Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ionic liquids for enhancing the enantioselectivity of isolated BVMO-catalysed oxidations

The present study describes the first-time usage of an isolated thermostable Baeyer–Villiger monooxygenase (phenylacetone monooxygenase, PAMO) in the presence of ionic liquids. The stability, activity and selectivity of PAMO as an oxidative enzyme in the presence of different ionic liquids were studied. This revealed that the addition of some specific ionic liquids, such Ammoeng™ 102 and [bmim]MeSO4, can significantly enhance the E-value in the oxidation of racemic benzylketones. Moreover, the use of ionic liquids increases the optimal substrate concentration for performing Baeyer–Villiger oxidation, thereby extending the biocatalytic repertoire of PAMO for synthetic applications.
Image Captioning with a Constraint of Image-to-Text Transformation

The encoder-decoder framework is widely adopted in image captioning where the encoder generates image features and the decoder receives the image features and generates captions. However, this framework has insufﬁcient capability to reduce the gap between image and text representations, thus leading to poor generation results. One solu-tion is to embed the two modalities in the same space such that the representation of an image region (e.g., a person) is close to the representation of a corresponding word (e.g., “person”) in that space. To achieve this goal, we propose to add a constraint to the encoder-decoder framework such that the image features can be transformed to the text embedding space and represent the captions. By minimizing an auxiliary loss function which encourages the transformed image representation to be close to the caption representation, we explicitly bridge the gap between two modalities. The decoder learns this image-to-text transformation and generates better captions for given images. Experiments on the MSCOCO captioning dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Effect of Sex on Fattening Performance and Carcass Characteristics in Kivircik Lambs

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of sex on fattening performance and carcass characteristics of Kivircik lambs. Fifty head weaned Kivircik lambs, half males and half females, were used in fattening period. After weaning, the growth and feed consumption of the male and the female lambs fattened for 56 days were recorded. Average daily weight gain differed significantly (P<0.01) between the males and the females (294.9 and 214.2 g, respectively). A total of 10 lambs (5 males and 5 females) were slaughtered and the left side of the carcasses was cut into five joints. Dressing percentage (hot/cold) based on full weight and empty body weight were lower (P<0.05) for the males than the female lambs. Sex had a significant effect on kidney-knob and channel fat weight, M. longissimus dorsi section area (MLDA) and liquid expelled (P<0.01). Sex primarily affected the quantity of all types of fat deposits. The male lambs had higher muscle, muscle/bone and muscle/total fat ratios than females. Research Article
Oberflächenaktivierung von Kunststoff mittels Plasma zur Haftvermittlung

In der Fügetechnologie kommen verschiedenste Verfahren zum Einsatz, um Bauteile dauerhaft miteinander zu verbinden. Wo Schweißen und Löten aufgrund zu hoher Hitzeentwicklung nicht in Frage kommen, können Plasmabehandlungen bei Temperaturen unter 50°C Oberflächen die für Verbindungen erforderliche Reaktivität verleihen. Die chemischen Hintergründe dieses Verfahrens und seine praktische Umsetzung werden im Beitrag am Beispiel der Haftung von Kunststoffen untereinander und mit Metallen dargestellt.
Influence of Buffers on Pesticide and Nutrient Runoff from Bermudagrass Turf

