Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
One‐pass Tillage for Summer Fallow Under Arid Summer Conditions

Millions of acres of cropland with as low as 6 inches annual precipitation are used for production of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. Despite soil conservation advances, soil erosion continues to be a problem. This on-farm study analyzed seed-zone soil water under farmerimplemented fallow tillage practices to find out if very low-disturbance systems are possible. A low-disturbance, wide-blade undercutter sweep treatment was similar or superior to the farmer’s more intensive conventional tillage system. A subsequent test at four paired no-till-conventionally-tilled summer-fallow sites demonstrated that a single pass of an undercutter sweep in the no-till field could preserve seed-zone moisture comparable to the more intensive multiple-pass conventional tillage. Despite conventional wisdom, summer-fallow soil mulches do not need to be finely pulverized or repeatedly tilled to be effective.
Being There Together

Virtual environments provide places for 'being there together', for avatars to interact with each other in computer-generated spaces. They range from immersive systems in which people have life-size tracked avatar bodies to large-scale spaces such as Second Life where populations of users socialize in persistent virtual worlds. This book draws together research on how people interact in virtual environments: What difference does avatar appearance make? How do avatars collaborate and play together? How do the type of system and the space affect how people engage with each other? How does interaction between avatars differ from face-to-face interaction? What can social scientists learn from experiments and other studies of how people interact in virtual environments? What are the ethical and social issues in doing this research, and in the uses of this technology? And how do virtual environments differ from other communication technologies such as videoconferencing systems and other new media? This book is a state-of-the art survey of research on these topics, and offers a framework for understanding this technology and its future implications.
Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Models for Clinical Search Recommendation

With increasing and extensive use of electronic health records, clinicians are often under time pressure when they need to retrieve important information efficiently among large amounts of patients' health records in clinics. While a search function can be a useful alternative to browsing through a patient's record, it is cumbersome for clinicians to search repeatedly for the same or similar information on similar patients. Under such circumstances, there is a critical need to build effective recommender systems that can generate accurate search term recommendations for clinicians. In this manuscript, we developed a hybrid collaborative filtering model using patients' encounter and search term information to recommend the next search terms for clinicians to retrieve important information fast in clinics. For each patient, the model will recommend terms that either have high co-occurrence frequencies with his/her most recent ICD codes or are highly relevant to the most recent search terms on this patient. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the proposed model, and the experimental results demonstrate that our model can outperform all the state-of-the-art baseline methods for top-N search term recommendation on different datasets.
Pasture production measurements on hill country

Abstract Pasture dry matter (d.m.) production was assessed over 48 weeks on steep unploughable hillsides under sheep grazing, using a “difference” and a “trim” cutting technique. Cuts were made at three- and six-weekly intervals, using battery-operated sheep shears. Total yields ranged from 7,190 lb d.m. per surface acre to 13,020 lb d.m. per surface acre, according to cutting treatment. Yields estimated by the trim technique were 60% larger than those estimated by the difference technique. Three-weekly cutting gave larger yields than six-weekly cutting. The three-weekly trim technique gave the least variable yields, and the six-weekly difference technique the most variable yields. Pasture composition, the effect of microtopography on yield, and soil nutrients were also examined.
Response of multiple generations of beet armyworm, Spodoptera exigua (Hübner), feeding on transgenic Bt cotton

Development, reproduction and food utilization of three successive generations of beet armyworm, Spodoptera exigua (Hübner), fed on transgenic and non‐transgenic Bt cotton were examined. Significantly longer larval life‐span and lower pupal weight were observed in three successive generations of S. exigua fed on transgenic Bt cotton compared with non‐transgenic Bt cotton. Significantly higher survival rate and adult fecundity of S. exigua were found in three successive generations of S. exigua fed on transgenic Bt cotton compared with non‐transgenic Bt cotton. The survival rate and adult fecundity of S. exigua were occurred significant increase in the third generation compared with the first generation after feeding on transgenic Bt cotton. Significantly lower consumption, frass and relative growth rate (RGR) were observed in three successive generations of S. exigua fed on transgenic Bt cotton compared with non‐transgenic Bt cotton. Cotton variety significantly affected all indices of larval consumption and utilization in three successive generations of S. exigua, except for efficiency of conversion of ingested food. However, beet armyworm generation only significantly affected RGR of S. exigua. The results of this study indicated food quality on the diet‐utilization efficiency of S. exigua was different along with beet armyworm generation. Measuring multigenerational development and food utilization of S. exigua at individual and population level in response to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) can provide a more meaningful evaluation of long‐term population dynamics than experiments on a single generation. It is imperative to develop an appropriate multigenerational pest management tactic to monitor the field population dynamics of non‐target pests (e.g., beet armyworm) in agricultural Bt cotton ecosystem.
Adaptation of growing pigs to changes in environmental temperature

