Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of pyric herbivory on prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus spp) habitat

The reduction and simplification of grasslands has led to the decline of numerous species of grassland fauna, particularly grassland-obligate birds. Prairie-chickens (Tympanuchus spp.) are an example of obligate grassland birds that have declined throughout most of their distribution and are species of conservation concern. Pyric herbivory has been suggested as a land management strategy for enhancing prairie-chicken habitat and stabilizing declining population trends. We assessed differences in vegetation structure created by pyric herbivory compared to fire-only treatments to determine whether pyric herbivory increased habitat heterogeneity for prairie-chickens, spatially or temporally. Our study was performed at four sites in the southern Great Plains, all within the current or historic distribution of either lesser (T. pallidicinctus), greater (T. cupido), or Attwater’s (T. cupido attwateri) prairie-chickens. Key vegetation characteristics of grass cover and vegetation height in pyric herbivory and fire-only treatments were within the recommended range of values for prairie-chickens during their distinct life history stages. However, patches managed via pyric herbivory provided approximately 5% more forb cover than fire-only treatments for almost 30 months post-fire. Additionally, pyric herbivory extended the length of time bare ground was present after fires. Pyric herbivory also reduced vegetation height and biomass, with mean vegetation height in pyric herbivory treatments lagging behind fire-only treatments by approximately 15 months. Canopy cover in fire-only treatments exceeded levels recommended for prairie-chicken young within 12 months post-fire. However, canopy cover in pyric herbivory treatments never exceeded the maximum recommended levels. Overall, it appears that pyric herbivory improves vegetation characteristics reported as critical to prairie-chicken reproduction. Based on our results, we suggest pyric herbivory as a viable management technique to promote prairie-chicken habitat in the southern Great Plains, while still accommodating livestock production.
Weak Disambiguation for Partial Structured Output Learning

Existing disambiguation strategies for partial structured output learning just cannot generalize well to solve the problem that there are some candidates that can be false positive or similar to the ground-truth label. In this article, we propose a novel weak disambiguation for partial structured output learning (WD-PSL). First, a piecewise large margin formulation is generalized to partial structured output learning, which effectively avoids handling a large number of candidate-structured outputs for complex structures. Second, in the proposed weak disambiguation strategy, each candidate label is assigned with a confidence value indicating how likely it is the true label, which aims to reduce the negative effects of wrong ground-truth label assignment in the learning process. Then, two large margins are formulated to combine two types of constraints which are the disambiguation between candidates and noncandidates, and the weak disambiguation for candidates. In the framework of alternating optimization, a new $2n$ -slack variables cutting plane algorithm is developed to accelerate each iteration of optimization. The experimental results on several sequence labeling tasks of natural language processing show the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Conspectus of the genera Radermachera and Fernandoa in Indo-Malesia (Bignoniaceae)

In Radermachera 16 named species (among which three new) are keyed out. The genus Mayodendron is reduced to Radermachera; one new combination is made. One Phillippine species known only from a presumably lost type remains doubtful. About 34 names are put into synonymy, many of which for the first time. Species are listed and provided with references and critical notes; for most species the sheets examined are cited. Types are cited and all except one have been examined. Six names are excluded from the genus and are referred to other names. In the key to the species I have also included the species of genera similar to Radermachera, viz. Pauldopia and Barnettia, for the convenience of other workers. The African genus Fernandoa is extended to occur in Indo-Malesia by the reduction of Spathodeopsis, Haplophragma, and Hexaneurocarpon, and to Madagascar by reduction of the genus Kigelianthe. A key is given to the six Indo-Malesian species, with references and specimens examined, and the six necessary new combinations are made. Domatia and stellate hairs are recorded for the first time.
Exact yet Efficient Graph Parsing, Bi-directional Locality and the Constructivist Hypothesis

