Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lignin Structural Changes During Liquefaction in Acidified Ethylene Glycol

Abstract Beech (Fagus Sylvatica) milled-wood lignin was used as a model substrate in a study of lignin-catalyzed liquefaction in the presence of p-toluene sulfonic acid monohydrate (PTSA) or sulphuric acid as the catalysts. The structural changes that lignin undergoes during the treatment were studied by NMR spectroscopy, FTIR, size-exclusion chromatography, and high-performance liquid chromatography. For the sulphuric acid-catalyzed liquefaction, it was shown that the greater hydronium ion concentration in the reaction mixture induced formation of more condensed structures compared to the ones obtained after PTSA-catalyzed liquefaction. In addition, lignin during the PTSA-catalyzed liquefaction suffered degradation and was functionalized by the ethylene glycol. Gradual introduction of the ethylene glycol moieties into the lignin structure formed a condensed lignin-based polymeric material with predominant aromatic hydroxyl groups. HPLC and NMR analysis of the liquefied lignin with low-molecular mass fraction confirmed the presence of lignin monomers and further conversion of initially identified products into the aliphatic, aromatic (syringyl- and guaiacyl-based) esters and acids.
Learning Entrepreneurship from Other Entrepreneurs?

We document that individuals who grow up in high firm density areas are more likely to become entrepreneurs, given firm density in their current location, and to run businesses in the sector with the highest density when young. Firm density at an entrepreneur’s young age drives current firm profitability and is more important than current density for business performance. Results hold in a sample of movers, which allows addressing endogeneity concerns. These results are consistent with entrepreneurial skills being partly learnable through social contacts. Accordingly, entrepreneurs who grow up in high firm density areas adopt better managerial practices.
A genetic analysis of traits recorded by automatic milking systems - the possibiilty for a new method to evaluate temperament of dairy cows

This is a master thesis written under joint supervision from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (As, Norway) and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Uppsala, Sweden). It examines the possibility that number of teat cup kick-offs and milking interval, recorded by an automatic milking system, could be used to make conclusions about a cow's temperament.
Insecticidal activity of different fractions of petroleum ether extract of Zingiber cassumunar rhizome against Tribolium castaneum

An experiment was carried out to investigate the efficacy of contact toxicity of different fractions of petroleum ether extract of Zinziber cassumunar Roxb. rhizome against Tribolium castaneum. Seventy-eight different fractions of petroleum ether extract were obtained from column chromatography. Elutes having the similar TLC behavior were combined in eight fractions and were named as: MN-1, MN-2, MN-3, MN-4, MN-5, MN-6, MN-7 and MN-8. Four separate fractions were collected from the MN-1 fraction by preparative thin layer chromatography. These four parts were washed with petroleum ether, chloroform, ethyl acetate and methanol. Thereafter, these were separated by small column and designated as: M 1 N 1 , M 1 N 2 , M 1 N 3 , M 1 N 4 , M 2 N 1 , M 2 N 2 , M 2 N 3 , M 2 N 4 , M 3 N 1 , M 3 N 2 , M 3 N 3 , M 3 N 4 , M 4 N 1 and M 4 N 2 . Fractions of M1N2, M 2 N 2 , M 3 N 2 and M 4 N 2 were found to be the most effective against the beetle T. castaneum after 24, 48 and 72 hours. However, some fractions exhibited the moderate effect and other fractions did not work against the beetle. Bangladesh J. Sci. Ind. Res. 50(2), 143-152, 2015
Structural and functional apple genomics and its application in breeding

The present paper summarized some knowledge of modern technologies, applied in apple (Malus domestica) genome studies. New generation sequencing allowed single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) chip technologies for genotyping, description of functional apple genes, characterization of the evolutionary results in apple genome fragment transition, as well as phylogenetic reconstruction of the genus Malus, being the confirmed progeny of M. sieviersii. Based on these technologies, newly developed putative markers may give the most important biological data such as age, geographical origins, tissue type determination, and external visible characters. The new generation genotyping platforms, representing very high efficiency, are now successfully applied for random apple genome-wide association (GWA) studies as well pedigree-based analysis and marker-assisted selection (MAS).
Fitting Isochrones to Open Cluster photometric data: A new global optimization tool

We present a new technique to fit color–magnitude diagrams of open clusters based on the cross-entropy global optimization algorithm. The method uses theoretical isochrones available in the literature and maximizes a weighted likelihood function based on distances measured in the color–magnitude space. The weights are obtained through a non parametric technique that takes into account the star distance to the observed center of the cluster, observed magnitude uncertainties, the stellar density profile of the cluster among others. The parameters determined simultaneously are distance, reddening, age and metallicity. The method takes binary fraction into account and uses a Monte-Carlo approach to obtain uncertainties on the determined parameters for the cluster by running the fitting algorithm many times with a re-sampled data set through a bootstrapping procedure. We present results for 9 well studied open clusters, based on 15 distinct data sets, and show that the results are consistent with previous studies. The method is shown to be reliable and free of the subjectivity of most previous visual isochrone fitting techniques.
Convolving Gaussian Kernels for RNN-Based Beat Tracking

