Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk Perception and Chronic Exposure to Organochlorine Pesticides in Maya Communities of Mexico

ABSTRACT In order to analyze risk perception related to the use and handling of organochlorine pesticides (OCP) in agricultural and livestock activities among Maya communities of Yucatan, Mexico, and to study their impact on public health and the environment, we conducted an analytical study applying 274 semi-structured interviews in 11 municipalities in the zone called “Ring of Cenotes. ” The harmful effects of agrochemicals on water supplies, soils, air, and human health were considered, including the indoor use of pesticides to preserve harvest products. Recent studies showed high levels of OCP in groundwater. A generalized low risk perception related to human health and the environment due to pesticide use was found. Likewise, social parameters were analyzed, including the educational level, as well as risk factors related to groundwater karst vulnerability. Pesticides that have been banned by international conventions are still in use. The occurrence of some diseases such as cervical cancer, with a very high prevalence at the national level, and the practice of obtaining drinking water from polluted wells and sinkholes, may be associated with this low risk perception and with poor social conditions. Establishing programs on health education, agro-ecological production alternatives, and water chemical quality monitoring is recommended.
Changing climate and the permafrost environment on the Qinghai–Tibet (Xizang) plateau

Permafrost on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) has undergone degradation as a result of recent climate change. This may alter the thermo‐hydrological processes and unlock soil organic carbon, and thereby affect local hydrological, ecological, and climatic systems. The relationships between permafrost and climate change have received extensive attention, and in this paper we review climate change for permafrost regions of the QTP over the past 30 years. We summarize the current state and changes in permafrost distribution and thickness, ground temperature, and ground ice conditions. We focus on changes in permafrost thermal state and in active‐layer thickness (ALT). Possible future changes in ground temperature and ALT are also discussed. Finally, we discuss the changes in hydrological processes and to ecosystems caused by permafrost degradation. Air temperature and ground temperature in the permafrost regions of the QTP have increased from 1980 to 2018, and the active layer has been thickening at a rate of 19.5 cm per decade. The response of permafrost to climate change is not as fast as in some reports, and permafrost degradation is slower than projected by models that do not account for conditions deep in permafrost.
Delineation of Bare Soil Field Areas from Unmanned Aircraft System Imagery with the Mean Shift Unsupervised Clustering and the Random Forest Supervised Classification

Abstract The use of aerial remote sensing platforms such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has been proven as a cost and time effective way to perform tasks related to precision agriculture and decision making. Two machine learning (ML) algorithms have been implemented on UAS blue and red band imagery to delineate field areas and extents of various bare soil fields: the Random Forest non-parametric supervised classifier and the unsupervised non-parametric Mean Shift clustering algorithm. Both ML algorithms perform exceptionally well. The mean Area Goodness of Fit (AGoF) for bare soil areas was greater than 99% and the mean Boundary Mean Positional Error (BMPE) was lower than 0.6 m for the 11 surveyed fields. Such precisions with ML algorithms will enable an easy automated field boundary delineation based on UAS imagery. Such information is needed by growers and crop insurance agencies for an accurate determination of the crop insurance premiums.
A comparison of two bat detectors: which is most likely to detect New Zealand’s Chalinolobus tuberculatus?

ABSTRACT The presence of bat species is commonly determined by placing acoustic bat detectors that record bat echolocation calls in the habitat they are likely to use. Detection rates are affected by variables including type of detection unit used. We compared detection rates of long-tailed bat (Chalinolobus tuberculatus) echolocation calls between two types of automated bat detectors: Wildlife Acoustics SMZC Zero Crossing Bat Recorders (ZC), and Frequency Compression Automated Bat Monitoring units (FC) produced by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. Units were placed in locations where bats were known to be present, but not all detected bats. The median number of bat passes recorded by FC units over 10 nights was 20 compared with a median of 3 bat passes for ZC units. ZC units also detected bats over significantly fewer nights than FC units. These results suggest FC units are more sensitive and therefore better to use where long-tailed bats are expected to be at low abundance or only present infrequently. Because of inconsistencies in detection rates, we recommend the use of only one model of the detector within a monitoring project. Our data also suggests that surveys should take place over long periods to maximise likelihood of detecting bats, if present.
Research on Environmental Sustainability of Coal Cities: A Case Study of Yulin, China