A key problem in processing graph-based meaning representations is graph parsing, i.e. computing all possible derivations of a given graph according to a (competence) grammar. We demonstrate, for the first time, that exact graph parsing can be efficient for large graphs and with large Hyperedge Replacement Grammars (HRGs). The advance is achieved by exploiting locality as terminal edge-adjacency in HRG rules. In particular, we highlight the importance of 1) a terminal edge-first parsing strategy, 2) a categorization of a subclass of HRG, i.e. what we call Weakly Regular Graph Grammar, and 3) distributing argument-structures to both lexical and phrasal rules.
Linear β-1,3 Glucans Are Elicitors of Defense Responses in Tobacco

Laminarin, a linear β-1,3 glucan (mean degree of polymerization of 33) was extracted and purified from the brown alga Laminaria digitata . Its elicitor activity on tobacco ( Nicotiana tabacum ) was compared to that of oligogalacturonides with a mean degree of polymerization of 10. The two oligosaccharides were perceived by suspension-cultured cells as distinct chemical stimuli but triggered a similar and broad spectrum of defense responses. A dose of 200 μg mL −1 laminarin or oligogalacturonides induced within a few minutes a 1.9-pH-units alkalinization of the extracellular medium and a transient release of H 2 O 2 . After a few hours, a strong stimulation of Phe ammonia-lyase, caffeic acid O-methyltransferase, and lipoxygenase activities occurred, as well as accumulation of salicylic acid. Neither of the two oligosaccharides induced tissue damage or cell death nor did they induce accumulation of the typical tobacco phytoalexin capsidiol, in contrast with the effects of the proteinaceous elicitor β-megaspermin. Structure activity studies with laminarin, laminarin oligomers, high molecular weight β-1,3–1,6 glucans from fungal cell walls, and the β-1,6–1,3 heptaglucan showed that the elicitor effects observed in tobacco with β-glucans are specific to linear β-1,3 linkages, with laminaripentaose being the smallest elicitor-active structure. In accordance with its strong stimulating effect on defense responses in tobacco cells, infiltration of 200 μg mL −1 laminarin in tobacco leaves triggered accumulation within 48 h of the four families of antimicrobial pathogenesis-related proteins investigated. Challenge of the laminarin-infiltrated leaves 5 d after treatment with the soft rot pathogen Erwinia carotovora subsp. carotovora resulted in a strong reduction of the infection when compared with water-treated leaves.
Understanding Advertisements with BERT

We consider a task based on CVPR 2018 challenge dataset on advertisement (Ad) understanding. The task involves detecting the viewer’s interpretation of an Ad image captured as text. Recent results have shown that the embedded scene-text in the image holds a vital cue for this task. Motivated by this, we fine-tune the base BERT model for a sentence-pair classification task. Despite utilizing the scene-text as the only source of visual information, we could achieve a hit-or-miss accuracy of 84.95% on the challenge test data. To enable BERT to process other visual information, we append image captions to the scene-text. This achieves an accuracy of 89.69%, which is an improvement of 4.7%. This is the best reported result for this task.
Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation using Source Language Inputs and Cross-lingual Language Model

We propose an automatic evaluation method of machine translation that uses source language sentences regarded as additional pseudo references. The proposed method evaluates a translation hypothesis in a regression model. The model takes the paired source, reference, and hypothesis sentence all together as an input. A pretrained large scale cross-lingual language model encodes the input to sentence-pair vectors, and the model predicts a human evaluation score with those vectors. Our experiments show that our proposed method using Cross-lingual Language Model (XLM) trained with a translation language modeling (TLM) objective achieves a higher correlation with human judgments than a baseline method that uses only hypothesis and reference sentences. Additionally, using source sentences in our proposed method is confirmed to improve the evaluation performance.
Trematode parasites of the mudsnail Ilyanassa obsoleta: An analysis of parasite communities at different scales

TREMATODE PARASITES OF THE MUD SNAIL ILYANASSA OBSOLETA: AN ANALYSIS OF PARASITE COMMUNITIES AT DIFFERENT SCALES by Irit Altman University of New Hampshire, May, 2010 This research examines the ecological factors that shape trematode parasite communities of mudsnail Ilyanassa obsoleta at three different spatial scales. Nine species of trematode which obligately infect I obsoleta during larval stages but use numerous estuarine species as second intermediate and definitive hosts are considered. The work provides the most geographically extensive examination to date of this trematode parasite community. At the broadest scale, I obsoleta trematodes were examined across their distributional range (Chapter 2) which includes both native and introduced populations. The results demonstrate that introduced trematode communities are characterized by lower abundance and diversity compared to native communities and therefore conform to the pattern predicted by the enemy release hypothesis. The ecological factors that contribute to the establishment of specific I. obsoleta trematodes in the introduced range are considered.
Longterm Outcomes of Patients Undergoing Liver Transplantation for Acute‐on‐Chronic Liver Failure