Because of an ability of modelling context information, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) or bi-directional RNNs (BRNNs) have been used for beat tracking with good performance. However, there are two problems associated with RNN-based beat tracking. The first problem is the imbalanced data: usually only around 2% frames are labelled as ‘beat’. The second one is the disagreement on the precise positions of beats in human annotations or the delay of annotations caused by human tapping. In order to tackle these problems, we propose to convolve the original ground truth with a Gaussian kernel as the target output of the network for a more robust training. We conduct a comparison experiment using five different Gaussian kernels on five individual datasets. The results on the validation sets show that we can train a better or at least competitive model in a shorter time by using the convolved ground truth with a proper Gaussian kernel.
Cloning in Plasmid pBR 322 giving Altered Expression of the Tetracycline Resistance Gene

The two HindIII fragments of polyoma virus DNA were cloned in the HindIII site of plasmid pBR322, a site located in the RNA polymerase promoter involved in the expression of tetracycline resistance. Although insertion of foreign DNA into this site did not always result in the complete loss of tetracycline resistance, Escherichia coli K 12 strain ~ 1 7 7 6 harbouring recombinant plasmids exhibited reduced growth properties in liquid culture with tetracycline and could easily be differentiated from bacteria transformed by non-recombinant plasmids. The formation of plasmid multimers increased the resistance to tetracycline at the level of the induction period, presumably as a result of a gene dosage effect.
Impact investigation of organizational commitment on intention to leave of public secondary school teachers in Tanzania

This study captures part of the product of larger survey conducted in three public secondary schools (S1, S2 and S3) in Dodoma, Tanzania. It aimed at investigating factors contributing to teachers intention to leave; and the relationship between organizational commitment dimensions (affective, normative and continuance) and intention to leave. Further, the study determined levels of teachers’ commitment and intention to leave while examining the impact of demographic factors on intention to leave levels. Employing survey method, data were collected using questionnaire on random sampled teachers (n= 127, response rate 88%). It was agreed between researchers and school administration that school names should not appear in publication. Results revealed teachers had low affective commitment, moderate continuance commitment, very low normative commitment and high intention to leave which may be executed into actual behavior next year. Organizational commitment dimensions had significant negative relationship with intention to leave. Though, normative commitment did not show unique contribution, affective and continuance commitment showed significant and unique contribution on teachers’ intention to leave while continuance commitment being stronger predictor. Except for younger teachers who reported higher intention to leave, other demographic factors did not indicate significant statistical differences on intention to leave. Implications relevant to school managers, educational stakeholders and Government were discussed as well. Keywords: Tanzania, Organizational commitment, Intention to leave, Affective commitment, Normative commitment, Continuance commitment
R2-ResNeXt: A ResNeXt-Based Regression Model with Relative Ranking for Facial Beauty Prediction

The purpose of facial beauty prediction (FBP) is to develop a machine that automatically evaluates facial attractiveness in a human perceptual manner. One of the essential problem of facial beauty prediction is the discriminative facial representation of the prediction model. Previous methods formulate FBP as a specific supervised learning of classification, regression, or ranking. We find that the relative ranking information is useful to improve the regression model of FBP. Based on this observation, this paper proposes a regression model guided by the relative ranking with the state-of-the-art Res NeXt structure to achieve FBP, and we call the model as $\mathbf{R}^{2}$ -ResNeXt. The $\mathbf{R}^{2}$ -ResNeXt facilitates to learn the representation and predictor guided by relative ranking for facial attractiveness assessment in an end-to-end manner. To train the $\mathbf{R}^{2}$ -ResNeXt, we develop an aggregated loss that combines regression loss and pairwise ranking loss linearly. We also design a method to construct a dataset containing relatively -labelled image pairs whose individual images are sampled from the SCUT-FBP benchmark database. The experimental results on the SCUT-FBP benchmark show that our $\mathbf{R}^{2}$ -ResNeXt achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with related literatures, and further indicates the effectiveness of the deep residual architecture and relative beauty ranking into regression task for facial beauty prediction.
Roles of JNK and P53 in Taxol-Induced Apoptotic Signaling in SKOV3 Human Ovarian Cancer Cells