Coal cities are an essential impetus for economic development and urbanization processes in China. However, a series of environmental issues provoked by resource exploitation cause the environmental sustainability of coal cities to face enormous challenges. Therefore, on the basis of the time series data of Yulin City from 1996 to 2017, this paper explores the nexus between socioeconomic development and industrial “three wastes” emissions by adopting the Tapio decoupling model, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis, and the vector auto-regressive (VAR) model. The results show that Yulin’s economic development remains in an extensive stage and will not decouple from the environmental pollution in a short time. Except for the nexus of industrial solid waste and economic growth, which is an inverted U-shaped, the EKC hypothesis is not valid for industrial wastewater and industrial waste gas. Through the VAR (2) model, the impact of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) on industrial waste emissions is consistent with the results of the EKC hypothesis. Moreover, industrial waste emissions have a positive correlation with the per capita raw coal output, the energy consumption per unit of GDP, and the proportion of secondary industry. Hence, it is necessary to formulate targeted measures from industrial restructuring, industrial chain extension, governance model optimization, and waste comprehensive utilization to realize the environmental sustainability of coal cities.
What’s Missing From Self-Supervised Representation Learning?

Despite tremendous effort to train visual recognition systems without human supervision, there is still no substitute for large, labeled training datasets. We perform a large-scale analysis to quantitatively understand the difference between the representations learned by self-supervised learning and supervised learning. Adopting a large collection of trained models for different computer vision tasks, we probe for functional similarities between visual recognition systems. Experiments and visualizations suggest that two key differences between self-supervised and supervised models are its representations for 3D geometry and de-formable objects, which also substantially contribute to its failures. Our hope is that such analysis will expose future research directions in self-supervised visual learning.
Genomic landscape of parallel domestication of upland rice and its implications

Parallel domestication has been widely acknowledged but its genetic basis remains largely unclear. As an important rice ecotype, upland rice was assumedly domesticated multiple times in two rice subspecies (Indica and Japonica) and provides a feasible system to explore the genetic basis of parallel domestication. To uncover the genome‐wide pattern of genetic differentiation between upland and lowland rice and explore the parallelism of genetic changes during upland rice domestication, we obtained whole‐genome sequences of 95 rice landraces and yielded genome‐wide expression data for five tissues of representative accessions of upland and lowland rice. Our phylogenetic analyses confirmed multiple domestications of the upland ecotype in two rice subspecies. Genomic scans based on resequencing data identified substantial differentiation between the upland and lowland ecotypes with 11.4% and 14.8% of the genome diverged between the two ecotypes in Indica and Japonica, respectively. Further genome‐wide gene expression analyses found that 30% of effectively expressed genes were significantly differentiated between two ecotypes, indicating the importance of regulation changes in the domestication of upland rice. Importantly, we found that only 1.8% of differentiated genomes and 1.6% of differentially expressed genes were shared by upland Indica and upland Japonica, suggestive of largely unparallel genetic alterations during upland rice domestication. These findings not only provide new insights into the genetic basis of parallel domestication at the genome scale but could also facilitate genetic improvement and breeding of rice and crops in general.
Associations between ISSR Markers and Quantitative Traits in Bread Wheat Genotypes

