Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of the Business Environment on Young Firm Financing

This paper uses a dataset of more than 70,000 firms in over 100 countries to systematically study the use of different financing sources for new and young firms, in comparison to mature firms. The authors find that in all countries younger firms rely less on bank financing and more on informal financing. However, they also find that younger firms use more bank finance in countries with stronger rule of law and better credit information, and that the reliance of young firms on informal finance decreases with the availability of credit information. Overall, the results suggest that improvements to the legal environment and availability of credit information are disproportionately beneficial for promoting access to formal finance by young firms.
RANS - Modeling of MHD Flow Over Infinite Vertical Plate in Rotating System Under the Effect of Viscous Dissipation, Joule Heating and Radiation

In this paper Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach have been employed so as to come up with a model capturing an MHD turbulent flow over a vertical plate provided the effect of viscous dissipation, Radiation and Joule Heating. The model equation for mean velocity and temperature in turbulent are not time dependent consequently, the Model turns out to be coupled highly non linear ODE
Disease Identification System: System Implementation and Attack

: Interactions with outside world are not only natural but mandatory, in DIS user can communicate to doctors through the system for retrieving information about diseases by giving symptoms as input. The system is designed specifically for users who are patients and diagnostic clinics. DIS provides a collaboration and communication platform for first doctors, extension diagnosticians to share information on human body related diseases. The system uses patient data and AI based database for medicines to respective diseases as tools for enhancement of diagnosis of diseases. Through interactions on the Internet between extension doctors and specialists, problems can be communicated immediately and assessed. Specialists authorized to the system can perform diagnosis and identification and provide the best remedy recommendations to the users. Also, an algorithm independent approach for mounting poisoning attack across a dataset of DIS system is being implemented which in turn may lead to false diagnostics.
Differential genomic alterations in normal and cancerous lung cells in response to chronic inflammation

Although chronic inflammation increases the risk of carcinogenesis, there have been few reports of genome-wide screening for chromosomal alterations and DNA damage, such as mutations and strand breaks, induced by chronic inflammation. This study utilized high-resolution comparative genomic hybridization to detect copy number variations (CNVs) between normal and cancerous lung cells treated with tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) for 24 weeks to induce chronic inflammation. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis was used to analyze the functions of genes located at the common CNV regions that were induced by chronic inflammation. The results shown that TNF-α induced more CNVs in normal lung cells than in cancerous lung cells. Moreover, Ingenuity Pathway Analysis was used to analyze the function of genes located at the common CNV regions get involved in cancer progression, DNA repair and inflammatory disease. In conclusion, chronic inflammation might be one of a set of factors which transform normal lung cells into tumor cells.
Interactive comment on “ Contrasting trends of mass and optical properties of aerosols over the Northern Hemisphere from 1992 to 2011 ” by K

Introductory Remarks Comment: The authors use regional databases for the Northern Hemisphere to compare PM10 and PM2.5 mass concentration data with daily mean visibility observations which are then converted to optical extinction coefficient values. The work is carried out for 4 regions over the Northern Hemisphere– that of Canada, China, Europe and the US. The result of a decreasing PM10 over the past decade or more is already fairly well established from sources such as National and Regional Environmental Agencies. The findings regarding PM2.5 variations since the mid to late 1990’s are more interesting, as is the decrease in visibility for 3 of the 4 regions
Effects of Starch/ Polycaprolactone-based Blends for Spinal Cord Injury Regeneration in Neurons/Glial Cells Viability and Proliferation

Spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to drastic alterations on the quality of life of afflicted individuals. With the advent of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine where approaches combining biomaterials, cells and growth factors are used, one can envisage novel strategies that can adequately tackle this problem. The objective of this study was to evaluate a blend of starch with poly(ε-caprolactone) (SPCL) aimed to be used for the development of scaffolds spinal cord injury (SCI) repair. SPCL linear parallel filaments were deposited on polystyrene coverslips and assays were carried out using primary cultures of hippocampal neurons and glial cells. Light and fluorescence microscopy observations revealed that both cell populations were not negatively affected by the SPCL-based biomaterial. MTS and total protein quantification indicated that both cell viability and proliferation rates were similar to controls. Both neurons and astrocytes occasionally contacted the surface of SPCL filaments through their dendrites and cytoplasmatic processes, respectively, while microglial cells were unable to do so. Using single cell [Ca2+ ]i imaging, hippocampal neurons were observed growing within the patterned channels and were functional as assessed by the response to a 30 mM KCl stimulus. The present data demonstrated that SPCL-based blends are potentially suitable for the development of scaffolds in SCI regenerative medicine.
From mass to structure: an aromaticity index for high‐resolution mass data of natural organic matter