Recent data have demonstrated >80% 1‐year survival probability after liver transplantation (LT) for patients with severe acute‐on‐chronic liver failure (ACLF). However, longterm outcomes and complications are still unknown for this population. Our aim was to compare longterm patient and graft survival among patients transplanted across all grades of ACLF. We analyzed the United Network for Organ Sharing database for the years 2004‐2017. Patients with ACLF were identified using the European Association for the Study of the Liver–Chronic Liver Failure criteria. Kaplan‐Meier and Cox regression methods were used to determine patient and graft survival and associated predictors of mortality in adjusted models. A total of 56,801 patients underwent transplantation of which 31,024 (54.6%) had no ACLF, 8757 (15.4%) had ACLF grade 1, 9039 (15.9%) had ACLF grade 2, and 7891 (14.1%) had ACLF grade 3. The 5‐year patient survival after LT was lower in the ACLF grade 3 patients compared with the other groups (67.7%; P < 0.001), although after year 1, the percentage decrease in survival was similar among all groups. Infection was the primary cause of death among all patient groups in the first year. Infection was the primary cause of death among all patient groups in the first year. After the first year, infection was the main cause of death in patients transplanted with ACLF grade 1 (32.1%), ACLF grade 2 (33.9%), and ACLF grade 3 (37.6%), whereas malignancy was the predominant cause of death in those transplanted with no ACLF (28.5%). In conclusion, patients transplanted with ACLF grade 3 had lower 5‐year survival as compared with patients with ACLF grades 0‐2, but mortality rates were not significantly different after the first year following LT. Graft survival was excellent across all ACLF groups.
Addressing Posterior Collapse with Mutual Information for Improved Variational Neural Machine Translation

This paper proposes a simple and effective approach to address the problem of posterior collapse in conditional variational autoencoders (CVAEs). It thus improves performance of machine translation models that use noisy or monolingual data, as well as in conventional settings. Extending Transformer and conditional VAEs, our proposed latent variable model measurably prevents posterior collapse by (1) using a modified evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective which promotes mutual information between the latent variable and the target, and (2) guiding the latent variable with an auxiliary bag-of-words prediction task. As a result, the proposed model yields improved translation quality compared to existing variational NMT models on WMT Ro↔En and De↔En. With latent variables being effectively utilized, our model demonstrates improved robustness over non-latent Transformer in handling uncertainty: exploiting noisy source-side monolingual data (up to +3.2 BLEU), and training with weakly aligned web-mined parallel data (up to +4.7 BLEU).
consumer: effect of diet isotopic ratio

Summary 1. Naturally occurring stable isotopes in resources and their consumer allow the estimation of nutritional flows between the two and have been much used to improve our understanding of the nutritional ecology of free-living animals. 2. The difference in isotopic composition between an animal and its diet is represented by a discrimination factor. Carbon and nitrogen flows are estimated by calculating the discrimination factors in stable isotope ratios ( δ 15 N and δ 13 C), which are presumed to be c . 3‰ and 1‰ heavier in the consumer tissues than those in their resources, respectively. 3. The discrimination factor is known to vary according to species, tissue, age, growth rates and food quality, but the estimation of discrimination factors is difficult and a fixed discrimination factor is usually used in diet reconstruction. It has also been suggested that discrimination factors could vary linearly with the diet isotopic ratio. If this linear relationship could be demonstrated using regression, this would provide an adequate method for the estimation of discrimination factors. In order to understand how diet isotopic ratios affect the discrimination factor, we investigated the pattern of its change in nitrogen ( ∆ 15 N) and carbon ( ∆ 13 C) in different tissues (liver, muscle and hair) of an omnivore species, the rat Rattus rattus . We fed captive rats with diets of the same nutritional quality but on different isotopic ratios. 4. First, discrimination factors for ∆ 15 N and ∆ 13 C showed great variability, ranging from ‐1·46‰ to 4·59‰ and from ‐8·79‰ to 0·64‰, respectively. Discrimination factors depended on both diet isotopic ratio and tissue. 5. We also show that isotope ratios in shaved hairs showed a turnover during the first month, and then stabilized during the second month. Using shaved hairs has the potential to be an effective non-lethal method for determining resource shifts in non-specialist consumers. 6. Finally, we demonstrated, for all tissues, a decrease of ∆ 15 N and ∆ 13 C with an increased values of δ 15 N and δ 13 C, respectively. These relationships allow us to propose a framework to estimate discrimination
Influence of Implant Design and Under-Preparation of the Implant Site on Implant Primary Stability. An In Vitro Study

