Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Final Report 01 Sep 06-09 May 11 Final Report for Geometric Observers & Particle Filtering for Controlled Active Vision 49414-NS . 1

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Is carbon isotope composition a relevant ecophysiological indicator of genetic variation in water use efficiency of rubber trees

The rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations extend to non-traditional area in Thailand where dryer conditions has been reported to impair the growth of rubber trees and latex production. Physiological parameters helpful for breeding adapted genotypes are required, such as water use efficiency (WUE). Carbon isotope discrimination is widely used as a proxy for WUE that can easily be used for selection and breeding programs for drought tolerance. Leaf [delta]13C and leaf gas exchange were measured on young saplings of 10 rubber clones growing in pot in a common garden. The range of leaf [delta]13C among 10 clones was narrow and the correlation between [delta]13C and WUEi was significant under high vapour pressure deficit only, which means the prediction of WUE by [delta]13C would have low precision. There were large [delta]13C variations among the genotypes at all seasons in a collection of 49 wild genotypes of rubber in Northeastern Thailand. [delta]13C was rather stable with a good correlation between rainy and dry season. The genetic variability of [delta]13C is promising for breeding if a good correlation between [delta]13C of leaf and WUE can be established. The lack of correlation between [delta]13C of latex ([delta]13C-L) and of leaf soluble compounds ([delta]13C-S) collected from tapped and untapped 20 year-old rubber trees suggests that recent photosynthates are mixed in the large pool of stored carbohydrates that are involved in latex regeneration after tapping. Thus [delta]13C of latex is not a relevant indicator of WUE of rubber trees
RICE CROP MAPPING USING SENTINEL-1 TIME SERIES IMAGES (CASE STUDY: MAZANDARAN, IRAN)

Abstract. Policymaking and planning agricultural improvement require accurate and timely information and statistics. In Iran, collecting and acquiring agricultural statistics is often done in the traditional methods. Related studies have proved that these methods mostly contain some mistakes. Multi-temporal acquisition strategies of remotely sensed data provide an opportunity to improve rice monitoring and mapping. Studying and monitoring rice paddies in vast areas is limited by the presence of cloud cover, the spatial and temporal resolution of optical sensors, and the lack of open access or systematic Radar data. Sentinel-1 satellite data, which are free to access and has a high quality of spatial and temporal resolution, can provide a great opportunity for monitoring crop products, especially rice. In this study, Sigma Nought, Gamma Nought and Beta Nought time series of Sentinel-1 data in VV, VH and VV+VH polarizations were employed for extracting areas under rice cultivation in the region of Mazandaran province, Iran. These satellite data are taken regularly every 12 days, according to the season of the region, from March 21st to September 22nd of 2018. In this study, in order to specify the rice paddies area, several fieldworks were randomly carried out for two weeks, and field data were collected as well. Field data including rice paddies areas and non-rice areas were collected as ‘Test and Train data set’ and then the Random Forrest (RF) algorithm was carried out to determine the rice paddies area. The classification result was validated using test samples. The accuracy of all classifications results are over 80% and the best result is related to Sigma Nought and gamma Nought of VH polarization, with an accuracy of 91.37%. The results showed a high capability to evaluate and monitor rice production at moderate levels in a vast area which is regularly exposed to the cloud cover.
IDENTIFICATION OF BACTERIAL WILT AND LEAF BLIGHT DISEASE ON MAIZE (Zea mays) FOUND IN KEDIRI, INDONESIA

Recently, a new bacterial disease of maize (Zea mays) was observed in Kediri, East Java, Indonesia. Infected plants showed wilt symptoms occasionally accompanied by leaf blight. This study aims to characterize the causal agent of bacterial wilt and leaf blight of maize observed in Kediri. Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic bacteria were isolated from the diseased tissues. All bacterial strains (KD1A, KB2A, KD1, KD4, KB1) gave positive result both in the hypersensitive response and pathogennicity assays. However, only KD1 and KB1 strains could be re-isolated from the diseased tissues. Based on several physiological and biochemical assays, the bacteria resembled Pantoea agglomerans. Moreover, the strains showed negative result on PCR amplification using HRP1d and HRP3r, a primer pair specific for detection of P. stewartii subsp. stewartii. Analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequence of KD1 and KB1 showed highest homology at 88% and 90%, respectively to P. agglomerans strain DSM 3493 (NR 0419781). The homology values were too low to conclude that the bacteria were similar to P. agglomerans. These results suggest that bacterial pathogens isolated from maize in Kediri were strains of Pantoea sp.
Fabrication of Nanoparticles by Electric Discharge Plasma in Liquid

