Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic diversity and structure of two endangered mole salamander species of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt

The most important factor leading to amphibian population declines and extinctions is habitat degradation and destruction. To help prevent further extinctions, studies are needed to make appropriate conservation decisions in small and fragmented populations. The goal of this study was to provide data from the population genetics of two micro-endemic mole salamanders from the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Nine microsatellite markers were used to study the population genetics of 152 individuals from twoAmbystomaspecies. We sampled 38 individuals in two localities forA. altamiraniandA. rivualre. We found medium to high levels of genetic diversity expressed as heterozygosity in the populations. However, all the populations presented few alleles per locus and genotypes. We found strong genetic structure between populations for each species. Effective population size was small but similar to that of the studies from other mole salamanders with restricted distributions or with recently fragmented habitats. Despite the medium to high levels of genetic diversity expressed as heterozygosity, we found few alleles, evidence of a genetic bottleneck and that the effective population size is small in all populations. Therefore, this study is important to propose better management plans and conservation efforts for these species.
Preterm Births and Educational Disadvantage

Although preterm births are the leading cause of perinatal morbidity and mortality in advanced economies, evidence about the consequences of such births later in life is limited. Using Swedish population register data on cohorts born 1982-1994 (N=1,087,750), we examine the effects of preterm births on school grades using sibling fixed effect models which compare individuals with their non-preterm siblings. We test for heterogeneous effects by degree of prematurity, as well as whether family socioeconomic resources and school characteristics can compensate for any negative effects of premature births. Our results show that preterm births can have negative effects on school grades, but these negative effects are largely confined to children born extremely preterm (<28 weeks of gestation, i.e. born at least 10 weeks earlier). Children born moderately preterm (i.e. born up to 5 weeks early) suffer no ill effects. We do not find any evidence for the moderating effect of parental socioeconomic resources. Our results indicate that school environment is very important for the outcomes of preterm born children, such that those born extremely preterm that are in the top decile of schools have as good grades as those born fullterm that are in an average school. However, good schools appear to lift scores for all groups, and as a result that gap between extremely preterm and full-term children remains also in the best schools. This highlights the role of schools as institutions that may either reduce or reinforce the early life course disadvantage.
Variable Precision Capabilities in RISC-V Processors

This work proposes to extend RISC-V with Variable Precision (VP) Floating-Point (FP) capabilities to accelerate scientific computing applications. It adopts the UNUM type I FP format in main memory to overcome the limitation of the IEEE 754 standard. Our work comprises: 1/ a VP FP RISC-V coprocessor; 2/ a RISC-V ISA extension for the unit, 3/ and a programming model to support VP floats in C/C++. Results have shown that our system can be more than 100x faster than the MPFR library when executing basic arithmetic operations.
Antecedents of Relational Capabilities in an Arab context: the case of Industrial Firms in Jordan

Within the business-to-business and international marketing fields it is recognised that interorganisational relationships are context bound and require the development of responsive relational capabilities. However, there is dearth of knowledge with regard to the institutional influences on companies’ relational capabilities, particularly across border and in the Arab Middle East region. This study draws on the relational view, relationship marketing and institutional theory to identify and highlight the influence of context-specific relational antecedents on the relational capability of firms in managing inter-organisational relationships with key customers in emerging economies in the Arab Middle Eastern Region. It is based on an extensive qualitative enquiry that utilises 68 in-depth semistructured interviews conducted in Jordan with indigenous and multinational/western firms. It concludes that relational capabilities within an Arab context are shaped by a number of relational antecedents and contingencies that are embedded in broader institutional contexts that have implications for the ways resources are utilised and capabilities adapted and developed in order to be more competitive in such an uncertain and dynamic environment.
The Impact of Self-Interaction Attention on the Extraction of Drug-Drug Interactions

Since a large amount of medical treatments requires the assumption of multiple drugs, the discovery of how these interact with each other, potentially causing health problems to the patients, is the subject of a huge quantity of documents. In order to obtain this information from free text, several methods involving deep learning have been proposed over the years. In this paper we introduce a Recurrent Neural Network-based method combined with the Self-Interaction Attention Mechanism. Such a method is applied to the DDI2013Extraction task, a popular challenge concerning the extraction and the classification of drug-drug interactions. Our focus is to show its effect over the tendency to predict the majority class and how it differs from the other types of attention mechanisms.
Diagnosis of Cylindrocarpon destructans Using Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay

