFLE), and the shortest distance with the centroid of the triangle (SDC). The experimental results on the Grimace and faces94 databases show that the proposed method has recognition rate over 90%. For Grimace database, the proposed algorithm outperforms the other methods.
An atmospheric radiation model for Cerro Paranal - I. The optical spectral range

Aims. The Earth’s atmosphere affects ground-based astronomical observations. Scattering , absorption, and radiation processes deteriorate the signal-to-noise ratio of the data received. For scheduling astronomical observations it is, therefore, im portant to accurately estimate the wavelength-dependent effect of the Earth’s atmosphere on the observed flux. Methods. In order to increase the accuracy of the exposure time calcul ator of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Larg e Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal, an atmospheric model was developed as part of the Austrian ESO In-Kind contribution. It includes all relevant components, such as scattered moonlight, scat tered starlight, zodiacal light, atmospheric thermal radi ation and absorption, and non-thermal airglow emission. This paper focuses on atmospheric scattering processes that mostly affect the blue ( 0.55� m) wavelength regime. While the former is mainly investigated by means of radiative transfe r models, the intensity and variability of the latter is stud ied with a sample of 1186 VLT FORS 1 spectra. Results. For a set of parameters such as the object altitude angle, Moon-object angular distance, ecliptic latitude, bimonthly p eriod, and solar radio flux, our model predicts atmospheric radiati on and transmission at a requested resolution. A comparison of our model with the FORS 1 spectra and photometric data for the night-sky brightness from the literature, suggest a model accuracy o f about 20%. This is a significant improvement with respect to existing pr edictive atmospheric models for astronomical exposure time calculators.
Computational gene finding in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax

Different approaches to genome annotation are reviewed and compared with reference based annotation using GeneMapper in the human malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax. It is found that the latter approach does not achieve sensitivity and specificity as high as those for some ab initio techniques. Potential reasons for this are identified and discussed. As part of the process of using GeneMapper, codon substitution matrices are constructed and examined. This leads to the discovery of evidence from which we derive a conjecture regarding Plasmodium evolution.