Recent progress in Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FTICRMS) provided extensive molecular mass data for complex natural organic matter (NOM). Structural information can be deduced solely from the molecular masses for ions with extreme molecular element ratios, in particular low H/C ratios, which are abundant in thermally altered NOM (e.g. black carbon). In this communication we propose a general aromaticity index (AI) and two threshold values as unequivocal criteria for the existence of either aromatic (AI > 0.5) or condensed aromatic structures (AI >= 0.67) in NOM. AI can be calculated from molecular formulae which are derived from exact molecular masses of naturally occurring compounds containing C, H, O, N, S and P and is especially applicable for substances with aromatic cores and few alkylations. In order to test the validity of our model index, AI is applied to FTICRMS data of a NOM deep-water sample from the Weddell Sea (Antarctica), a fulvic acid standard and an artificial dataset of all theoretically possible molecular formulae. For graphical evaluation a ternary plot is suggested for four-dimensional data representation. The proposed aromaticity index is a step towards structural identification of NOM and the molecular identification of black carbon in the environment.
Antioxidant activity of in vitro propagated Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni plants of different origins

An efficient in vitro protocol for propagation of Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni is described. Multiple shoots were induced in vitro from shoot tip and nodal segments on Murashige and Skoog medium containing 6-benzylaminopurine, zeatin, or thidiazuron alone and in combination with naphthalene acetic acid or indole-3-acetic acid. A high frequency of shoot induction as well as maximum number of shoots per shoot tip explant was observed on Murashige and Skoog medium supplemented with 6-benzylaminopurine (1.0 mg L -1 ) alone and combined with indole-3-acetic acid (0.1 mg L -1 ). For root induction, in vitro shoots were transferred to rooting media containing naphthalene acetic acid, indole-3-acetic acid, or indole-3-butyric acid. The highest rooting frequency and the highest number of roots was observed in half-strength Murashige and Skoog medium supplemented with 0.1 mg L -1 indole-3-butyric acid. The rooted in vitro plants were successfully acclimatized in a growth chamber and transferred to the field. Leaf extracts of plants propagated in vitro and adapted to field conditions are characterized by high levels of water-soluble antioxidant capacity (expressed as equivalents of ascorbic acid), phenols, and flavonoids, and therefore by high total antioxidant potential, expressed as DPPH radical scavenging activity.
GENETIC STRUCTURE AND DIVERSITY OF 12 CHINESE INDIGENOUS CHICKEN BREEDS

College of Animal Science and Technology, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, 225009, P. R. China; Chemcial Biology and Physics College, Yantai University, Yantai, 264005, P.R. China; Institute for Animal Breeding, Federal Agricultural Research Centre, Mariensee, 31535 Neustadt, Germany † Presenting author: Steffen Weigend, Institute for Animal Breeding, Federal Agricultural Research Centre Mariensee, Hoeltystr. 10, 31535 Neustadt, Germany steffen.weigend@fal.de
Extending the Business Model Canvas: A Dynamic Perspective

When designing and assessing a business model, a more visual and practical ontology and framework is necessary. We show how an academic theory such as Business Model Ontology has evolved into the Business Model Canvas (BMC) that is used by practitioners around the world today. We draw lessons from usage and define three maturity level. We propose new concepts to help design the dynamic aspect of a business model. On the first level, the BMC supports novice users as they elicit their models; it also helps novices to build coherent models. On the second level, the BMC allows expert users to evaluate the interaction of business model elements by outlining the key threads in the business models' story. On the third level, master users are empowered to create multiple versions of their business models, allowing them to evaluate alternatives and retain the history of the business model's evolution. These new concepts for the BMC which can be supported by Computer-Aided Design tools provide a clearer picture of the business model as a strategic planning tool and are the basis for further research.
Sequence variation in the rabbit major histocompatibility complex DQA gene.

The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, especially class II genes, are correlated with the ability of disease resistance and some economic traits in most vertebrates. In this study, we sequenced exon 2 of rabbit MHC DQA gene, RLA-DQA, in 20 animals raised in China. Sixty-one polymorphisms were observed and 18 haplotypes were defined. Aligning these haplotypes and seven sequences from GenBank, 70 nucleotide polymorphic sites were identified and 24 haplotypes were obtained. Among the 70 polymorphisms, there were 32 transitions, including 20 A/G and 12 C/T, and 32 transversions. At the remaining six polymorphic sites, at least three kinds of nucleotides were observed. On average, RLA-DQA exon 2 was composed of 28.1%A, 25.9%T, 23.2%G, and 22.8%C. Among the 24 haplotypes, 41 amino acid (AA) polymorphisms were observed. The rate of nonsynonymous substitution was higher than that of synonymous substitution (P<0.05), which means RLA-DQA may undergo positive selection. Overall, RLA-DQA has a very high degree of polymorphism not only at the nucleotide level, but also at the AA level. Further studies are needed to discover whether these polymorphisms can be used as genetic markers for association studies in the future.
Thiol-Dependent Peroxidases in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Antioxidant Defense