Morphological traits and molecular markers analyses are very important tools for estimation of genetic variability among genotypes. In this study, we combined the phenotypic characterization with the inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR) technique for the assessment of genetic diversity among 26 bread wheat genotypes. Out of 87 amplified bands 43 were polymorphic. The %P ranged from 25 to 76.92 with an average of 46.97%. The average number of polymorphic bands was 4.30 per primer. UBC-849 and UBC-833 primers which belonged to (GT) and (GA) repeats primer groups produced 62.50 and 76.92% level of polymorphism, respectively. It is clear that the highest polymorphism level was obtained in the case of di-nucleotide repeat primers. In this work the polymorphism information content (PIC) values varied from 0.04 (UBC-819) to 0.19 (UBC-834) with an average of 0.13. The Marker index (MI) values were from 0.12 (UBC-819) to 1.50 (UBC-833) with an average of 0.62. Two markers (UBC-811930bp and UBC-833600bp) were identified which may be linked to stem diameter and grain yield per plant traits, respectively.
Cytokine-Enhanced Vaccine and Suicide Non-Viral Gene Therapy in Advanced Metastatic Melanoma Patients: Two Case Reports

The prognostic for metastatic melanoma is very poor when treated with standard cytotoxic chemotherapies and it is often refractory to check point inhibitors and/or molecular targets. In this context the development of new treatments with better efficacy and safety profiles is highly desirable. Based on our successful experience applying suicide and immune gene therapy in a veterinary clinical setting, we are proposing its translation to human patients. We are presenting here the first-in-human safety assay of this approach. We report two cases of refractory metastatic melanoma. The first-one was a 27-years-old pharyngeal mucosal melanoma patient with a primary tumor in his left tonsil. Despite transient slowing down, the disease successively progressed to radiotherapy, radical surgery, ipilimumab, nivolumab, imatinib and temozolomide. The second-one was a 72-years-old malignant melanoma patient with a primary tumor in his left hallux. Despite transient slowing down, the disease successively progressed to hallux amputation, inguinal lymphadenectomy, radiotherapy, interferon-alpha, ipilimumab, pembrolizumab and temozolomide. The proposed treatment included local intratumoral suicide gene therapy concomitant with a subcutaneous vaccine composed by allogeneic tumor extracts and liposomes with plasmids bearing IL-2 and GM-CSF genes. The treatment was safe: the only side effects were from mild to moderate and manageable: pyrexia, swelling of the injected tumor and partial hair loss (alopecia). Due to disease progression both patients were withdrawn from the study before completing the complete series of interventions. These preliminary data encourage the completion of further clinical trials to establish the possible clinical benefit of the proposed approach.
Data Quality Management Evaluation: A Case Study at the BPS-Statistics of Kaur Regency Bengkulu Province

The BPS-Statistics of Kaur Regency is a work unit under the BPS-Statistics of the Republic of Indonesia which is responsible for carrying out statistical activities in the regency area and contributes a large role in the effort of improving data quality of each survey or census before being published to the public. In the implementation of the National Socio-Economic Survey conducted by the organization in the first semester of 2019, it was found incompleteness, inconsistency, and inaccuracy during data entry in the application. Likewise, post entries are still found inconsistencies and inaccuracies. To overcome this problem, an evaluation of the maturity level of data quality management using Loshin’s Data Quality Management was done. The results obtained indicate that the maturity level is in the range of 2 to 3. Four out of eight dimensions have not met the expected targets, namely expectations of data quality, data quality protocols, data standards, and technology. In addition, to supplement the result, measurement using European Statistical System framework indicates that the total score achieved is 5.7 of the expected target of 9.4. Further, from the results of this study, the recommendation for improving data quality were compiled.
PRÁTICAS PEDAGÓGICAS EM AMBIENTES VIRTUAIS DE APRENDIZAGEM: USOS E ABUSOS

Considerando as Tecnologias da Informacao e Comunicacao utilizadas no campo educacional, o Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizagem (AVA) se consolida como uma das mais expoentes no suporte as praticas de ensino e aprendizagem. Assim, com o intuito de investigar as formas de uso desses ambientes, realizamos o presente trabalho, que objetivou identificar em pesquisas os recursos e praticas recorrentes nos AVA durante a formacao em contexto on-line. Esta e uma pesquisa qualitativa, do tipo descritivo-exploratorio, que utilizou de tecnicas de Revisao Sistematica para mapear publicacoes que tratassem de praticas pedagogicas em AVA. A analise dos dados aponta usos recorrentes de um numero limitado de recursos e a ocorrencia de praticas que nao coadunam com as potencialidades que eles oferecem.
Borrower Sentiment on P2P Lending in Indonesia Based on Google Playstore Reviews