Buffer length (0, 2.4, and 4.9 m), mowing height (1.3 and 3.8 cm), and solid-tine aerification were evaluated to reduce pesticide and nutrient runoff from bermudagrass [Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers. ] turf on a Kirkland silt loam (fine, mixed, thermic Udertic Paleustolls) with a 6% slope. Nitrogen, P, chlorpyrifos [o,o-diethyl o-(3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinyl) phosphorothioate], and the dimethylamine salts of 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), mecoprop [2-(2-methyl-4-chlorophenoxy) propionic acid], and dicamba (3,6-dichloro-o-anisic acid) were applied at standard use rates on plots located upslope of buffers. A portable rainfall simulator applied precipitation rates of 51 or 64 mm h -1 for 75 to 140 min within 24 h after chemical application. Soil moisture before simulated rainfall in July 1995 was low and pesticide and nutrient loss to surface runoff was <3% and 2% of applied, respectively. Highest concentrations of pesticides and nutrients in runoff water were 314 μg L -1 for 2,4-D and 9.57 mg L -1 for PO 4 -P from the treatment containing no buffer. In August, 165 mm of natural rainfall fell 7 d before simulated rainfall and pesticide and nutrient loss to surface runoff was increased to 15 and 10% of applied, respectively. Highest concentrations of pesticides and nutrients in runoff water were 174 μg L -1 for 2,4-D and 8.14 mg L -1 for PO 4 -P from the treatment containing no buffer. Overall, buffers were effective in reducing pesticide and nutrient runoff due in part to dilution. In most instances, buffer mowing height, length (2.4 vs. 4.9 m), and aerification did not significantly affect pesticide and nutrient runoff.
Simultaneous determination of benzodiazepines, Z-drugs and metabolite concentrations in human whole blood by UPLC-MS/MS

Objective: To establish a simple, easy and quick method to screen benzodiazepines, Z-drugs, and their metabolites in whole blood samples by ultra-performance liquid chromatography tandem electrospray ionization triple quadrapole-mass spectrometry (UPLC-TQ/MS). Methods: Samples were prepared by modified Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged and Safe (QuEChERS) method. After being extracted with 0.1% acetic acid and dehydrated by anhydrous magnesium sulfate, the targets were separated and analyzed on a ZORBAX Eclipse PlusC18 (2.1 mm*100 mm, 1.8 μm) column by gradient elution with 0.1% formic acid-0.1% formic acid/acetonitrile as mobile phase, then ionized with positive electrospray, and finally detected under a multiple reaction monitoring mode. Results: Chromatographic separation was achieved in less than 5 min. Limits of detection (LODs) varied from 0.5 to 2 ng/ mL. Conclusion: The experimental method outlined in this paper showed high accuracy, linearity, and repeatability, which can meet the demand of the analysis in actual cases.
K -implicit Tracking Data Publishing Scheme against Geo-matching Attacks

The dynamic queries by wireless mobile network users, will generate the social data with location tags and tracking data sequences, which enable the adversary can infer privacy information combined background knowledge, especially strong geographic correlation information. Therefore, we propose the Geo-matching privacy inference attack methods based on road network and sensitive semantic location. To address these issues, a k -implicit data publishing scheme is presented with adaptive privacy budget, which is based on the road network topological graph and the sensitivity quantiﬁcation of grid unit, and also realizes an optimized dynamic anonymous region construction. Finally, the proposed Geo-matching attack algorithm is simulated to verify the effectiveness of the k -implicit data publishing scheme. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme can better resist the Geo-matching attack under different privacy budget thresholds.
Taxation of Multi-Product Firms with Cost Complementarities

I analyze how taxes impact prices, quantities, and welfare when products are connected via demand or cost relationships. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in taxes from 1993 to 2015, I estimate a discrete-choice, oligopoly model of the U.S. aviation industry—a network setting where demand-side substitutes are straightforward to observe and cost complementarities arise naturally. I show that cost complementarities increase incidence on taxed products and cause incidence to spill over across products. Taxation of hub airports generates larger spill-over effects and greater negative effects on consumer welfare. Simulations of revenue-neutral tax policies such as standardization of taxes across routes and subsidization of hub airports find improvement in consumer welfare on average, but effects are limited by competing effects on prices in untaxed routes.
Determinants of the Choice of Healthcare Services during and After Pregnancy in Some Selected Rural Areas in Kaduna DETERMINANTS OF THE CHOICE OF HEALTHCARE SERVICES DURING AND AFTER PREGNANCY IN SOME SELECTED RURAL AREAS IN KADUNA

