Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS

OF THESIS SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS According to the USDA Economic Research service, farm-level prices are on the decline. This decline in prices particularly hurts smaller scale operators with many needing to rely on off-farm income in order to ensure they remain in operation. This thesis studies two problems of key interest to the Southeast region and the State of Kentucky by investigating dairy management practices and the environmental benefits of hemp production. As dairy prices have been on the decline and dairy co-ops have tightened their restrictions on somatic cell count (SCC) levels, dairy farmers and farm managers must decide the best course of action for maintaining milk quality in order to maintain their contract and profitability. Maintenance decisions as well as factors like sanitation and animal living conditions can all contribute to bulk tank SCC and depending on the type of incentives or penalties instituted by the co-op they can have an impact on net farm income. The objective of the dairy study is to determine which dairy management practices have the largest impact on SCC levels. Industrial hemp is produced worldwide. Historically, the major producers of hemp have been China, Europe, and Russia. In 2014, the passage of the Farm Bill opened the door to the production of Industrial hemp through the development of state pilot programs. Then the 2018 Farm Bill removed industrial hemp from the Scheduled Drug list. This has further expanded the opportunities and excitement for this crop. The plant’s versatility and the variety of products that can be made from it are coming to light. Sustainability is one of the key attributes touted concerning industrial hemp. Specifically, in the state of Kentucky, it is expected to be a replacement for tobacco and other traditional crops. However, how does the crop compare to tobacco production in terms of sustainability? The objective of the hemp study is to develop a life cycle analysis on the planting and harvesting of hemp and compare its impacts to more traditional crops.
Economic Debates under Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of the Income Distribution Controversy in Brazil in the 1970s

The paper investigates the political and economic contexts of the controversy about the causes of the significant increase of income concentration in Brazil during the 1960s. That was the most important economic debate that took place under the military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985. The perceived sharp increase in income inequality posed a challenge to the economic legitimation of the military regime, which had by the early 1970s achieved high rates of economic growth accompanied by falling inflation. We discuss the reasons behind the relatively open economic debate during a period of political repression, as well as its international dimension as reflected in the role played by institutions such as the World Bank.
A Stochastic Simulation Model for the Optimization of the Taxi Management System

The paper presents a simplified simulation model of the operation of a taxi system. The model retains the main features of a real taxi transportation system and despite its simplicity examines the system behavior in different conditions. It was shown that for every request generation rate a critical number of taxis in disposal could be determined. If the real number of taxis is lower than the critical number, the queue of pending requests grows in an unlimited way. On the other hand, if the real number of taxis is significantly higher, the service level is clearly not better and leads to the waste of taxi drivers’ time and fuel. The presented model can be regarded as a queue system; therefore, the well-known queue theory is used to describe its nature. However, this approach has some practical limitations coming from incomplete knowledge on real transportation demands, which additionally undergo significant fluctuations. A method, which optimizes the assignment of vacant taxis to the pending requests was also introduced. It was proven that this method mitigated the influence of the above-mentioned limitations.
Molecular dynamics simulation of nanocrack closure mechanism and interface behaviors of polycrystalline austenitic steel

Void-type defects in heavy forgings deteriorate their mechanical properties and service life. In this work, the evolutions of a pre-crack closure and the healing and mechanical properties of FeCrNi polycrystalline samples are assessed under different loading conditions using molecular dynamics simulation. The stress–strain curves show that the sample with interface exhibits higher Young’s modulus and yield strength than those with cracks, despite the loading conditions. These results imply that samples under compression loading have a higher ability to resist plasticity, while the shear stress facilitates plastic flow. Crack closure and healing occur under compression stress by dislocation-dominant plastic deformation, while the crack length shrinks and the crack tips expand along grain boundaries (GBs) and the interface because of its higher stress under shear loading. Dislocation activities, including dislocation emission, slip, and interactions with cracks, grain boundaries, and dislocations, contribute to the plasticity of the specimen under compressive loading. In addition to dislocation activities, grain boundary slip, grain rotation, and twinning are potential plastic-deformation mechanisms under shear loading.
Extraction of ontology and semantic web information from online business reports

