Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Salt stress resistance in SmCP-transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana as revealed by transcriptome analysis

Adaptation to environmental changes is crucial for the viability of all organisms. In plants, cysteine proteases (CP) are vital proteolytic enzymes response to complex and volatile environmental factors. Previously, over-expression of a CP gene isolated from Salix matsudana (SmCP) was shown to improve the salt stress tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana. However, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the enhanced salt stress tolerance of these over-expression lines remain uncharacterized. In this study, the transcriptome of transgenic Arabidopsis SmCP over-expression lines and wild type (WT) control (CT) plants was analyzed by RNA sequencing to identify genes associated with salt tolerance. The abundance level of selected differentially expressed genes was validated by quantitative real-time PCR analysis. The SmCP-transgenic line showed many transcriptomic changes under salt-stress conditions, including genes associated with alterations in the antioxidant environment and ion-transport capacity. Elucidation of the mechanism of salt stress resistance is important for utilization of SmCP for genetic improvement of commercial crops for tolerance to saline soil.
Millimeter-Wave Multibeam Antenna Based on Folded C-Type SIW

A millimeter-wave (mm-wave) multibeam array antenna based on folded C-type substrate integrated waveguide (FCSIW) is presented for the first time. The design steps for its two main elements are described, namely an FCSIW Butler matrix (BM) and an FCSIW single-branch slot array antenna. Both of them exhibit a significant miniaturization in comparison with their substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) counterparts, leading to 40% and 33.2% reduction in occupied surface for the BM and the whole multibeam array antenna while maintaining similar performances, respectively. In addition, an optimized transition connection structure from ground coplanar waveguide (GCPW) to FCSIW is designed to facilitate the measurement of the multibeam array antenna. Finally, the FCSIW multibeam array antenna is optimized, manufactured, and measured, which can help verify the feasibility of FCSIW for the miniaturized multibeam array antenna.
Occupational Therapy Service redesign for care of the elderly: Measuring up to a joint future?

Partnership working between Health and Social Care is the Scottish Government’s strategy to affect major policy and practice level changes within public services in order to meet the fiscal challenges arising from the ageing demographic profile within our society. The Joint Future Group Report, published by the Scottish Government in 2002, specifically identified the profession of occupational therapy as central to the strategy for public service reform and inspired an inter-organisational occupational therapy service redesign within Lanarkshire. The practice and system service redesign transcended Acute, Primary Care and Local Authority care of the elderly occupational therapy services, introducing measures to promote patient continuity of care at an informational, management and relational level. The aim was to promote longitudinal models of patient care that minimised the incidence of patients being transitioned between occupational therapy services. This PhD adopted a critical realism research approach with a mixed method sequential explanatory research design. The aim was to develop a theoretical understanding of the structural and agential influences at the macro meso and micro levels that gave rise to the service redesign outcomes. The results provided illuminating insights as to the agential and structural barriers to partnership working. Service specific patterns emerged that suggested structural and cultural influences on occupational therapy practice resulted in service specific variation in the ability to deliver on the continuity of care service redesign intentions. The agency of the occupational therapists was explored through mechanism based theorising in order to identify morphogenetic influences (facilitators to change) and morphostatic influences (barriers to change) in engaging in the service redesign measures in practice. The results reflect that the occupational therapists within all three service sectors enacted their agency to preserve their respective pre-existing organisational service structures. These results suggest that the learning strategies and associated behaviours of the participating occupational therapists were not conducive to transformational change. The practical insights of the conditioning power of structure vis a vis the discrete reflexive power of agency outlined within this thesis offers the profession of occupational therapy within public services the means of exploring and conceptualising the complex implications of partnership working.
Divergent Growth Responses to Warming between Stand-Grown and Open-Grown Trees in a Dryland Montane Forest in Northwestern China