c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) represents a group of mitogenactivated protein kinases (MAPKs) involved in many cellular responses including apoptosis. We have previously reported that taxol, a microtubule-interfering therapeutic agent widely used against various cancers, induces caspase-independent but apoptotic inducing factor (AIF)-dependent apoptosis in human ovarian cancer cell line SKOV3 cells. In the present study, we add to this report a detailed analysis of the taxol-induced apoptotic mechanisms in SKOV3 cells, particularly focusing on JNK and p53. In line with the previous report, we found that taxol induced caspase-independent apoptosis with concurrent activation of JNK, phosphorylation of Bcl-2, Bax translocation to the mitochondria, and AIF release from the mitochondria. Restoration of p53 functionality into SKOV3 cells, which are p53-null cells, by transfection of wild-type p53, however, induced caspase-dependent apoptosis in response to taxol treatment as evidenced by increasing PARP cleavage and the emergence of processed, active caspase-3 and -7. More to the point, treatment with a JNK inhibitor SP600125 blocked taxol-induced apoptotic cell death in both parental SKOV3 cells (p53-deficient) and p53-transfectant cells. Collectively, the aforementioned findings lend support to the view that taxol-induced apoptotic cell death in SKOV3 cells is executed by different mechanisms depending on the presence of p53 but commonly mediated by ASK1-JNK and/or -p38 axes.
On the use of AMSU-based products for the description of soil water content at basin scale

Abstract. Characterizing the dynamics of soil moisture fields is a key issue in hydrology, offering a strategy to improve our understanding of complex climate-soil-vegetation interactions. Besides in-situ measurements and hydrological models, soil moisture dynamics can be inferred by analyzing data acquired by sensors on board of airborne and/or satellite platforms. In this work, we investigated the use of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (NOAA-AMSU-A) radiometer for the remote characterization of soil water content. To this aim, a field measurement campaign, lasted about three months (3 March 2010–18 May 2010), was carried out using a portable time-domain reflectometer (TDR) to get soil water content measures over five different locations within an experimental basin of 32.5 km2, located in the South of Italy. In detail, soil moisture measurements were carried out systematically at the times of satellite overpasses, over two square areas of 400 m2, a triangular area of 200 m2 and two transects of 60 and 170 m, respectively. Each monitored site is characterized by different land covers and soil textures, to account for spatial heterogeneity of land surface. Afterwards, a more extensive comparison (i.e. analyzing a 5 yr data time series) was made using soil moisture simulated by a hydrological model. Measured and modeled soil moisture data were compared with two AMSU-based indices: the Surface Wetness Index (SWI) and the Soil Wetness Variation Index (SWVI). Both time series of indices have been filtered by means of an exponential filter to account for the fact that microwave sensors only provide information at the skin surface. This allowed to understand the ability of each satellite-based index to account for soil moisture dynamics and to understand its performances under different conditions. As a general remark, the comparison shows a higher ability of the filtered SWI to describe the general trend of soil moisture, while the SWVI can capture soil moisture variations with a precision that increases at the higher values of SWVI.
Accretion in brown dwarfs: An infrared view

This paper presents a study of the accretion properties of 19 very low mass objects ($M_\star$~ $0.01{-}0.1$ $M_\odot$) in the regions Chamaeleon I and ρ Oph. For 8 objects we obtained high resolution H α profiles and determined mass accretion rate $\dot M_{\rm ac}$ and accretion luminosity L ac . Pa β is detected in emission in 7 of the 10 ρ Oph objects, but only in one in Cha I. Using objects for which we have both a determination of L ac from H α and a Pa β detection, we show that the correlation between the Pa β luminosity and luminosity L ac , found by Muzerolle et al. ([CITE]) for T Tauri stars in Taurus, extends to objects with mass ~0.03 $M_\odot$; L (Pa β ) can be used to measure L ac also in the substellar regime. The results were less conclusive for Br γ , which was detected only in 2 objects, neither of which had an H α estimate of $\dot M_{\rm ac}$. Using the relation between L (Pa β ) and L ac we determined the accretion rate for all the objects in our sample (including those with no H α spectrum), more than doubling the number of substellar objects with known $\dot M_{\rm ac}$. When plotted as a function of the mass of the central object together with data from the literature, our results confirm the trend of lower $\dot M_{\rm ac}$ for lower $M_\star$, although with a large spread. Some of the spread is probably due to an age effect; our very young objects in ρ Oph have on average an accretion rate at least one order of magnitude higher than objects of similar mass in older regions. As a side product, we found that the width of H α measured at 10% peak intensity is not only a qualitative indicator of the accreting nature of very low mass objects, but can be used to obtain a quantitative, although not very accurate, estimate of $\dot M_{\rm ac}$ over a large mass range, from T Tauri stars to brown dwarfs. Finally, we found that some of our objects show evidence of mass-loss in their optical spectra.
Growth of InGaAs:Nδ-doped superlattices for multi-junction solar cells