The electric plasma discharge method involves the application of a voltage between a cathode and anode in a conductive electrolytic solution to create a discharge plasma at the cathode. When certain material is used as the cathode, small droplets are emitted with the plasma discharge, and the melted droplets are rapidly cooled in the solution to form nanoscale particles of the material. In this work, nanoparticles of Al, Au, Si, and various alloys of between 100 nm and less than 10 nm in size were produced and characterized. Characterization of Si nanoparticles is especially important because their use in lithium batteries greatly influences battery performance. It was found by high resolution electron microscopy and microstructural surface analysis that oxidation layers of a few nm in thickness were formed on the surface of the Si nanoparticles.
The Impact of Stock Transfer Restrictions on the Private Placement Discount

The literature contains four explanations for the private placement discount. I find that all four contribute to the discount: loss of option value due to transfer restrictions, equity ownership con-centration, information gathering, and overvaluation and expected underperformance post-issue. An average-strike put option model calculates marketability discounts that are consistent with empirical private placement discounts when observed discounts are adjusted for equity ownership concentration, information, and overvaluation effects. In contrast to the positive signaling effect of traditional private placement announcements, there is a negative signaling effect for private investments in public equity when the firm commits to register the shares promptly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
RBV and the road to the control of external organizations

** Although primarily focusing on the internal resource endowment of the firm, RBV has the potential to address the firm’s embeddedness in the business environment as well. At present, RBV research lacks a sound understanding of the development of competitive advantages in industries. A change regarding the unit of analysis, however, allows for considering causes and effects on the micro and the macro level as well. The paper stresses the entrepreneurial dimension of RBV and the firm’s impact on the environment by comparing RBV and RDA reasoning. Using the explanatory power of the isolating mechanisms and applying system dynamic modelling, it turns out that RBV can move into the direction of a ‘New IO’.
Predicting Trust from User Ratings

Trust relationships between users in various online communities are notoriously hard to model for computer scientists. It can be easily verified that trying to infer trust based on the social network alone is often inefficient. Therefore, the avenue we explore is applying Data Mining algorithms to unearth latent relationships and patterns from background data. In this paper, we focus on a case where the background data is user ratings for online product reviews. We consider as a testing ground a large dataset provided by Epinions.com that contains a trust network as well as user ratings for reviews on products from a wide range of categories. In order to predict trust we define and compute a critical set of features, which we show to be highly effective in providing the basis for trust predictions. Then, we show that state-ofthe-art classifiers can do an impressive job in predicting trust based on our extracted features. For this, we employ a variety of measures to evaluate the classification based on these features. We demonstrate that by carefully collecting and synthesizing readily available background information, such as ratings for online reviews, one can accurately predict trust-based social links.
Corporate Governance, Earnings Management, and Economic Value Added Indonesian Evidence

This paper describes the research which investigates the effect of earnings management and corporate governance (CG) on economic value added (EVA) in companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the ﬁscal year ending 31 December 2015 to 2017. Earnings management used in this study is accrual earnings management (MLA) as measured by the Modiﬁed Jones Model and real earnings management (MLR) as measured by management earnings operating cash ﬂows. CG is measured by the CG index. Data is obtained by purposive sampling process and comesfromsecondarydatabothfromtheIDXandfromthewebsitesofeachcompany. The research hypothesis was tested using generalized-least square (GLS). The results showed that accrual earnings management had a positive effect on EVA while real earnings management had a negative effect on EVA. The results also show that CG has a negative effect on EVA if tested together with MLA, but CG does not affect EVA if tested together with MLR. This research is expected to contribute to the existing literature by completing and enriching ﬁndings on the effect of earnings management and corporate governance on EVA.
Private supplementary tutoring among primary students in Bangladesh