Nigerian government in collaboration with donor agencies are making spirited effort to create awareness of the importance of antenatal care (ANC) most especially in rural areas. So that pregnant women will take ANC seriously. However, this has not yielded the desired result, hence, a study of this nature is a welcome development. Therefore, this studies focuses no investigating the determinants of the choice of healthcare services during and after pregnancy in some selected rural areas in Kaduna state. This was achieved through Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and Key In-depth Interview (KII) in the selected local government areas of Kaduna state. The qualitative data was transcript and analysed using content analysis method. The results show their knowledge about ANC, due to low literacy level and religious factor in most rural settlements visited. Furthermore, demand and supply side on ANC facilities are also poor and do not meet the minimum standard. The study concludes that demand and supply of ANC fall short of equilibrium, both are too low. Therefore the study recommended that government in collaboration with nongovernmental organization such as World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF should design and implement campaign/interventions to enhance the literacy level and advocacy to reduce the influence of religion in healthcare service.
Do CSR Firms Provide more Readable Financial Disclosures?

This paper examines the relationship between the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and the syntactic complexity of financial communications. Based on stakeholder and agency perspectives, we offer an empirical test of two competing hypotheses. First, we may expect that CSR firms will provide more transparent disclosures because this reflects a socially responsible behavior and a firm’s commitment to high ethical standards. In contrast, the agency perspective predicts that managers engage in CSR for self-interest purposes and use it as an entrenchment strategy. Therefore, we may expect that managers of CSR firms will be more likely to attempt to mislead stakeholders about the firm’s actual performance through unethical financial reporting practices and complex financial disclosures. Corporate social performance is measured through a CSR score provided by Sustainalytics database which rates corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. The FOG index and the number of words are used to assess MD&A syntactic complexity. Based on a sample of large firms listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, our results show a positive association between corporate social performance and MD&A’s syntactic complexity. Consistent with the agency perspective, our results suggest that managers may engage in CSR opportunistically and use complex narrative disclosures in an impression management strategy. Our findings add to the recent accounting literature on financial reporting quality in CSR firms by examining the association between CSR orientation and the overall complexity of firms’ textual disclosures.
Linking Rater-Ratee Personality (Dis)Similarity and Feedback-Seeking Behavior

Being grounded in similarity-attraction theory, this study explicates that (dis)similarity in personality traits among rater-ratee dyads has a deep effect on ratee feedback-seeking behavior. Data were collected from 156 matched rater-ratee dyads working with a multinational beverage company and a telecommunication organization of Pakistan. The findings from polynomial regression analysis revealed that rater-ratee dyadic personality congruence (extraversion and agreeableness) enhanced ratee feedback-seeking behavior. Moreover, ratee feedback-seeking behavior enhanced the rater-ratee dyads and were similar in normatively negative traits (introvert and disagreeable), compared to when they were dissimilar. The study concludes that in order to completely grasp the knowledge about ratee feedback-seeking behavior, the dyadic personality configurations need to be considered simultaneously.
Some elements of a sociology of translation : domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of

Highly appreciated by French consumers, scallops have only been systematically exploited for the last twenty years. In a short period they have become a highly sought-after gourmandise to the extent that during the Christmas season, although prices are spectacularly high, sales increase considerably. They are fished in France at three locations: along the coast of Normandy, in the roadstead of Brest, and in St. Brieuc Bay. There are several different species of scallops. Certain ones, as in Brest, are coralled all year round. However, at St. Brieuc the scallops lose their coral during spring and summer. These characteristics are commercially important because, according to the convictions of the fishermen, the consumers prefer coralled scallops to those which are not. Throughout the 1970s, the stock at Brest progressively dwindled due to the combined effects of marine predators (starfish), a series of hard winters which lowered the general temperature of the water, and the fishermen who, wanting to satisfy the insatiable consumers, dredged the ocean floor for scallops all year round without allowing time to reproduce. The production of St. Brieuc had also been falling off
THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FOREIGN AID ON POVERTY: A CASE OF SUBSAHARAN AFRICA