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) is the causative agent of tuberculosis disease. According to the Global Tuberculosis Control 2010 report of the World Health Organization http://www.who. int/tb/publications/global_report/en/, approximately one-third of the world’s population is latently infected with M. tuberculosis and about two million people die of this disease every year. The emergence of multiand extensivelydrug resistant strains to the currently available drugs makes the development of new therapeutic strategies a priority. However, the mechanisms underlying pathogenesis, virulence and persistence of infections caused by M. tuberculosis are not completely understood (Nathan, 2009; Lawn & Zumla, 2011).
How Do Mortgage Subsidies Affect Home Ownership? Evidence from the Mid-Century Gi Bills

The largest 20th-century increase in U.S. home ownership occurred between 1940 and 1960, associated largely with declining age at first ownership. I shed light on the contribution of coincident government mortgage market interventions by examining home loan benefits granted under the World War II and Korean War GI Bills. The impact of veterans' housing benefits on home ownership is positive for young men, and declines with age. Veterans' benefits increased aggregate home ownership rates primarily by shifting purchase earlier in life, explaining 7.4 percent of the overall 1940-60 increase and 25 percent of the increase for affected cohorts. A rough extrapolation suggests that broader changes in mortgage terms may explain 40 percent of the 1940-60 increase.
Impact of anisotropy on vortex clusters and their dynamics

We investigate the effects of anisotropy on the stability and dynamics of vortex cluster states which arise in Bose-Einstein condensates. Sufficiently strong anisotropies are shown to stabilize states with arbitrary numbers of vortices that are highly unstable in the isotropic limit. Conversely, anisotropy can be used to destabilize states which are stable in the isotropic limit. Near the linear limit, we identify the bifurcations of vortex states including their emergence from linear eigenstates, while in the strongly nonlinear limit, a particle-like description of the dynamics of the vortices in the anisotropic trap is developed. Both are in very good agreement with numerical results. Collective modes of stabilized many vortex cluster states are demonstrated.
THE EFFECT OF PHYSICAL PRIMING OF SEED ON TRAITS AND YIELD OF CORN (ZEA MAYS L.) UNDER WATER DEFICIT CONDITIONS IN IRAN

In order to study the effect of physical priming of seed on traits and yield of corn under water deficit conditions, a two years experiment was conducted during 20142015 as a split plot with three replications in Iran. The main factor includes two levels of irrigation (70 and 110 mm evaporation from pan class A as control and water deficit, respectively) after 8-9 leaves stage of corn and sub-factor includes corn seed treatment with gamma and beta rays, laser wave, magnetic field and ultrasonic waves, all in time intervals of 5 and 10 min. along with a non–primed control. Results indicated that maize seed priming under magnetic field of 5 and 10 min. and gamma and laser rays for 5 min. in normal irrigation regime were the best treatments with 20%, 18%, 16% and 13% increase value, respectively, while seed priming with gamma and laser rays for 10 min. under water deficit condition had the lowest grain yield. To increase corn grain yield in both normal and water deficit conditions, seed priming with the magnetic field in both time intervals, gamma and laser rays only in a short time is recommended.
Disturbance to Marine Benthic Habitats by Trawling and Dredging: Implications for Marine Biodiversity

▪ Abstract The direct effects of marine habitat disturbance by commercial fishing have been well documented. However, the potential ramifications to the ecological function of seafloor communities and ecosystems have yet to be considered. Soft-sediment organisms create much of their habitat's structure and also have crucial roles in many population, community, and ecosystem processes. Many of these roles are filled by species that are sensitive to habitat disturbance. Functional extinction refers to the situation in which species become so rare that they do not fulfill the ecosystem roles that have evolved in the system. This loss to the ecosystem occurs when there are restrictions in the size, density, and distribution of organisms that threaten the biodiversity, resilience, or provision of ecosystem services. Once the functionally important components of an ecosystem are missing, it is extremely difficult to identify and understand ecological thresholds. The extent and intensity of human disturbance to .
Wavelet Network Implementation on an Inexpensive Eight Bit Microcontroller