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of different implant sites an under-preparation sequence associated with two different implant designs on implant primary stability measured by two parameters: insertion torque (IT) and implant stability quotient (ISQ). It used two different implants: one cylindrical as a control and another one with a tapered design. The implants were inserted in type III fresh humid bovine bone and four drilling sequences were used: one control, the one proposed by the implant company (P1), and three different undersized (P2, P3 and P4). P2 was the same as P1 without the cortical drill, P3 was without the last pilot drill and P4 was without both of them. The sample size was n = 40 for each of the eight groups. Final IT was measured with a torquemeter and the ISQ was measured with Penguin resonance frequency analysis. Results showed that both ISQ and IT have a tendency to increase as the preparation technique reduces the implant site diameter when compared with the standard preparation, P1. The preparations without cortical drill, P2 and P4, showed the best results when compared with the ones with a cortical drill. Tapered implants always showed higher or the same ISQ and IT values when compared with the cylindrical implants. Giving the limitations of this study, it can be concluded that reducing implant preparation can increase IT and ISQ values. Removing the cortical drill and the use of a tapered design implant are also effective methods of increasing primary implant stability.
Atherogenicity of Cucumeropsis mannii and Cucumis sativus oils from Cameroon

The atherogenicity of Cucumeropsis mannii and Cucumis sativus oils was compared to that of corn oil and palm oil. Female wistar albino rats of 6 weeks old weighing 58 – 65 g were randomly assigned to one of four diet groups: C. mannii and C. sativus oils (test diets) and corn and palm oil (control diets). There was weight gain in all the groups amounting to 128.65% (palm oil), 132.75% (C. mannii), 140.8% (C. sativus) and 153.45 (corn oil) with no significant difference. The weights of the livers ranged from 4.22 (palm oil) to 5.17 g (corn oil), ratio of weights of liver to that of rat, from 0.029 0.034 and percentage weight gain from 128.65 (palm oil) to 153.45% (corn oil). There was no significant difference in the values. For the atherogenic parameters measured, the triglyceride level ranged from 73 (palm oil) to 79.4 (C. sativus oil) with no significant difference. Total cholesterol levels ranged from 49.6 (corn oil) to 64.2 mg/dl (C. sativus oil) with significantly lower values in the corn oil group but similar values in the rest of the groups. HDL ranged from 18.94 (C. mannii oil) to 32.8 (palm oil) which was significantly high, LDL from 6.2 (palm oil) to 25.06 mg/dl (C. mannii oil) and atherogenic ratio (AR) from 0.2 (palm oil) to 1.61 (C. mannii) which was significantly high. The levels of these atherogenic parameters are far below the borderline level for oils to cause atherosclerosis, indicating that they could be potential good edible oils for reducing cardiovascular illnesses.
Epigallocatechin-3-Gallate (EGCG), an Active Compound of Green Tea Attenuates Acute Lung Injury Regulating Macrophage Polarization and Krüpple-Like-Factor 4 (KLF4) Expression