CAINES, Content Analysis and INformation Extraction System, employs an information extraction (IE) methodology to extract unstructured text from the Web. It can create an ontology and a Semantic Web. This research is different from traditional IE systems in that CAINES examines the syntactic and semantic relationships within unstructured text of online business reports. Using CAINES provides more relevant results than manual searching or standard keyword searching. Over most extraction systems, CAINES extensively uses information extraction from natural language, Key Words in Context (KWIC), and semantic analysis. A total of 21 online business reports, averaging about 100 pages long, were used in this study. Based on financial expert opinions, extraction rules were created to extract information, an ontology, and a Semantic Web of data from financial reports. Using CAINES, one can extract information about global and domestic market conditions, market condition impacts, and information about the business outlook. A Semantic Web was created from Merrill Lynch reports, 107,533 rows of data, and displays information regarding mergers, acquisitions, and business segment news between 2007 and 2009. User testing of CAINES resulted in recall of 85.91%, precision of 87.16%, and an F-measure of 86.46%. Speed with CAINES was also greater than manually extracting information. Users agree that CAINES quickly and easily extracts unstructured information from financial reports on the EDGAR database. Keywords: Semantic web; information extraction; ontology; EDGAR
Political language patterns’ dissemination between a political leader and his campaign community: a CMC corpora analysis

Abstract Political campaigns are important moments for a political personality, but for their campaigners as well. During this period, ideas flow between the two, and one can wonder how the discourse of a political personality is constructed and how they use what the campaigners say. This way, one can understand the rhetorical strategies of the political personalities during campaigns. To answer these questions, in this paper we discuss the dissemination of political language patterns between a political personality and a campaign community, as a way to access political representations and ideological issues. In particular, this involves evaluating the polyphonic dimension of the discourse, widely described in enunciative linguistics, but rarely used in NLP works seeking to measure these phenomena. In this paper, we put forward an analysis methodology based on statistical computations which provides encouraging results. We tested our methodology on the case of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a French political personality, head of the France Insoumise party and candidate in the 2017 French presidential elections. We used two corpora: one composed of a set of tweets from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and a second composed of two sets of data coming from two different forums used by the campaign community. In the study, we compare the results from both corpora to provide answers to the political question of the construction and circulation of political ideas, studying a movement with a charismatic leader and an important campaign community. From a linguistic point of view, we discuss the links between language elements, themes, ideologies, and the rhetoric dimensions of political discourse.
Multi-constrained Routing Optimization for Data Center Network

Server-centric data center (SCDC) architecture is a new data center architecture with high throughput, scalable architecture and high fault tolerance. Some SCDC-based routing algorithms had been proposed, but these algorithms have the following disadvantages:1) The most advanced routing algorithms in SCDC are only considering hop count in path selection;2) Traditional QOS multiconstrained routing algorithms usually find one available path and is oriented to the switches; 3) The current multi-path algorithm cannot guarantee the quality of the selected path. Therefore, we propose a multi-constrained routing algorithm in the data center network. The SCDC topology is used to reduce the complexity of the algorithm, and it has high possibility to find the correct optimal path.
Factors influencing choice of major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University

Agriculture is a fast-growing career field and employers are looking to universities for graduates to fill the myriad of available employment opportunities; therefore, recruiting students into colleges of agriculture is essential to meet the growing job demand. The purpose of this research study was to determine the demographic profile of students, find out what factors influence a student’s decision to major in the field of agriculture, and discover if these factors are different based on major, demographics or type of entrance into the university. The quantitative survey that was administered to all first-year students at Iowa State University’s (ISU) College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) was developed from qualitative focus groups and interviews that were conducted. A majority of students in this study were Caucasian and female, as well as being raised on a farm or in a rural area. Findings showed that influencers of a college major included parents, websites, campus visits, written correspondence from the university, and personal conversations with a professor. The quality of the facilities, prestige of the department, and university and campus environment are all critical influencers in a student determining their major. Career factors are also essential influencers for students as are personal characteristics such as enjoying a challenge, being outdoors, and science. Few statistically significant differences existed when comparing the factors among gender, race, place of residence, or type of entrance into the university. Findings indicate that the influential factors are similar between majors, but the level of influence is different depending on the major.
Inorganic light‐emitting diode displays using micro‐transfer printing

Large quantities of microscopic red, green, and blue light‐emitting diodes (LEDs) made of crystalline inorganic semiconductor materials micro‐transfer printed in large quantities onto rigid or flexible substrates form monochrome and color displays having a wide range of sizes and interesting properties. Transfer‐printed micro‐LED displays promise excellent environmental robustness, brightness, spatial resolution, and efficiency. Passive‐matrix and active‐matrix inorganic LED displays were constructed, operated, and their attributes measured. Tests demonstrate that inorganic micro‐LED displays have outstanding color, viewing angle, and transparency. Yield improvement techniques include redundancy, physical repair, and electronic correction. Micro‐transfer printing enables revolutionary manufacturing strategies in which microscale LEDs are first assembled into miniaturized micro‐system “light engines,” and then micro‐transfer printed and interconnected directly to metallized large‐format panels. This paper reviews micro‐transfer printing technology for micro‐LED displays.
Ned Kelly: Under the Microscope