This research paper examines the economic impact of foreign aid on poverty for Sub-Saharan African countries. In this empirical analysis I have ascertained that foreign aid has an impact in reducing poverty in 42 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1980-2013. Panel estimation techniques and instrumental variables are used in order to control for country specific time varying effects and endogeneity. Based on the empirical analysis, I concluded that aid is effective in reducing poverty after controlling for macroeconomic variables. The findings are consistent on all poverty measures, the poverty gap, poverty depth, and poverty severity. Thus, sound macroeconomic policies and good institutional quality are also necessary factors in achieving sustainable poverty reduction strategies in recipient countries.
Comparisons and Choice

Decisions made in laboratory settings have often been found to be sensitive to details of how the choice sets are structured and ordered. I provide a framework for describing these effects, in which preferences can vary depending on the history of choice sets, but which restricts them to be consistent when decisions are made simultaneously. Within this framework I introduce a simple comparison effect, in which being exposed to a larger value along some dimension makes a person less sensitive to marginal differences along that dimension (expressed in terms of the marginal rate of substitution). This effect predicts the existence of many otherwise disparate empirical findings (contrast and anchoring effects, response range effects, joint vs separate reversals, decoy, scope neglect and common difference effects). I also discuss sufficient conditions under which this behaviour could reflect Bayesian inference from the choice set. In the second half of the paper I apply the model to equilibrium in an imperfectly competitive market. Under unit demand the model predicts, unlike the rational benchmark, that markups and dispersion are increasing in cost, two facts that have been commonly observed in the empirical IO literature. Finally I introduce a novel dataset of cost and price for 3,500 goods from a chain drugstore which shows, as predicted, a very tight connection between cost and markup. ∗College Fellow, Economics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138 (email: tcunning@fas.harvard.edu). I am especially grateful to Francesco Caselli, Erik Eyster, David Laibson and Andrei Shleifer for their support and advice. I have also benefited greatly from comments by Ruchir Agarwal, Inés Moreno de Barreda, Gharad Bryan, Alex Peysakhovich, Matthew Rabin, Matan Tsur, Tomasz Strzalecki, Balasz Szentes, among many others, besides seminar participants at Harvard and LSE.
CFDP: an approach to Cost-Optimal Planning based on FDP

CFDP is a planning system based on the paradigm of planning as constraint satisfaction, that searches for costoptimal plans. Basically it is an Iterative Deepening DepthFirst Search procedure (Korf 1985) like its predecessor FDP (Grandcolas & Pain-Barre 2007) (FDP produces optimal sequential plans). CFDP works directly on a structure related to Graphplan’s planning graph: given a fixed bound on the length of the plan, the structure is incrementally build. Each time the structure is extended, a search for cost-optimal sequential plans is made. The process stops either if it can be proved that searching for longer plans will only produce plans of worse quality, or if the given bound is reached and no plan has been found. The search procedure is not complete since if no solution is found it cannot prove that there is no solution. If a solution is found, in most cases the procedure provides a cost-optimal plan and the proof of its optimality. In some cases a solution is found with no assurance of its optimality (this problem is due to the fixed bound and can easily be corrected).
Physics-Informed Discriminator (PID) for Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets

We propose a novel method of incorporating physical knowledge as an additional input to the discriminator of a conditional Generative Adversarial Net (cGAN). Our proposed approach, termed as Physics-informed Discriminator for cGAN (cGAN-PID), is more aligned to the adversarial learning idea of cGAN as opposed to existing methods on incorporating physical knowledge in GANs by adding physics based loss functions as additional terms in the optimization objective of GAN. We evaluate the performance of our model on two toy datasets and demonstrate that our proposed cGAN-PID can be used as an alternative to the existing techniques.
Effects of Heating Nutrient Solution on Water and Mineral Uptake and Early Yield of Two Cucurbits under Soilless Culture