The approximation of general continuous functions by nonlinear networks is very useful for system modeling and identification. Such approximation methods can be used, for example, in black-box identification of nonlinear systems, signal processing, control, statistical data analysis, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence. Recently neural networks have been established as a general approximation tool for fitting nonlinear models from input/output data due to their ability of learning rather than complicated process functions (Gao, 2002). Their attractive property is the self-learning ability. A neural network can extract the system features from historical training data using the learning algorithm, requiring little or no a priori knowledge about the process (Patan, 2008). This is why during the past few years the nonlinear dynamic modelling of processes by neural networks has been extensively studied (Narendra & Parthasarathy, 1990; Nerrand et al., 1993; Levin, 1992; Rivals & Personnaz, 1996). In standard neural networks, the nonlinearities are approximated by superposition of sigmoidal functions (Cybenko, 1989). In the other hand, the wavelet theory has found many applications in function approximation, numerical analysis and signal processing. Though this attractive theory has offered efficient algorithms for various purposes, their implementations are usually limited to wavelets of small dimension. The reason is that constructing and storing wavelet basis of large dimension are of prohibitive cost. In order to handle problems of larger dimension, it is necessary to develop algorithms whose implementation is less sensitive to the dimension. And it is known that neural networks are powerful tools for handling problems of large dimension. Due to the similarity between wavelet decomposition and one-hidden-layer neural networks, the idea of combining both wavelets and neural networks has been proposed in various works (Zhang & Benveniste, 1992; Pati & Krishnaprasad, 1993; Hong, 1992; Bakshi & Stephanopoulos, 1993; Tsatsanis & Giannakis, 1993;et al., 1994; Delyon et al., 1995; Saad Saoud & Khellaf, 2009). For example, in (Zhang & Benveniste, 1992) wavelet network is introduced as a class of feedforward networks composed of wavelets, in (Pati & Krishnaprasad, 1993) the discrete wavelet transform is used for analyzing and synthesizing
Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network Equilibria Computation and Analysis

This paper presents a comprehensive approach for computing nontrivial equilibria of autonomous Long Short-Term Memory neural networks using a homotopy formulation. Through simulations, it is shown that the eigenvalues of the linearized models around these nontrivial equilibria tend to move closer to the unit circle as the complexity of the training data increases. This provides insights into the dynamical properties of the LSTM neural networks.
Motives and values in farming local cattle breeds in Europe: a survey on 15 breeds

Summary Within the EURECA project (Towards self-sustainable EUropean REgional CAttle breeds), we interviewed a total of 371 farmers of 15 local cattle breeds in eight European countries. Besides collecting data on farmers, land use, herd composition and economic role of cattle, we aimed at understanding farmers’ motives and values in keeping local cattle. The most frequent first reason to keep the local breed was productivity, followed by tradition. When comparing the local breed with a mainstream breed, only in four breeds was productivity considered the same, while in three breeds more than 50 percent of farmers valued the local breed as more profitable. The local breed was valued as always superior or the same on functional traits. Farmers were asked which type of appreciation they thought representatives of various stakeholders had on their local breed: a positive appreciation was observed in 33 percent of farmers. On average across breeds, 39 percent of farmers expect to increase the size of their herd in the next few years and 5 percent plan to give up farming. The degree of dependence of farmers on economic incentives was estimated by asking farmers their expected behaviour under three scenarios of change of subsidies. Most farmers demanded activities for promoting local breed farming. The results are discussed in terms of breed sustainability and conservation.
Oblate Spheroidal Kinematic

The kinematic dynamo problem is solved for a uniformly electrically-conducting fluid filling an oblate spheroidal volume with insulating exterior. The solution method uses a class of oblate spheroidal toroidalpoloidal fields in a non-orthogonal coordinate system. Scaling of coordinates and fields to a spherical geometry leads to a modified form of the kinematic dynamo problem with a geometric anisotropic diffusion and a modified current-free condition in the exterior, which must be solved explicitly. The scaling allows the use of well-developed spherical harmonic techniques in angle and large aspect ratios. Dynamo solutions are found for three axisymmetric flows in oblate spheroids with semi-axis ratios 1 ≤ a/c ≤ 25. For larger aspect ratios strong magnetic fields may occur in any region of the spheroid, depending on the flow, but the external fields for all three flows are weak and concentrated near the axis or periphery of the spheroid.
A novel methodology for quality assessment of voxelized point clouds

Recent trends in multimedia technologies indicate a significant growth of interest for new imaging modalities that aim to provide immersive experiences by increasing the engagement of the user with the content. Among other solutions, point clouds denote an alternative 3D content representation that allows visualization of static or dynamic scenes in a more immersive way. As in many imaging applications, the visual quality of a point cloud content is of crucial importance, as it directly affects the user experience. Despite the recent efforts from the scientific community, subjective and objective quality assessment for this type of visual data representation remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new, alternative framework for quality assessment of point clouds. In particular, we develop a rendering software, which performs real-time voxelization and projection of the 3D point clouds onto 2D planes, while allowing interaction between the user and the projected views. These projected images are then employed by two-dimensional objective quality metrics, in order to predict the perceptual quality of the displayed stimuli. Benchmarking results, using subjective ratings that were obtained through experiments in two test laboratories, show that our framework provides high predictive power and outperforms the state of the art in objective quality assessment of point cloud imaging.