P2P lending is a part of fintech where the public can request small loans without the common procedures of a conventional bank. There are many issues that arise from the lack of regulations and information on P2P lending which are mostly negative. In this paper, we analyze the public perspective of P2P lending regarding their opinion. We use text classification using Naïve bayes and random forest tree to classify their opinion. The data are collected from Google Playstore application review which are manually labeled as positive or negative. This paper also analyzes the reasoning behind such sentiments and the aspects most important to Indonesian users in P2P lending services. The experiment shows no significant difference in the accuracy using both classifiers. We found keywords that affect the sentiment using InfoGainAttribute in Weka. Based on manual review, the users mainly focus on the speed of loans going through, the ease of use of the application as well as convenience in reviewing the platform.
EVALUATION OF ANTIMICROBIAL EFFECT OF TWO PROPOLIS FORMULAE ON STREPTOCOCCUS MUTANS AND CANDIDA ALBICANS: A RANDOMIZED CLINICAL TRIAL

INTRODUCTION: Streptococcus mutans is considered to be the most cariogenic microorganism. However, candida albicans has also been isolated from dental plaque of high caries risk children. Therefore, uses of natural antimicrobial agents such as propolis have been established as an adjunctive approach for oral health care. OBJECTIVES: the aim of this study was to evaluate the antibacterial and antifungal effects of propolis chewing gum compared to propolis mouthwash. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Sixty high caries risk children aged 6 to 8 were randomly assigned into two groups. Group I received propolis chewing gum and Group II received propolis mouthwash. A baseline and final plaque samples were obtained from each participant before and after intervention respectively within 14 days interval. All participants were asked to refrain from eating or brushing on the sampling days. Samples were sent immediately to the laboratory for microbial assessment. RESULTS: data revealed that both study groups showed significant differences (P≤0.001) in streptococcus mutans and candida albicans counts before and after intervention. But there was no significant difference among the comparative groups. CONCLUSION: It was demonstrated that propolis chewing gum and propolis mouthwash can be used as antimicrobial agents.
Microspore embryogenesis in anther culture of three species of Populus and regeneration of dihaploid plants of Populus trichocarpa

Microspore embryogenesis was induced from in vitro cultured anthers of Populusbalsamifera L. , Populusmaximowiczii A. Henry, and Populustrichocarpa Torr. & Gray. Embryoids were formed at low frequencies on a modified Murashige and Skoog's medium, supplemented with 5 μM 6-benzylaminopurine, 5.1 mM L-glutamine, and 6% maltose. Growth regulator combinations (0–10 μM 6-benzylaminopurine and naphthaleneacetic acid) affected embryogenesis only slightly but formation of nonembryogenic callus from the anthers increased with increasing concentration of naphthaleneacetic acid. One donor clone of P. trichocarpa produced 54 embryoids from as many anthers during the two years of study. Adventitious shoots were obtained from 31 of these embryoids on woody plant medium with 2.5 μM 6-benzylaminopurine and 0.005 μM naphthaleneacetic acid. Adventitious shoots from 25 different embryoids were successfully rooted on woody plant medium containing 0.25 μM indole-3-butyric acid and transplanted to soil. Isozyme analysis confirme.
A review of Himalcercyon stat. nov., with description of a new species from the Chinese Himalaya and an updated key to Asian genera of Megasternini (Coleoptera, Hydrophilidae)