Dryland montane forests conserve water for people living in the fluvial plains. The fate of these forests under climate warming is strongly affected by local environmental factors. The question remains of how internal factors contribute to climate change impacts on forest growth in these regions. Here, we investigated tree ring records for similar-aged stand-grown trees and their neighboring open-grown trees at elevation in a dryland montane forest (Picea crassifolia Kom.) in northwestern China. The growth rate of open-grown trees is much higher than their neighboring stand-grown trees across the entire elevation gradient, and the lower the altitude, the greater the difference. Open-grown trees at different elevations showed similar growth patterns, as tree growth at all sites was accelerated over time. In contrast, growth patterns of stand-grown trees were divergent at different altitudes, as growth at high elevations (3100–3300 m a.s.l.) was accelerated, whereas growth at low elevations (2700–2900 m a.s.l.) became stable after the year 1990. Analysis of growth–climate relationships indicated that warming promoted open-grown tree growth across the entire altitude gradient, and also stand-grown tree growth at high elevations, but negatively affected the growth of stand-grown trees at low elevations. Water scarcity can be exacerbated by competition within forests, inhibiting the warming-induced benefits on tree growth. Moving window correlation analysis suggested the negative effect of warming on tree growth at low elevations was diminished after the late 1990s, as the drought stress was alleviated. Our research shows the divergent growth responses to warming of stand-grown and open-grown trees along elevation. It reveals effects of internal factors in determining tree growth response to warming and holds the potential to aid forest management and ecosystem models in responding to climate change.
Using stable isotopes to estimate migratory connectivity for a patchily distributed, wetland-associated Neotropical migrant

Estimates of migratory connectivity are needed for full annual cycle population models of migratory bird species experiencing rapid declines in abundance. One technique to determine migratory connectivity is through stable isotope analysis. This low-resolution method may be influenced by how data are calibrated between isotopes measured in precipitation and those measured in feathers, and can be informed by incorporating relative abundance into the assignment model. eBird abundance maps are a new tool combining citizen science data into a predictive species distribution model. In the Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea), a wetland-associated songbird with a patchy breeding distribution, we sought to use stable-hydrogen isotope analysis informed by a species-specific calibration equation and eBird abundance data to determine the strength of migratory connectivity. We developed a species-specific calibration equation using known-origin samples from the breeding grounds and found that stable-hydrogen isotope values measured in precipitation explained 50% of the variation in stable-hydrogen isotope values among feathers. We found that the assignment model incorporating eBird abundance data correctly identified the true origins of 66% of individuals, and that the average assignment area (as a measure of precision) was 64% of the breeding distribution. These results represented a 7% increase in precision and a 3% decrease in accuracy when compared to a model that was not informed by abundance. Based on these models, wintering populations from 6 countries represented a mix of likely breeding origins, suggesting low migratory connectivity for Prothonotary Warblers. We found evidence that wintering latitude was related to likely breeding origin, with individuals at western wintering locations more likely to have southern breeding origins, but this relationship was weak. These results corroborate studies using archival light-level geolocators and high-resolution genetic markers, which also demonstrated weak migratory connectivity in this species. For patchily distributed species, eBird abundance data may not provide a useful increase in precision and accuracy for isotope assignments.
A follow-up study on students attending a university counselling service in Northern Italy

ABSTRACT The aims of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of a university counselling service in Northern Italy, to assess the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of students who used counselling service, and to assess the psychological conditions of the students who ended the counselling after a 4 month follow-up period. The study involved 100 students, who filled out the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12), the Brief COPE Inventory, and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). The results showed that who received counselling were positively affected by this experience. The areas of benefit were psychological well-being, coping behaviours, ability to positively reframe problems and less sense of guilt. Additional studies are needed to identify which factors influence the outcomes of university counselling services in Italy. These studies would be important to evaluate the services rendered, upgrade the skills of counsellors and visualise priority areas of need.
An Investigation of a Classroom-Based Specialized Music Therapy Model for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Voices Together Using the VOICSS™ Method

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have marked deficits in social communication skills, which can challenge their ability to participate in academic and social activities. Music therapy is a popular intervention for children with ASD, and although research evidence supporting its effectiveness is growing, methodological flaws limit interpretation. The present study proposes a new measure, the DUACS, to assess outcomes associated with a group music therapy program, Voices Together. Participants were 64 elementary students from nine self-contained autism classrooms who attended 16 weekly intervention sessions. Teacher-reported behavior questionnaires and direct student behavioral measures were administered at baseline, during, and after treatment. Increases in communication and social skills suggested program effectiveness, particularly among students with higher baseline skills. Further investigation of this program approach will help to better understand its mechanisms and for whom it works best.
Nanophotonic design and nanomaterial assembly for next-generation optoelectronics