Pigs fed ad libitum were exposed to changes from 22 to 33°C and from 33 to 20°C. Responses were investigated in two groups of animals kept for three successive periods of four weeks at 22°, 33° and finally 20°C. Twenty-four hr after the first change, from 22 to 33°C, there was a decline in body weight; after the second change, from 33 to 20°C, there was a large increase. After the change to 33°C, feed intake by the second day and growth rate for the first week were about the same as at the end of the four weeks, but about 12 days were required for water intake, rectal temperature and respiratory rate to reach steady values. After the change from 33 to 20°C, steady values for respiratory rate and rectal temperature were reached in one and 12 days respectively. The rate of gain in weight increased to reach a peak nine days following the temperature change and then declined.
Demographic Importance of the Life-Cycle Components in Sceloporus grammicus

Abstract: Survival, growth, and fecundity are considered as the three main components of the life cycle of any living organism. The relative contribution of these three components to average fitness may vary drastically among populations of single species. Examining this interpopulation variation and understanding its causes can provide insight on the particular selection pressures that drive phenotypic divergence among populations. We conducted a demographic study of eight distinct populations of the viviparous lizard Sceloporus grammicus in central Mexico. We estimated variation among populations in stage-specific survival, growth, and fecundity. Using these data we constructed site-specific population projection matrices to estimate population growth rates, which we interpreted as measures of the average fitness of each population. Elasticity analysis was used to calculate the relative contribution of the three life-cycle components to population growth rates. The three life-cycle components had relatively high elasticity values, which meant that survival, growth, and fecundity contributed similarly to fitness. However, some variation was found among populations. We searched for potential associations between the observed interpopulation variation in these measures of relative importance for average fitness and interpopulation variation in temperature, rainfall, population density, microhabitat availability, degree of human-induced disturbance, and overall mortality. None of these environmental factors or their interactions could explain the observed interpopulation variation in the relative importance of the life-cycle components. Our results provide insight about how these viviparous lizards allocate resources to survival, growth, and fecundity in different environments.
ANÁLISE CULTURAL DE PRODUTOS AUDIOVISUAIS: RELATO DE CONSTRUÇÃO DE PROTOCOLO TEÓRICO-METODOLÓGICO

Relata-se, nesta apresentacao, as atividades desenvolvidas no âmbito de um projeto de pesquisa em andamento, coordenado pelo autores, cujo objetivo principal e a elaboracao de um modelo de analise aplicada, afinado com a tradicao dos estudos culturais em sua relacao com o campo da Comunicacao. Parte da proposta de analise cultural, delineada por Williams (2003) e Johnson (2010), e se justifica no intuito de compreender as articulacoes entre o produto audiovisual e suas instâncias de producao e consumo.
Efficient Operator Placement for Distributed Data Stream Processing Applications

In the last few years, a large number of real-time analytics applications rely on the Data Stream Processing (DSP) so to extract, in a timely manner, valuable information from distributed sources. Moreover, to efficiently handle the increasing amount of data, recent trends exploit the emerging presence of edge/Fog computing resources so to decentralize the execution of DSP applications. Since determining the Optimal DSP Placement (for short, ODP) is an NP-hard problem, we need efficient heuristics that can identify a good application placement on the computing infrastructure in a feasible amount of time, even for large problem instances. In this paper, we present several DSP placement heuristics that consider the heterogeneity of computing and network resources; we divide them in two main groups: model-based and model-free. The former employ different strategies for efficiently solving the ODP model. The latter implement, for the problem at hand, some of the well-known meta-heuristics, namely greedy first-fit, local search, and tabu search. By leveraging on ODP, we conduct a thorough experimental evaluation, aimed to assess the heuristics’ efficiency and efficacy under different configurations of infrastructure size, application topology, and optimization objectives.
A checklist of the vascular flora of El Morro National Monument, Cibola County, New Mexico1