Ned Kelly was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880, and his body buried in the graveyard there. Many stories emerged about his skull being separated and used as a paperweight or trophy, and it was finally put on display at the museum of the Old Melbourne Gaol — until it was stolen in 1978. It wasn’t only Ned Kelly’s skull that went missing. After the closure of the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1929, the remains of deceased prisoners were exhumed and reinterred in mass graves at Pentridge Prison. The exact location of these graves was unknown until 2002, when the bones of prisoners were uncovered at the Pentridge site during redevelopment. This triggered a larger excavation that in 2009 uncovered many more coffins, and led to the return of the skull and a long scientific process to try to identify and reunite Ned Kelly’s remains. But how do you go about analysing and accurately identifying a skeleton and skull that are more than 130 years old? Ned Kelly: Under the Microscope details what was involved in the 20-month scientific process of identifying the remains of Ned Kelly, with chapters on anthropology, odontology, DNA studies, metallurgical analysis of the gang's armour, and archaeological digs at Pentridge Prison and Glenrowan. It also includes medical analysis of Ned's wounds and a chapter on handwriting analysis — that all lead to the final challenging conclusions. Illustrated throughout with photographs taken during the forensic investigation, as well as historical images, the book is supplemented with breakout boxes of detailed but little-known facts about Ned Kelly and the gang to make this riveting story a widely appealing read. Winner of the Collaborative Community Award at the 2015 Victorian Community History Awards.
Prognostic value and immunological role of BAIAP2L2 in liver hepatocellular carcinoma: A pan-cancer analysis

Background In recent years, the role of BAI1-associated protein 2-like 2 (BAIAP2L2) in the prognosis and immune microenvironment of various cancers has attracted increasing attention. However, its clinical value and immune infiltration in liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) remain unclear. Objective To investigate the prognostic value of BAIAP2L2 and its correlation with immune infiltration in LIHC, we conducted corresponding data mining. Methods In this study, The Cancer Genome Atlas, GTEx, StarBase, UALCAN, TIMER, GEPIA, Human Protein Atlas, Kaplan–Meier Plotter, cBioPortal, LinkedOmics, STRING and BioGPS databases were used to analyze BAIAP2L2 in cancers. Logistic regression and Cox regression were performed to analyze the correlation between clinical features and BAIAP2L2 expression in LIHC. In addition, the diagnostic and prognostic values of BAIAP2L2 in LIHC were determined by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and nomograms. Single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA), BioGPS and TIMER were used to analyze the correlation between BAIAP2L2 and immune infiltration. More importantly, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was used to verify BAIAP2L2 expression in a liver cancer cell line and a normal cell line. Visualization of data was mostly achieved using R language, version 3.6. 3. Results High BAIAP2L2 levels indicated poor overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) of patients with LIHC. Abnormally increased expression of BAIAP2L2 in LIHC may be the result of both genetic alterations and lower DNA methylation levels. Furthermore, Cox regression analysis showed that high BAIAP2L2 expression was an independent risk factor for OS and DFS in patients with liver cancer. ROC curves and nomograms also confirmed the diagnostic and prognostic values of BAIAP2L2 in LIHC. Additionally, a PPI network of BAIAP2L2 was established and results implyed that BAIAP2L2 interacts with MTSS1, AMPH, FCHO1, SYT9, PDK2, MTSS1L, PM20D1, CHST4 and PALM3. ssGSEA showed that BAIAP2L2 was associated with T cells and natural killer cells. Simultaneously, the TIMER database showed that the expression of BAIAP2L2 in LIHC was positively correlated with tumor infiltrating cells, including B cells, CD8+ T cells, CD4+ T cells, macrophages, neutrophils and dendritic cells. Conclusions Through pan-cancer analysis, prognostic and immunological value of BAIAP2L2 in LIHC was identified. This is the first report on the potential of BAIAP2L2 as a prognostic biomarker and its correlation with immune infiltration in LIHC.
High performance HEVC and FVC video compression hardware designs