ABSTRACT Root temperature may affect the production of greenhouse vegetables under soilless culture. Four independent experiments were carried out over two consecutive crop cycles using two different substrates: rockwool and coconut coir waste. Three heating treatments were applied: non heating (T0), nutrient solution at 12–16°C (T1), and at 18–22°C (T2). The experiments were carried out in greenhouses in Almería (SE Spain) on cucumber and melon. Mean substrate and air temperature were not affected by the treatments. Under conditions of nutrient solution heating EC and percentage of drainage volume decreased, while water and mineral nutrient absorption increased. However, results showed great differences between both crops and substrates. A significant decrease in nitrate and phosphate emission from the substrates was also recorded, especially in rockwool substrate. Few effects were observed concerning yield and fruit quality parameters, but in rockwool-grown melon early yield was enhanced. It follows that nutrient solution heating is a low-cost and environmentally friendly method of increasing early melon yield.
Surface behaviour of uranium dioxide after immersion in mineral water studied by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy

X-Ray photoelectron spectroscopic (XPS) analysis has been carried out on samples of crystalline uranium dioxide following exposure to deionised or mineral water at 60 and 90°C for several weeks. A surface layer formed on UO2 samples immersed in mineral water at 90°C has been identified as magnesium silicate precipitated from the mineral water. Depth-profiling experiments showed that this magnesium silicate deposit was ca. 100–200 nm in thickness and revealed the formation of a thin film of UO3 between the bulk UO2 and the outer magnesium silicate deposit.
Counterfactual inference for single-cell gene expression analysis

Finding a causal gene from case-control studies is a classic and fundamental problem in genomics. To date, we still ask which genes are differentially regulated by a disease with single-cell sequencing data, but in a cell-type-specific way. Here, we present a causal inference framework that effectively adjusts confounding effects, not requiring prior knowledge of control genes or cells. We demonstrate that our causal inference algorithm substantially improves statistical power in simulations and real-world data analysis of 70k brain cells, collected for dissecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) mechanisms. We identified that 377 causal genes are differentially regulated by the disease in various brain cell types, including highly-relevant AD genes with a proper cell type annotation, such as DGKD in neurons, SNCA in microglia, PIAS in oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, and FGFR2 in astrocytes. Causal genes in different cell types also enrich distinctive pathways, highlighting multiple components of the disease progressions.
Validation of the short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire in young adulthood

Abstract: Background: Depression often onsets in adolescence and is associated with recurrence in adulthood. There is a need to identify and monitor depression symptoms across adolescence and into young adulthood. The short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (sMFQ) is commonly used to measure depression symptoms in adolescence but has yet to be validated in young adulthood. This study aimed to (1) examine whether the sMFQ is a valid assessment of depression in young adults, and (2) identify cut-points that best capture a DSM-5 diagnosis of depression at age 25. Methods: The sample included young people who took part in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) at age 25 (n=4098). Receiver Operating Characteristic analyses were used to examine how well the self-rated sMFQ discriminates between cases and non-cases of DSM-5 Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) classified using the self-rated Development and Well Being Assessment. Sensitivity and specificity values were used to identify cut-points on the sMFQ. Results: The sMFQ had high accuracy for discriminating MDD cases from non-cases at age 25. The commonly used cut-point in adolescence ([≥]12) performed well at this age, best balancing sensitivity and specificity. However, a lower cut-point ([≥]10) may be appropriate in some contexts, e.g. for screening, when sensitivity is favoured over specificity. Limitations: ALSPAC is a longitudinal population cohort that suffers from non-random attrition. Conclusions: The sMFQ is a valid measure of depression in young adults in the general population. It can be used to screen for and monitor depression across adolescence and early adulthood. Keywords: ALSPAC, depression, sMFQ, validation, young adulthood