Acute lung injury (ALI)/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) are serious clinical complications with a high frequency of morbidity and mortality. The initiation and amplification of inflammation is a well-known aspect in the pathogenesis of ALI and related disorders. Therefore, inhibition of the inflammatory mediators could be an ideal approach to prevent ALI. Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), a major constituent of green tea, has been shown to have protective effects on oxidative damage and anti-inflammation. The goal of the present study was to determine whether EGCG improves phenotype and macrophage polarisation in LPS-induced ALI. C57BL/6 mice were given two doses of EGCG (15 mg/kg) intraperitoneally (IP) 1 h before and 3 h after LPS instillation (2 mg/kg). EGCG treatment improved histopathological lesions, Total Leucocyte count (TLC), neutrophils infiltration, wet/dry ratio, total proteins and myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity in LPS-induced lung injury. The results displayed that EGCG reduced LPS-induced ALI as it modulates macrophage polarisation towards M2 status. Furthermore, EGCG also reduced the expression of proinflammatory M1 mediators iNOS TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-6 in the LPS administered lung microenvironment. In addition, it increased the expression of KLF4, Arg1 and ym1, known to augment the M2 phenotype of macrophages. EGCG also alleviated the expression of 8-OHdG, nitrotyrosine, showing its ability to inhibit oxidative damage. TREM1 in the lung tissue and improved lung regenerative capacity by enhancing Ki67, PCNA and Ang-1 protein expression. Together, these results proposed the protective properties of EGCG against LPS-induced ALI in may be attributed to the suppression of M1/M2 macrophages subtype ratio, KLF4 augmentation, lung cell regeneration and regulating oxidative damage in the LPS-induced murine ALI.
Effect of finishing system, gender and breed on trans-vaccenic and conjugated linoleic acids in beef.

Studies comparing the effects of different finishing systems on beef quality characteristics suggest that finishing systems produce mixed findings on beef chemical composition. This study analyzed the fatty acid composition of steaks from one-hundred and seventy six crossbred young bulls and heifers finished on pasture or in the feedlot. Feedlot finishing increased steak fat content (29.7%) compared to pasture (23.9%) and heifers had more fat content than bulls. There were no differences in saturated fatty acids (SFA) when production system or sire breed were considered. However SFA was higher for bulls than heifers (48.7% vs. 47.2%). Both finishing systems resulted in a greater percentage of trans (t) 11-18:1 than t10-18:1, and pasture finished had more of both isomers than feedlot. The main natural isomer of CLA (cis (c)9, t11-18:2) was affected by a finishing system*gender interaction and the highest percentage was found in heifers finished on pasture (0.53%). Overall, breed and gender had little influence on beef fatty acid composition, which was more influenced by diet. Both feedlot and pasture finished beef had ‘healthy’ trans fatty acid profiles, and percentages of trans isomers and the main natural isomer of CLA were highest on pasture, with preferential accumulation of CLA in
Cysteine aminoethylation enables site-specific glycosylation analysis of recombinant human erythropoietin using trypsin.

Recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) is an important biopharmaceutical for which glycosylation is a critical quality attribute. Therefore, robust analytical methods are needed for the in-depth characterization of rhEPO glycosylation. Currently, the protease GluC is widely established for the site-specific glycosylation analysis of rhEPO. However, this enzyme shows disadvantages with respect to specificity and the characteristics of the resulting (glyco)peptides. The use of trypsin, the gold standard protease in proteomics, as sole protease for rhEPO is compromised as no natural tryptic cleavage site is located between the glycosylation sites Asn24 and Asn38. Here, cysteine aminoethylation using 2-bromoethylamine was applied as alternative alkylation strategy to introduce artificial tryptic cleavage sites at Cys29 and Cys33 in rhEPO. The (glyco)peptides resulting from a subsequent digestion using trypsin, were analyzed by reversed-phase liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. The new, trypsin-based workflow was easily implemented by adapting the alkylation step in a conventional workflow and was directly compared to an established approach using GluC. The new method shows an improved specificity, significantly reduced chromatogram complexity, allows shorter analysis times and simplifies data evaluation. Furthermore, the method allows monitoring of additional attributes such as oxidation and deamidation at specific sites in parallel to the site-specific glycosylation analysis of rhEPO.