The Korean Society of Plant Pathology This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 식물병연구 Res. Plant Dis. 25(3): 131-135 (2019) https://doi.org/10.5423/RPD.2019. 25.3. 131 Note Open Access
Development and Implementation of a Low-Cost Switching Control Software for Multi-level Converter

Multilevel converters have been designed and implemented many decades ago in many countries around the word. However, in West Africa, these systems are difficult to implement because of lack of expertise and hardware which are usually very expensive. This paper proposes an implementation of an Embedded Switching Control Software (ESCS) code on Arduino 2560 hardware for multi-level systems using Model-Based Design (MBD) approach that Arduino 2560 control hardware platforms are low-cost system and locally available in many Africa countries. Thus, it can enable the validation of complex energy conversion systems using local components for research and education purposes. The paper provides detailed steps to reach such goals by proposing a Carrier Based Space Vector Pulse Wide Modulation (CBSVPWM) for three-phase multi-level inverters. A simple model of CB-SVPWM is considered to automatically generate the ESCS code for a single-phase five-level Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter then deployed on Arduino 2560 hardware conforming to On-Target Rapid Prototyping (OTRP) approach. The simulated and practical results confirm that MBD with Simulink offers a convenient approach to develop ESCS code for multi-level converters.
Virtual reality walkthrough of laser scanned environments

Lauri Varjo: Virtual reality walkthrough of laser scanned environments Bachelor’s thesis, 23 pages, 3 appendix pages Tampere University Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Electrical Engineering May 2019 Virtual reality has been continuously growing for a long time. The applications of virtual reality can range anywhere from industrial uses to entertainment, simulation and training. There are numerous applications which would benefit from replicating an environment from the real world in the virtual reality. This has become possible with the development of surface reconstruction methods, laser scanning and virtual reality software and hardware. The required equipment has also become more affordable, even for personal use. There are many different methods and aspects to every part of the process. This thesis explores the theory and practice of different steps of the whole pipeline from a realworld environment into virtual reality. The pipeline consists of scanning the environment, surface reconstruction from the scans, and the development of the virtual reality application. Existing methods, software and tools are used to achieve a functional virtual reality application, with an environment replicated from the real world. Different aspects of the process are discussed, and the results are analysed.
Perspectives on the use of lipoic acid in the support of disease treatment*

Lipoic acid (LA) is a natural compound present in food and used as a dietary supplement. LA is endogenously synthetized in small amounts from octanoid acid in the mitochondria. This compound occurs naturally in vegetables such as spinach, broccoli and in animal tissues, in the kidneys, heart and liver. It has been shown that LA is a cofactor in the multienzyme complexes that are responsible for oxidative decarboxylation of α- ketoacids. LA and its reduced form, dihydrolipoic acid (DHLA), have many biological functions leading to a wide variety of actions such as anti-inflammation and antioxidant protection, scavenging of reactive oxygen species, regenerating other antioxidant agents, such as vitamins C and E, and cytosolic glutathione, chelating the transitional metal ions (e.g. iron and copper), and modulating the signal transduction of nuclear factor. Many authors regard LA as a potentially useful agent in the treatment and/or prevention of many diseases such as diabetes mellitus, overweight, obesity, hypertension, heart diseases, inflammation. This review concentrates on the role of LA in the treatment of diabetes mellitus, obesity, inflammation and blood pressure regulation. LA can be considered as a potentially useful drug in treatment of many diseases, particularly those related to excessive production of free radicals.
The Impact of Market Fluctuations on Financial Bond Liquidity

The global financial crises often strongly affect the decisions of investors. This paper studies whether domestic and foreign institutional investors change their investment strategies during crisis periods by shifting from high-risk and high-yield investment products to more conservative bond-related securities. In particular, this paper focuses mainly on financial bonds in the interbank market. This paper examines the causes of pricing discrepancies of financial bonds between financial crisis periods and normal market conditions. In addition, as China's bond market is still at its developing phase, this paper studies whether some widely used liquidity measures in the US and European markets play a significant role in the pricing of China's financial bonds. The result shows that liquidity explains an additional 28% of bond yield spread during normal market conditions, while it increases the R-squared from 7.58% to 45.93% during the three crisis periods.
Statistical analysis for brain EIT images using SPM