InGaAs:Nδ-doped superlattices (SLs) with a band gap of 1 eV were fabricated by molecular beam epitaxy as a candidate for the subcell material of 4-junction lattice-matched tandem solar cells. The N δ-doping was carried out by suppling N source during the growth interruption and the SL structures were obtained by alternate formation of a N δ-doped layer and an In0.06Ga0. 94 As spacer layer. It was revealed that excess N supply induces interstitial N incorporation and surface roughness. By adjusting the growth conditions and SL structural parameters, coherent growth of SLs with the band gap of 1 eV was successfully achieved.
Constructing an XML database of linguistics data

A language-oriented, multi-dimensional database of the linguistic characteristics of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament can enable researchers to do ad hoc queries. XML is a suitable technology to transform free text into a database. A clause’s word order can be kept intact while other features such as syntactic and semantic functions can be marked as elements or attributes. The elements or attributes from the XML “database” can be accessed and processed by a 4 th generation programming language, such as Visual Basic. XML is explored as an option to build an exploitable database of linguistic data by representing inherently multi-dimensional data, including syntactic and semantic analyses of free text.
Spatially Coherent Matching for Robust Registration

In order to solve the registration problem, we propose a robust method called Spatially Coherent Matching (SCM), where it can get the underlying correspondences from the given putative sets of feature points for robust matching, and estimate the transformation for robust registration. Recovering correct matches and fitting transformations between image pairs are key components in the field of pattern recognition. The proposed SCM starts with a putative correspondence set which is contaminated by degradations (e.g., occlusion, deformation, rotation, and outliers), and the main goal is to identify the true correspondences and estimate the underlying transformation. Then we formulate this challenging problem by the spatially coherent matching model with a robust exponential distance loss and a spatial constraint. Based on the regularization theory, SCM preserves the topological structure of the adjacent features. Moreover, a sparse approximation strategy is used to improve the efficiency. Finally, the experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in most test scenarios on several real image datasets and synthesized datasets.
Relationship between Air Pollution Exposure in Daily Travelling Activities and Health Impact on Primary School Children

This study relates to the pulmonary function of school age children and the air quality of public transport in Hong Kong. It focuses on selected primary five or six students from schools in Hong Kong. A log book and a questionnaire were distributed through the schools to and completed by these students. Each sampled student had to fill in the daily travelling activities and also required to answer questions related to their indoor living conditions. The sampled students were required to conduct a pulmonary function test. The air pollutants such as PM10, PM2.5, CO2, CO and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) were measured following the routes to school and return home of sampled students. A statistical analysis, ANCOVA, was performed on the modes of transportation and the lung function test results. It was found that different modes of transportation have significant difference on the student’s lung function. It was also found that students who go to school by Mass Transit Railway (MTR) had significant better pulmonary function values than any others. Statistical regression was further applied to quantify the effect of different parameter to pulmonary function.
Toe-Clipping Dramatically Reduces Clinging Performance in a Pad-Bearing Lizard (Anolis carolinensis)

Abstract Toe-clipping is a simple and widely used method for permanently marking small lizards. Although some studies have shown negligible effects of toe-clipping on locomotor performance and survival in terrestrial lizards, less is known about effects of toe-clipping on arboreal lizards. We evaluated effects of toe-clipping on clinging performance of the small arboreal, pad-bearing lizard Anolis carolinensis. We also examined how clinging ability scaled with size within this species. We measured clinging ability in the same lizards with unclipped toes and with one (two toes clipped total) and two toes (four toes clipped total) clipped per each forelimb. We found that clinging ability decreased dramatically even after clipping only two toes (about a 40% decline) and even more dramatically after clipping four toes (about a 60% decline). We also found that clinging ability scales isometrically with body size within unclipped anoles. Because clinging ability was measured on a smooth substrate and was not influenced directly by claws, toe-clipping appears to directly affect toepad function. Toe-clipping may affect clinging ability because of the severing of a tendon that plays a key role in toepad function. Thus, we suggest that researchers should be cautious before applying toe-clipping as a marking technique to pad-bearing lizards.
Are MNCs norm entrepreneurs or followers? The changing relationship between host country institutions and MNC HRM practices

Abstract Rooted in the literature on comparative capitalism, we examine the effects of host country institutions on the intra-organizational practices of multinational corporations (MNCs), using transnational level survey data, exploring change over time. We found that the less comprehensive institutional mediation of the Liberal Market Economies correlated with greater diversity and a more pronounced difference between domestic firms and foreign MNCs. However, rather than being the predicted norm entrepreneurs, MNCs tended to follow the lead of local firms in adjusting HRM policies and practices towards liberalization. Those most prone to challenging existing orders were in industries facing particular crises of competitiveness. Finally, we found that single regulatory features rather than complex assemblies of institutions exerted particularly strong effects on the individual firms’ practices encompassed in this study.