Nanomaterials are widely deployed in many optoelectronic technologies, with applications in solar energy harvesting, light emission, bio-sensing, computing and communications. The unique advantages of colloidal nanomaterials include size-tunable optical properties and room-temperature solutionprocessability, which translates to low-cost materials growth and fabrication processes associated with nanomaterials-based technology. Moreover, their lightweight and thin-film nature enables optoelectronic devices made from nanomaterials to be flexibly coated on almost any surface, which is ideal for applications such as wearable electronics and building-integrated photovoltaics. This thesis focuses on combining optical modeling, nanomaterials synthesis, nanofabrication, and advanced optical and electrical characterization techniques to develop nanomaterial-based next-generation optoelectronic devices. The first section of this thesis focuses on applying nanophotonics design principles to optically engineer solar cell and photodetector device structures for specific applications. One of our studies demonstrated a highperforming visible-blind ultraviolet (UV) thin film photodetector by introducing nanoheterojunctions for enhanced absorption and carrier injection. In
The Enhancing Versus Backfiring Effects of Positive Emotion in Consumer Reviews

Researchers, marketers, and consumers often believe that amplifying emotional content is impactful for the spread of information and purchasing decisions. However, there is little systematic investigation of when emotionality backfires. This research demonstrates when and why positive emotion can have enhancing versus backfiring effects. The authors find that reviewers who express greater positive emotion are indeed more positive toward their products, regardless of product type. In addition, expressed emotion for hedonic products has a positive impact when read by others, but this emotion backfires for utilitarian products, leading others to be less positive. The authors construct a conceptual model of these effects and show that violated expectations leading to decreased trust underlie this divergence between reviewers and readers. The effects occur in well-controlled experiments as well as computational linguistic analysis of 100,000 Amazon reviews across 500 products. Indeed, emotional reviews of utilitarian products are less likely to become popular and be displayed on the product’s front page on Amazon. This work also introduces a novel tool for quantifying natural language in marketing: the Evaluative Lexicon.
Pattern of local adaptation to quantitative host resistance in a major pathogen of a perennial crop

Understanding the mechanisms involved in pathogen adaptation to quantitative resistance in plants has a key role to play in establishing durable strategies for resistance deployment, especially in perennial crops. The erosion of quantitative resistance has been recently suspected in Cuba and the Dominican Republic for a major fungal pathogen of such a crop: Pseudocercospora fijiensis, causing black leaf streak disease on banana. This study set out to test whether such erosion has resulted from an adaptation of P. fijiensis populations, and to determine whether or not the adaptation is local. Almost 600 P. fijiensis isolates from Cuba and the Dominican Republic were sampled using a paired‐population sampling design on resistant and susceptible banana varieties. A low genetic structure of the P. fijiensis populations was detected in each country using 16 microsatellite markers. Cross‐inoculation experiments using isolates from susceptible and resistant cultivars were carried out, measuring a quantitative trait (the diseased leaf area) related to pathogen fitness on three varieties. A further analysis based on those data suggested the existence of a local pattern of adaptation to resistant cultivars in both of the study countries, due to the existence of specific (or genotype by genotype) host–pathogen interactions. However, neither cost nor benefit effects for adapted populations were found on the widely used “Cavendish” banana group. These results highlight the need to study specific host–pathogen interactions and pathogen adaptation on a wide range of quantitative resistance phenotypes in banana, in order to develop durable strategies for resistance deployment.
Acclimation, long-term repeatability, and phenotypic correlations of aerobic metabolic traits in the Gulf killifish, Fundulus grandis

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Performance assessment: Teachers beliefs and practices in higher education

In educating the students, teachers’ beliefs on teaching and learning influenced not only on what to teach and how to do it, but also on how to assess their students. Education has a goal that students can apply the knowledge gained in real world activities. Through assessment process, it helps them to understand their strengths and weaknesses of their abilities development. This research aims to find out teachers’ beliefs about performance assessment and how they use it to assess their students in one of public college under The Ministry of Industry in Indonesia. Data findings are obtained by using interviews, observation and document analysis conducted on T1 and T2 as the participants. Researcher used the five elements of performance assessment to make the instruments and analyze the findings. Results indicated that there were differences between what they say and what they do. The differences appeared because of the theories they knew, their own knowledge and experiences they have in teaching.
Automated optimal test data generation for OCL specification using harmony search algorithm

Exploring software testing possibilities at an early software life cycle is increasingly necessary to avoid the propagation of defects to the subsequent phases. This requirement demands technique that can generate automated test cases at the initial phases of software development. Thus, we propose a novel framework for automated test data generation using formal specifications written in object constraint language (OCL). We also defined a novel fitness function named exit-predicate-wise branch coverage (EPWBC) to evaluate the generated test data. Another focus of the proposed approach is to optimise the test case generation process by applying, harmony search (HS) algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework outperforms the other OCL-based test case generation techniques. Furthermore, it has been inferred that OCL based testing adopting HS algorithm forms an excellent combination to produce more test coverage and an optimal test suite thereby improving the quality of a system.
Altitude and species identity drive leaf litter decomposition rates of ten species on a 2950 m altitudinal gradient in Neotropical rain forests