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a relatively new medical imaging method, which is based on the physiological property that different tissues have different impedances. EIT imaging of brain provides neuroimages by detecting functional impedance changes in the brain caused by cell swelling, blood volume and flow increase, and neuronal depolarisation. These changes are very subtle, therefore imaging analysis is usually needed to enhance the images. In this paper, statistical processing is adopted to analyse brain EIT images. The feasibility of using SPM (Statistical Parametric Mapping), a popular statistical software package used for neuroimages obtained by SPECT/PET or fMRI, to analyse simulated brain EIT images is studied. A scheme of utilizing SPM to interpret brain EIT data is presented. The experimental results suggest that it is reasonable to process brain EIT images with SPM.
The Impact of CEO Characteristics on Earnings Per Share and Earnings Management

The purposes of research were to examine the effect of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) characteristics’ on earnings per share (EPS) and earnings management. The research samples are 104 manufacture companies listed in the Indonesian Stock Exchange 2013-2017. Hypotheses test use multiple regression. The result shows that CEO's narcissism, education, age, tenure, and nationality have an effect on EPS, while CEO's gender has no effect on EPS. CEO's narcissism and education have a positive effect on accrual earnings management, while CEO's gender and nationality have a negative effect on accrual earnings management to manage EPS. CEO's age and tenure have no effect on accrual earnings management. CEO's narcissism has a positive effect on real earnings management; while CEO's gender, education, tenure, and nationality have a negative effect on real earnings management to manage EPS. CEO's age has no effect on real earnings management.
Study of Informed Searching Algorithm for Finding the Shortest Path

While technological revolution has active role to the increase of computer information, growing computational capabilities of devices, and raise the level of knowledge abilities, and skills. Increase developments in science and technology. In city area traffic the shortest path finding is very difficult in a road network. Shortest path searching is very important in some special case as medical emergency, spying, theft catching, fire brigade etc. In this paper used the shortest path algorithms for solving the shortest path problem. The shortest path can be single pair shortest path problem or all pairs shortest path problem. Search problems can be classified by the amount of information that is available to the search process. This paper discuss briefly the shortest path algorithms such as Dijkstra's algorithm, Bellman-Ford algorithm, Floyd- Warshall algorithm, Johnson's algorithm, Greedy best first Search, A* Search algorithm, Memory-bounded heuristic search, Hill-climbing search, Simulated annealing search and Local beam search.
Transcatheter closure of perimembranous ventricular septal defect

The author's reply: The letter from Melbourne by Dumitrescu et al reporting complete heart block occurring in 3 of 36 patients after transcatheter closure of perimembranous ventricular septal defect adds weight to the concern expressed about this complication.1 Most disturbing is the detection of new‐onset heart block more than 3 years after the interventional catheter procedure. This supports the view that steroid treatment in the immediate postimplantation period will not necessarily prevent the late development of this important complication. The age or size of the affected patients at the time of device implantation is not stated, but all were children. Interventional catheterisation occlusion of a perimembranous ventricular septal defect in children, whether using the existing asymmetric Amplatzer occluder or other occlusive devices, should be performed with caution, and only as part of a prospective clinical trial or with submission of data to a registry. Continuing follow‐up of patients who have undergone the procedure is required. There is a responsibility to alert patients and their families to seek advice should relevant symptoms suggesting bradycardia occur, and also to report further experience of heart block should this be recognised. If similar experience of late‐onset heart block becomes widespread, the question of prophylactic pacemaker insertion may even need consideration.
ARGUMENTATION AND PROOF: DISCUSSING A "SUCCESSFUL" CLASSROOM DISCUSSION

This paper concerns a discussion in a university course of primary school teacher education. The discussion was aimed at developing awareness about the condition of "equally likely possible cases" in the classical definition of probability. During the discussion students engaged several times in reflections about validity of statements, validity of inferences, etc. The aim of this paper is to present some tools to analyze the discussion and hypothesize possible follow-ups, related to the performed analysis and the aim of developing awareness about the "rules" of argumentation and proof.
SERVICE QUALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION STUDY OF TURKISH STUDENTS IN MALAYSIAN UNIVERSITIES

Article attempts to analyze service quality in higher education institutions of Malaysia. Study used Gap Model presented by Parasuraman et al. (1985, 1988) to identify difference between expected quality and perceived quality in higher education institutions of Malaysia. Study focused to identify gaps of Turkish students in Malaysian universities Five basic dimensions of service quality measured through SERVQUAL (Instrument for service quality measurement), these dimensions are tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. A stratified sample of 41 Turkish students has been selected from top five public universities in Malaysia. Results showed negative service quality gap in higher education institutions of Malaysia from Turkish students perceptive which indicated perceived service quality is below than expectations of Turkish students in Malaysian universities.
A multivariate analysis of factors associated with physical functioning limitations in the Greek elderly population