Using the databases created under Education Watch, a civil society initiative to monitor primary and basic education in Bangladesh, this paper explores trends, socioeconomic differentials and cost in private supplementary tutoring among primary students and its impact on learning achievement. The rate of primary school students getting access to private supplementary tutoring is increasing at two percentage points per year and reached 31% in 2005. Incidence of private tutoring was greater among boys and urban students than respective counterparts. Educated parents and well‐off families were more likely to arrange supplementary tutoring for their children. A wide variation in the cost for private tutoring prevailed. The tutees spent 46% of their total private expenditure for education on supplementary tutoring. Supplementary tutoring helped students learn more than those who had no such support. Private tutors for primary school students have become a well‐accepted norm. Finally, a number of social implications are discussed.
Towards a more in-depth understanding of the IoT Paradigm and its challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new technological paradigm that brings together the physical and virtual worlds to provide software systems everywhere through daily life objects. The IoT can transform how we interact with the environment surrounding us, leading to a significant multidisciplinary technological shift. However, since it is a new field of research and development, there is a lack of consensus and understanding of its concepts and features, as we observed when engineering some software systems in the field. Therefore, we performed investigations to characterize IoT regarding its definition, characteristics, and applications, organizing the area and revealing its challenges and research opportunities. A structured literature review of secondary studies supported the answering of three research questions: What is “Internet of Things”? Which characteristics can define an IoT domain? Which are the areas of IoT application? The structured literature review leads to 15 subsequent studies from which we recovered 34 definitions - discussed in the light of the technical evolution - 29 characteristics and several IoT application areas. Furthermore, the results include an IoT characterization based on identification, sensing, and actuation capabilities, besides a discussion of the relation between IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), regarding other research areas and terms often associated with IoT aiming at to bring clarification to the field. In this work, we offer an essential overview of the IoT state-of-the-art and a characterization, presenting issues that should be addressed to contribute to its strengthening and establishment.
RW-Through: A Data Replication Protocol Suitable for GeoDistributed and Read-Intensive Workloads

The microservice architecture encourages the composition of services through choreography. Choreography favors loose coupling and decentralization. The challenge then arises of finding suitable approaches for carrying it out according to the architectural style proposed by the microservices. This paper describes and compares two strategies for choreographing microservices. The first strategy is event based and makes use of a mediator to convey the messages. The second is called choreographic programming and its great advantage is to provide an overview of choreography. A case study with four microservices was implemented in each strategy. Results include a comparative table and the number of messages per minute supported by implementations.
Taming the Goldstone contributions to the effective potential

The standard perturbative effective potential suffers from two related problems of principle involving the field-dependent Goldstone boson squared mass, G. First, in general G can be negative, and it actually is negative in the Standard Model; this leads to imaginary contributions to the effective potential that are not associated with a physical instability, and therefore spurious. Second, in the limit that G approaches zero, the effective potential minimization condition is logarithmically divergent already at two-loop order, and has increasingly severe power-law singularities at higher loop orders. I resolve both issues by resumming the Goldstone boson contributions to the effective potential. For the resulting resummed effective potential, the minimum value and the minimization condition that gives the vacuum expectation value are obtained in forms that do not involve G at all.
EFFECT OF WILD OATS (AVENA FATUA L.) DENSITY ON WHEAT YIELD AND ITS COMPONENTS UNDER VARYING NITROGEN REGIMES

A field study was conducted at Malakandher Research Farm, NWFP Agricultural University, Peshawar during Rabi 2003-4 to quantify the competition between wheat and wild oats. The experiment was laid out in randomized complete block design with four replications under a split-plot arrangement. The experiment comprised of 3-nitrogen levels (75, 100 and 125 kg ha -1 ), kept in main plots, while six wild oats densities (0, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 plants m -2) assigned to sub-plots. Ghaznavi-98 variety of wheat with a sub-plot size of 5x 1 m 2 was seeded in the 3rd week of November 2003. The data were recorded on density of wheat (m -2 ), density of wild oats (m -2 ), wheat and wild oats leaf area plant -1 (cm 2 ), wheat and wild oats plant height at maturity (cm), wheat spike length (cm), number of grains spike -1 , grain weight spike -1 (g), 1000 grains weight (g), biological yield (t ha -1 ) and grain yield (t ha –1 ). Moreover, grain and straw were also analyzed to estimate the uptake of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash by the test species. All the data except the chemical analyses were subjected to ANOVA technique using MSTATC Computer software. The data revealed significant differences for the wild oats densities for most of the traits studied, the differences for nitrogen levels and interaction were significant only in grain yield and spike length, respectively. The comparison of means revealed that density of wheat decreased with an increase in wild oats density. Only 150 plants m -2 was recorded under 50 wild oats seeded m -2 as compared to 262 plants m -2 in the monoculture of wheat. Plant height of wheat was also influenced by the oats density. At 50 wild oats, the wheat height was 83.333 cm as compared to 90.125 cm in the monoculture wheat. Similarly, the grain size was also affected by the presence of wild oats. As low as 12% lower sized grains were recorded under 50 oats plants m -2 as compared to monoculture of wheat. The adverse effect of oats on yield components reflected on the grain yield. More than 50% reduction in yield was noticed at the highest density of wild oats as compared to monoculture of wheat.
Preliminary for course 2 D 5342 , Data Mining , Jan-April 2006 .