Identifying the environmental factors controlling litter decomposition is key to understanding the magnitude and rates of nutrient cycling in tropical forests, and how they may be influenced by climate variability and environmental change. We carried out a leaf litter translocation experiment in mature rain forest over a 2,520 m altitudinal gradient in Costa Rica. Leaf litter decomposition rates (k) of ten tree species, two dominant species from each ecosystem, plus two standard species, were calculated over 540 days in four life zones. k was lowest in montane with 0.83 per year and lower montane forests with 2.21 per year. k did not differ between lowland and premontane forests at 3.12 per year, in spite of the 3℃ difference of mean annual temperature between these life zones. k varied fourfold among species. Species decomposition rates ranked as follows, and were predictably related to leaf economic spectrum traits of the species: Acalypha communis (standard, fast decomposer)» Hyeronima oblonga > Alchornea latifolia, Quercus bumelioides, Jarava ichu (standard, slow decomposer)> Minquartia guianensis > Magnolia sororum > Vochysia allenii > Pourouma bicolor, Carapa guianensis. These two slowest‐decomposing species were native premontane and lowland forest dominants, respectively, with tough, low‐nutrient leaves. The ranking of species by k varied very little among life zones suggesting that decomposer organisms in very different ecosystems and environments react in similar ways to the litter quality in general. We conclude that while k decreases with temperature in rain forests on tropical mountains, bioclimatic zones defined as premontane may be “functionally lowland. ” The effects of species identity on decomposition rates on tropical mountains are consistent and independent of environment for both standard and native species. Under climate change on these mountains, if moisture regimes do not change, decomposition rates will increase due to rising temperatures. Soil carbon storage may therefore decrease. Changes in the altitudinal distributions of currently dominant species will also affect this critically important biogeochemical process.
Entrepreneurial by Design: How Organizational Design Affects Family and Non‐family Firms’ Opportunity Exploitation

Opportunity exploitation is a key aspect of the corporate entrepreneurship process and is particularly important to maintain a family firm through multiple generations. Drawing on an organizational design perspective, we investigate opportunity exploitation in family versus nonfamily firms. The empirical analyses on survey data from a sample of 224 Italian firms reveal that family firms exploit significantly fewer opportunities than nonfamily firms, and this result is fully mediated by the organization of their TMT. Our findings show that how family firms organize is crucial for opportunity exploitation, thus extending and enriching prior corporate entrepreneurship research, highlighting the importance of bringing an organizational design perspective to corporate entrepreneurship and family business studies.
Design and analysis of INDEP FinFET SRAM cell at 7‐nm technology

The reduction in size of metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) devices results in increase in leakage power dissipation, which occurs due to the short‐channel effects in subthreshold region. Now a day's power dissipation is one of the crucial issues that the modern electronic industry is facing. Fin‐type field‐effect transistor (FinFET) can be proven as a best substitute to reduce leakage power dissipation in logic circuits. Degradation of performance with process variations is of major concern and needs to design FinFET circuits with minimum leakage power dissipation. In this paper, static random‐access memory (SRAM) cell is designed using low power shorted‐gate (SG) FinFETs at 7‐nm technology to minimize leakage power dissipation besides improving other performance parameters like static noise margins (SNMs) and power delay product (PDP) as well. The various parameters are analyzed using butterfly and N‐curve methods. The ASAP7 PDK is used to design SRAM cells using Cadence Virtuoso tool. The simulated results show that FinFET input‐dependent (INDEP) technique reduces the leakage power dissipation by 32.08% and 13.50%, respectively, in read and write conditions of FinFET SRAM cell. The Monte‐Carlo simulation results show the reduction in average power using INDEP approach at ±10% process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations under 3σ Gaussian distribution of FinFET SRAM cell.
RATE INCREASE OF THE OBJECTS CLASSIFICATION ON THE CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS WITH THE SELF-ORGANIZATION MAPS IMPLEMENTATION

Objects and processes classification is a common experimental problem. Its solution, first of all, is needed in automatic diagnosis systems, for example, to determine the equipment operation state through the diagnostic signal or to identify abnormalities with medical images. With the development of convolutional neural networks, new prospects for solving such problems have risen up. However, the classification accuracy that can be achieved on these networks is not sufficient enough for all diagnosis issues. It is subject to, for example, timely diagnosis of the onset of transient phenomena. At the same time, another type of neural network, Kohonen self-organizing maps