Abstract This paper examines associations of socio-demographic, behavioural risk and health related factors with the physical functioning of Greeks aged 50 or higher, applying logistic regression models to data derived from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Three aspects of self-reported limitations are considered: in activities of daily living (ADL), in instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) and difficulties related to stamina, strength, arm and fine motor function (Mobility). Our findings indicate that limitations are more severe among the older old and among women. A strong inverse relationship has been found between IADLs, Mobility and socio-economic indicators while education was proved a more robust predictor than income. Obesity and lack of regular physical activity are significant risk factors. Comorbidity substantially increases chances of disability, as does depression. Considering specific chronic conditions, stroke and cerebrovascular disease, Parkinson’s, arthritis or rheumatism, hip and femoral fractures and cataracts have the strongest associations with functional impairment.
3-D Simulation of Particle and Gas Flow Behavior in a Riser with Venturi Pipe Inlet

The hydrodynamic behavior of a gas-solid flow in a 14-m high riser with a 45 inclined standpipe using a venturi pipe inlet was predicted using a transient three-dimensional hydrodynamic model. The model based on the kinetic theory of a granular flow was constructed using commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The hydrodynamic behaviors of the gas-solid flow in the risers with a conventional straight pipe inlet and with a venturi pipe inlet were compared. In addition, the effect of throat diameter of the venturi pipe was studied. The solid concentration over the cross-sectional area of the riser is asymmetric because of the asymmetry of the particle inlet. The simulation results showed that a riser with a venturi pipe inlet can improve the solid flow behavior in the region near the riser entering region. In the riser with a venturi inlet, the solid particles flow in the standpipe with less gas blocking and higher velocity than those in a riser with a conventional inlet. The throat diameter has significant effects on the flow pattern in the riser. The solid velocity increases as the throat diameter decreases. Therefore, a venturi pipe inlet with proper design can decrease the backward gas flow into the standpipe.
Physical Restraint Among Hospitalized Nursing Home Residents

Abstract We examined physical restraint use among 1856 nursing home residents hospitalized with hip fracture using a data set of hip fracture patients in 20 U. S. hospitals from 1983-1993. Mean age of patients was 85.2 years, 81.7% were women, and 91.3% were white. Rate of physical restraint use was 59.4%. Pre-operative physical restraint use was predicted by younger age, confusion, dementia, and needing assistance or dependency in activities of daily living (ADL). Physical restraint use following surgery was predicted by pre-operative physical restraint use, confusion, dementia, and lower co-morbidity of illness. At hospital discharge, restrained patients were more likely to be dependent in ADL and continence. The reduction of physical restraints among hospitalized nursing home residents will require attention to a multiplicity of factors that contribute to restraint use.
DISSERTATION NONPARAMETRIC FUNCTION SMOOTHING: FIDUCIAL INFERENCE OF FREE KNOT SPLINES AND ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS Submitted by

OF DISSERTATION NONPARAMETRIC FUNCTION SMOOTHING: FIDUCIAL INFERENCE OF FREE KNOT SPLINES AND ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS Nonparametric function estimation has proven to be a useful tool for applied statisticians. Classic techniques such as locally weighted regression and smoothing splines are being used in a variety of circumstances to address questions at the forefront of ecological theory. We first examine an ecological threshold problem and define a threshold as where the derivative of the estimated functions changes states (negative, possibly zero, or positive) and present a graphical method that examines the state changes across a wide interval of smoothing levels. We apply this method to macro-invertabrate data from the Arkansas River. Next we investigate a measurement error model and a generalization of the commonly used regression calibration method whereby a nonparametric function is used instead of a linear function. We present a simulation study to assess the effectiveness of the method and apply the method to a water quality monitoring data set. The possibility of defining thresholds as knot point locations in smoothing splines led to the investigation of the fiducial distribution of free-knot splines. After introducing the theory behind fiducial inference, we then derive conditions sufficient to for asymptotic normality of the multivariate fiducial density. We then derive the fiducial density for an arbitrary degree spline with an arbitrary number of knot points. We