We overview fundamental inference principles for hypothesis and decision choice, parameter(state) estimation and tracking methods. We also explore methods for finding dependencies and graphical models, latent variables and robust decision trees in a joint Bayesian framework. We also consider the most important methods for performing Bayesian inference in various settings: Analytic integration using conjugate families of distributions and likelihoods, discretization, Monte Carlo as well as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and particle filters. We overview related probabilistic methods such as robust Bayesian analysis, evidence theory and PAC
Alcohol consumption and lifetime change in cognitive ability

Studies of the effect of alcohol consumption on cognitive ability are often confounded. One approach to avoid confounding is the Mendelian randomization design. Here, we used such a design to test the hypothesis that a genetic score for alcohol processing capacity moderates the association between alcohol consumption and lifetime change in cognitive ability. Members of the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 completed the same test of intelligence at age 11 and 70 years. They were assessed for recent alcohol consumption in later life and genotyped for a set of four single-nucleotide polymorphisms in three alcohol dehydrogenase genes. These variants were unrelated to late-life cognition or to socioeconomic status. We found a significant gene × alcohol consumption interaction on lifetime cognitive change (p=0.007). Individuals with higher genetic ability to process alcohol showed relative improvements in cognitive ability with more consumption, whereas those with low processing capacity showed a negative relationship between cognitive change and alcohol consumption with more consumption. The effect of alcohol consumption on cognitive change may thus depend on genetic differences in the ability to metabolize alcohol.
Anti-Influenza Virus Activity and Phenolic Content of Pomegranate (Punica granatum L.) Peel Extract and Fractions

Background: Influenza virus, associated with high level of morbidity and mortality, has been recently considered a public health concern while the choices for the control and treatment of the disease are limited. The present study was conducted to evaluate activity of pomegranate peel extract and its fractions against Influenza A virus in vitro . Methods: In this research, ethyl alcohol extract of pomegranate peel was prepared and subjected to fractionation with different polarities. The potential in vitro anti-influenza A virus activity of the extract and fractions was assessed using Cytopathic Effect (CPE) reduction assay, Hemagglutinin Assay (HA), and 50% Tissue Culture Infectious Doses (TCID50) method in Madin-Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) cells. Results: The crude pomegranate peel extract and its n-butanol and ethyl acetate fractions had the highest inhibitory effect against influenza A virus with IC50 value of 6.45, 6.07 and 5.6 μg/ml in MDCK cells, respectively. Our results also showed that, the production of virus was significantly reduced upon treatment with crude extract, n-butanol and ethyl acetate fractions in a dose-dependent manner (p<0.05). Conclusion: Based on our results, the ethyl alcohol extract and its polar fractions of pomegranate peel can inhibit influenza A virus replication in vitro. Therefore, further characterization of its active ingredients and the mechanism of action should be carried out.
A Method for Determining Asymptotes of Home-Range Area Curves

Home-range area curves are used to estimate the number of locations needed to accurately estimate home range size based on the asymptote of the curve. However, the current methodology used to identify asymptotes for home-range area curves is largely subjective and varies between studies. Our objective was to evaluate the use of exponential, Gompertz, logistic, and reciprocal function models as a means for identifying asymptotes of home-range area curves. We radio monitored northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) coveys during mid-September through November 2001-2002 in Jim Hogg County, Texas. We calculated home-range size of radiomarked coveys using the 95% fixed kernel with least squares cross validation and minimum convex polygon estimators. We fitted area observations and coefficient of variation to the number of locations using exponential, Gompertz, logistic, and reciprocal function models to estimate the minimum number of locations necessary to obtain a representative home range size for each home range estimator. The various function models consistently provided a relatively good fit for home range area curves and coefficient of variation curves (0.58 ≤ R ≤ 0.99; P < 0.05) for both home range estimators. We used an information-theoretic framework (AICC) to select the best model to estimate area-curve asymptotes. The use of function models appears to provide a structured and useful approach for calculating area-curve asymptotes. We propose that researchers consider the use of such models when determining asymptotes for home-range area curves and that more research be conducted to validate the strength of this method.