Abstract Three hundred and ninety-one vascular plant taxonomic entities within 61 families and 219 genera were documented for El Morro National Monument, an area of 419 hectares. These include 140 new non-horticultural records for El Morro and 60 records that had not been recorded in either Cibola County or nearby Valencia County. The checklist includes 55 entities that are exotic to El Morro. One species tracked by the New Mexico Natural Heritage Program, Besseya arizonica (Arizona coraldrops), occurs at El Morro. El Morro is dominated by juniper (Juniperus monosperma) woodland, with ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) in mesic sites, and shrublands in drier sites.
Evaluation of Vision Behaviors in Children with Cortical Visual Impairment Due to Cerebral Palsy (CP)

1. MSc Candidate in Optometry, Department of Optometry, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2. The low vision research center, Rehabilitation faculty, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3. PhD, Senior Lecturer, Department of Ophthalmology, School of Medicine, Baqiyatollah University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 4. MSc. Lecturer, Department of Optometry, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Application of PCR-SSCP to Species Identification of Fishery Products

A method of DNA analysis has been developed to verify authenticity of labelled raw material of canned fish or in products made from closely related fish species (tuna, eel, salmon, trout and sturgeon). Short segments (123–358 bp) of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene were amplified by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and analysed by single strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) to get species-specific patterns of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA). DNA strands were separated by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and visualised by silver staining. Differentiation between four eel species was possible. Each of three types of sturgeon caviar gave a characteristic pattern of ssDNA. Canned sardine, herring, tuna and other species expressed specific bands of ssDNA. © 1997 SCI.
Do positive distractions improve pediatric patient satisfaction in children undergoing medical procedures

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not positive distractions improve pediatric patient satisfaction in children undergoing medical procedures. STUDY DESIGN: Systematic review compiling data from two randomized controlled trials and one convenience prospective trial between 2012 and 2015, all in the English language. DATA SOURCES: After a thorough search of PubMed and Cochrane, three pertinent studies were found to include in this review. The selected studies were evaluated to assess the effectiveness of positive distraction techniques in improving pediatric patient satisfaction. OUTCOMES MEASURED: Decrease in anxiety and pain symptoms measured by the Yale preoperative anxiety scale, behavioral observation and self-reported assessments were assessed. RESULTS: Each of the selected studies found that the use of positive distraction techniques resulted in lower anxiety, stress and pain levels for children who were given a positive distraction technique, when compared to the children who were not exposed to a distraction technique. Lee et al. observed that children who viewed an animated cartoon exhibited lower anxiety levels in the operating room (p<0.001). Quan et al. concluded the treatment group who did not have a positive distraction technique of lights or visual distractions, exhibited higher stress throughout the radiology procedure (p<0.001). The Downey et al. study assessed there was a significant difference between the children who viewed a cartoon compared to the children who underwent a standard medical procedure, and showed significant with an F value of 5.523, significant at 0.021. CONCLUSIONS: The results of these studies demonstrated that the use of positive distraction techniques in the pediatric population is an effective method to alleviate stress, pain, and anxiety for children undergoing a medical procedure. These interventions have shown to improve a child’s overall satisfaction towards medical procedures.
In vitro larvicidal action of Paecilomyces marquandii crude extract

The aim of this present work is to produce Paecilomyces marquandii crude extract and its in vitro larvicidal action. Saccharose, glucose, coffee residue, soluble starch, insoluble starch, soybean meal and wheat bran were the carbon sources tested. NaNO3, NH4Cl, soybean meal, (NH4)2SO4, yeast extract, casein peptone, tryptone and NH4NO3 were the nitrogen sources tested. Central composite design was applied to determine the optimal concentration of the tested significant variables. The best carbon sources were glucose and soybean meal, while the best nitrogen source observed was tryptone. The greatest value for proteolytic activity was 246.58 U/ml due to the concentration of tryptone and pH value. Results showed that the optimum pH was 8.0, while the optimum temperature was 60°C. The optimized extract obtained from P. marquandii exhibited in vitro larvicidal activity with 60.1% reduction. Tryptone and pH optimized the production of proteases by fungus P. marquandii. Key words: Nematophagous fungi, Paecilomyces marquandii, crude extract, larvicidal action, surface response.
Text Semantic Annotation: A Distributed Methodology Based on Community Coherence