Himalcercyon Hebauer, 2002 stat. nov. is elevated to genus rank based on the unique form of its mesoventral elevation. The genus is reviewed, redescribed, and illustrated in detail. Two species are recognized: Himalcercyon mirus (Hebauer, 2002) comb. nov. from Nepal and H. franzi sp. nov. from Chinese Himalaya (Xizang Autonomous Region). Both species are illustrated and diagnosed. An updated key to the Asian genera of the tribe Megasternini (Coleoptera, Hydrophilidae, Sphaeridiinae) is provided, along with the SEM micrographs of ventral morphology of these genera. New replacement name Oreosternum nom. nov. is proposed for Oreocyon Hebauer, 2002 which is preoccupied by Oreocyon Marsh, 1872 (Mammalia, Oxyenidae) and Oreocyon Krumbiegel, 1949 (Mammalia, Canidae).
Quantifying methane emissions from Queensland's coal seam gas producing Surat Basin using inventory data and an efficient regional Bayesian inversion

Abstract. Methane emissions across Queensland’s Surat Basin, Australia, result from a mix of activities, including the production and processing of coal seam gas (CSG). We measured methane concentrations over 1.5 years from two monitoring stations established 80 km apart on either side of the main CSG belt located within a study area of 350 × 350 km2. Coupling bottom-up inventory and inverse modelling approaches, we quantify methane emissions from this area. The inventory suggests that the total emission is 173 × 106 kg CH4/yr, with grazing cattle contributing about half of that, cattle feedlots 25 %, and CSG Processing 8 %. Using the inventory emissions in a forward regional transport model indicates that the above sources are significant contributors to methane at both monitors. However, the model underestimates approximately the highest 15 % of the observed methane concentrations, suggesting underestimated or missing emissions. An efficient regional Bayesian inverse model is developed, incorporating an hourly source-receptor relationship based on a backward-in-time configuration of the forward regional transport model, a posterior sampling scheme, and the hourly methane observations. The inferred emissions obtained from one of the inverse model setups that uses a Gaussian prior whose averages are identical the gridded bottom-up inventory emissions across the domain with an uncertainty of 3 % of the averages best describes the observed methane. Having only two stations is not adequate at sampling distant source areas of the study domain, and this necessitates a small prior uncertainty. This inverse setup yields a total emission that is very similar to the total inventory emission. However, in a subdomain covering the CSG development areas, the inferred emissions are 33 % larger than those from the inventory.
A State-of-the-Art Overview and Future Research Avenues of Self-Service Business Intelligence and Analytics

Self-Service Business Intelligence and Analytics (SSBIA) is an upcoming approach and trend that enables casual business users to prepare and analyze data with easy-to-use Business Intelligence and Analytics (BIA) systems without being reliant on expert support or power users to perform their (complex) analytical tasks easier and faster than before. Despite a strong interest of scholars and practitioners in SSBIA, the understanding about its underlying characteristics is limited. Furthermore, there is a lack of a structured and systematic form in which SSBIA research can be classified. Against this backdrop, this article showcases the current state-of-the-art of SSBIA research along four key areas in the field: (1) perspectives on SSBIA, (2) user roles involved, (3) required expertise, and (4) supported levels of self-service. Analyzing 60 articles, our main contribution resides in the synopsis of SSBIA literature in these four areas. For instance, we illustrate that there exist three perspectives of SSBIA: artefact-centric (45% of analyzed studies), user-centric (82%), and governance-centric (25%). On the basis of our analysis, we suggest promising avenues, which will support scholars in their endeavors on how to pursue with future avenues in the field of SSBIA (for e.g., understanding the trade-off between top-down and bottom-up capabilities).
International Equity and Debt Flows: Composition, Crisis, and Controls

We propose a theory of endogenous composition of capital flows that highlights two asymmetries between international equity and debt financing. In our model, poor institutional quality leads to an inefficiently low share of equity financing as well as an inefficiently high volume of total inflows. The required optimal capital controls naturally become looser as a country's institutional quality improves. Our story differs in important ways from an alternative narrative focusing on collateral constraint.