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the current state-of-the-art video compression standard developed by Joint collaborative team on video coding (JCT-VC). HEVC has 50% better compression efficiency than H.264 which is the previous video compression standard. HEVC achieves this video compression efficiency by significantly increasing the computational complexity. Therefore, in this thesis, we proposed a low complexity HEVC sub-pixel motion estimation (SPME) technique for SPME in HEVC encoder. We designed and implemented a high performance HEVC SPME hardware implementing the proposed technique. We also designed and implemented an HEVC fractional interpolation hardware using memory based constant multiplication technique for both HEVC encoder and decoder. Future Video Coding (FVC) is a new international video compression standard which is currently being developed by JCT-VC. FVC offers much better compression efficiency than the state-of-the-art HEVC video compression standard at the expense of much higher computational complexity. In this thesis, we designed and implemented three different high performance FVC 2D transform hardware. The proposed hardware is verified to work correctly on an FPGA board.
Psychological coaching as a driver to enhance networking capabilities of young entrepreneurs

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Index 2018, Portuguese entrepreneurship is suboptimal, namely due to a low capacity of networking by Portuguese entrepreneurs. As such, this research focuses on the psychological and personality traits that may be the origin of this suboptimal performance. To carry out the research, 331 young adults participated by answering a questionnaire composed out of three parts: a sociodemographic part; the Portuguese Entrepreneurial Psychological Traits Inventory (PEPTI); and the Big Five Inventory (BFI-44). The results show that young entrepreneurs have higher scores on the PEPTI and onfour of the five dimensions of the BFI-44. However, the differences in Agreeableness are not statistically significant, possibly evidencing one of the reasons for suboptimal networking skills. As networking capabilities are importantfor successful entrepreneurship, we propose the development of a psychological coaching programme for young entrepreneurs with the objective to enhance several soft-skills that improve networking capabilities.
Structured learning via convolutional neural networks for vehicle detection

One of the main tasks in a vision-based traffic monitoring system is the detection of vehicles. Recently, deep neural networks have been successfully applied to this end, outperforming previous approaches. However, most of these works generally rely on complex and high-computational region proposal networks. Others employ deep neural networks as a segmentation strategy to achieve a semantic representation of the object of interest, which has to be up-sampled later. In this paper, a new design for a convolutional neural network is applied to vehicle detection in highways for traffic monitoring. This network generates a spatially structured output that encodes the vehicle locations. Promising results have been obtained in the GRAM-RTM dataset.
Preliminary study on the molecular features of mutation in multiple primary oral cancer by whole exome sequencing

Multiple primary cancers (MPCs) refer to cancers that occur simultaneously or metachronously in the same individual. The incidence of MPC has increased recently, as the survival time of malignant tumor patients has been greatly prolonged. It is difficult to differentiate MPC from primary cancers (PCs) in the same anatomical region from the clinical manifestation alone. However, their biological behaviors appear to be distinct. In this study, we show that the prognosis of multiple primary oral cancers (MP-OCs) is worse than primary oral cancers (P-OCs). To better understand the molecular mechanisms of MP-OC, we used whole exome sequencing (WES) to analyze samples from 9 patients with MP-OC and 21 patients with P-OC. We found more somatic mutations in MP-OC than in P-OC. MP-OC had more complicated mutation signatures, which were associated with age-related and Apolipoprotein B mRNA Editing Catalytic Polypeptide-like (APOBEC) activity-related signatures. Tumor mutational burden (TMB) and mutant-allele tumor heterogeneity (MATH) of MP-OC trended higher compared to P-OC. KEGG and GO analysis showed the differential pathways of MP-OC versus P-OC. In addition, MP-OC took amplification, not loss, as the main pattern of copy number variation (CNV), while P-OC took both. Lastly, we did not find significantly different mutant germline genes, but MSH-6 mutation may be a potential MP-OC driver. In short, our preliminary results show that MP-OC and P-OC have different molecular characteristics.
Clinical profile of PCOS patients in a rural tertiary care hospital

Background: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is a common gynaecological Endocrinopathies characterized by chronic anovulation and hyperandrogenism. It’s a heterogeneous, multifactorial, complex disorder and is one of the most common treatable causes of infertility. Aim: To study the various clinical presentations of patients with Polycystic ovarian syndrome in rural Indian women. Materials and Methods: Present study is a cross-sectional study carried out in a rural tertiary hospital. 82 cases of PCOS as per Rotterdam Criteria (2003) were taken. Patients underwent detailed clinical, anthropometric examination and ultrasonography was Performed. Observations: PCOS is a condition of the young with mean age 21.6. Oligomenorrhea was the most common menstrual abnormality (89%). 42% patients were obese and 56% had Infertility. Conclusions: PCOS is a common Endocrinopathies with varying clinical manifestation. Its diagnosis is extremely important because it identifies risk for potential metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and its seqeualae reaches beyond reproductive health.