Text annotation is the process of identifying the sense of a textual segment within a given context to a corresponding entity on a concept ontology. As the bag of words paradigm’s limitations become increasingly discernible in modern applications, several information retrieval and artificial intelligence tasks are shifting to semantic representations for addressing the inherent natural language polysemy and homonymy challenges. With extensive application in a broad range of scientific fields, such as digital marketing, bioinformatics, chemical engineering, neuroscience, and social sciences, community detection has attracted great scientific interest. Focusing on linguistics, by aiming to identify groups of densely interconnected subgroups of semantic ontologies, community detection application has proven beneficial in terms of disambiguation improvement and ontology enhancement. In this paper we introduce a novel distributed supervised knowledge-based methodology employing community detection algorithms for text annotation with Wikipedia Entities, establishing the unprecedented concept of community Coherence as a metric for local contextual coherence compatibility. Our experimental evaluation revealed that deeper inference of relatedness and local entity community coherence in the Wikipedia graph bears substantial improvements overall via a focus on accuracy amelioration of less common annotations. The proposed methodology is propitious for wider adoption, attaining robust disambiguation performance.
Multiple effects of salinity on photosynthesis of the protist Euglena gracilis

The effect of NaCI in the culture medium on growth, photosynthesis and cell content of chlorophyll, K + , Na + , Ca 2+ and Mg 2+ in Euglena gracilis was studied. O 2 production, quantum yield of photosystem II (PSII), the non-photochemical quenching of chlorophyll fluorescence (q N ) and the chlorophyll a/b ratio all diminished by 0.2 M NaCI. Respiration and chlorophyll a and b increased, whereas the photochemical quenching (q p ) of chlorophyll fluorescence was not affected by 0.2 M NaCI. Salt stress also induced an increase in cell volume and in K + and Na + concentrations, but decreased the concentrations of Ca 2+ and Mg 2+ . Except for a protective effect on O 2 production, additional Ca 2+ in the culture medium did not attenuate the salt effect on the parameters measured. The addition of HCO 3 - restored the PSII quantum yield of O 2 production in cells grown in high salt. Salt stress promoted a decrease in the apparent rate of quinone A (Q A ) reduction and an apparent obstruction of Q B reduction, which were not prevented by excess HCO 3 - ; the addition of 3-(3,4-dichlorophenyl)-1,1-dimethylurea (DCMU) did not increase chlorophyll fluorescence in salt-grown cells. These results indicate that photosynthesis in Euglena grown under salt stress exhibits: (1) diminution of the HCO 3 - -dependent water-splitting activity of PSII ; (2) inhibition of the electron transfer at the quinone pool level; (3) probable increase in thylakoid stacking (as indicated by the effect on the chlorophyll a/b ratio): and (4) dissipation of the H + gradient across the thylakoid membranes (as indicated by the decrease of q N ).
Emergence of Topographical Correspondences between Deep Neural Network and Human Ventral Visual Cortex

Recent computer vision work dissecting information from within the layers of deep neural networks revealed emergence of humaninterpretable concepts within these artificial units. In the current study, using representational similarity analysis, we compare convolutional layers of DNNs trained for object and scene recognition (hybrid AlexNet) with regions along ventral visual pathway to ask whether these layers and regions share topographical correspondence. Results reveal the emergence of a brain inspired topographical organization in this hybrid-net, such that layer-units showing strong central-bias were associated with cortical regions with foveal tendencies, and layer-units showing greater selectivity for image boundaries and backgrounds were associated with cortical regions showing strong peripheral preference. The emergence of a categorical topographical correspondence between deepnets and visual regions of interests further strengthens the role of deepnets as models of the inner workings of perceptual networks in the brain.
Pose estimation with correspondences determination

Pose estimation by monocular is finding the pose of the object by a single image of feature points on the object, which must meet the requirements of detecting all the feature points and matching them in the image. But it will be difficult to obtain the correct pose if part of the feature points are occluded when the object moving a large scale. We proposed a method for finding the pose on the condition that the correspondences between the object points and the image points are unknown. The method combines two algorithms: one algorithm is SoftAssign, which constructs a weight matrix of feature points and image points, and determines the correspondences by iteration loop processing; the other algorithm is OI(orthogonal iteration), which derives an iterative algorithm which directly computes orthogonal and globally convergent rotation matrices.We nest the two algorithms into one iteration loop.An appropriate pose will be chosen from a set of reference poses as the initial pose of object at the beginning of the loop, then we process the weight matrix to confirm the correspondences and calculate the optimal solution of rotation matrices alternately until the object space collinearity error is less than the threshold, each estimation will be closer to the truth pose than the last one through every iteration loop. Experimentally, the method proved to be efficient and have a high precision pose estimation of 3D object with large-scale motion.