Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EVALUATION OF INDIGENOUS TECHNOLOGY FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF WHITEFLY, Trialeaurodes vaporariorum L. (HOMOPTERA: ALEURODIDAE) IN POTATO

Plant-derived extracts and phytochemicals have long been a subject of research in an effort to develop alternatives to conventional insecticides. In the present study bioactivities of some plant extracts viz. Jatropha curcas L. , Nerium oleander L. , Allium sativum L. and Urtica dioca L. were tested at different intervals of spray and compared with two commercially available botanical insecticides, mycojaal and B.t. at 5 and 10% concentration and standard recommended insecticide, imidacloprid (0.03%) against Trialeaurodes vaporariorum L. in potato. Among the test treatments, the highest population suppression of whiteflies was observed with cattle urine extract of J. curcas at 10 (90.6%) and 5% (83.4%) concentrations. At 10% test concentration mycojaal and methanolic extraction of J. curcas also proved as effective as imidacloprid that resulted in an average population reduction up to 90.22, 88.25 and 93.78% respectively over control. The different plant extracts and bio-pesticides were effective for longer duration at 10% (up to 4-7 days) as compared to 5% concentration, but they were effective up to 3-6 days only. All the treatments proved significantly better over control.
Potential bacterial pathogens of external ocular infections and their antibiotic susceptibility pattern at Hawassa University Teaching and Referral Hospital, Southern Ethiopia

Bacterial external ocular infection is a common health problem along with increase and spread of drug resistance in Ethiopia. The objective of this study was to identify potential bacterial isolate of external ocular infections and their antimicrobial susceptibility patterns in patients attending eye clinic of the Hawassa University Teaching and Referral Hospital, from December 2012 to April 2013. A total of 281 consecutive, non-repetitive ocular specimens were collected among conjunctivitis cases (n=140), blepharitis cases (n=55), keratitis cases (n=31), dacryocystitis cases (n=19), and other cases (n=36). All samples were processed for culture and identification by standard methods. Susceptibility testing was done by Kirby-Bauer method as per Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) guideline. Out of 281 ocular specimens submitted to culture, 137 (48.8%) specimen were positive. The most common bacterial isolates were Gram positive cocci (n=88; 61.5%). The predominant bacterial species isolated was Staphylococcus aureus (n=30; 21.0%) followed by coagulase negative Staphylococci (CoNS) (n=26; 18.2%) and Streptococcus pneumoniae (n=20; 14.0%). In vitro ciprofloxacin was effective against 86% of isolated pathogen. Multi-drug resistance was observed in 69.9% of the bacterial isolates. Our study confirmed that S. aureus was the overall predominant isolated pathogen followed by CoNS, S. pneumoniae and Klebsiella spp. Gram positive isolates were more susceptible to amoxicillin-clavulanic acid and vancomycin, whereas Gram negative isolates were more susceptible to ciprofloxacin and gentamicin. Relatively, ciprofloxacin is effective against most isolated pathogen. Key words: External ocular infections, conjunctivitis, blepharitis, keratitis, dacryocystitis, susceptibility.
The effects of 20 years of highway presence on the genetic structure of Rana dalmatina populations

ABSTRACT Habitat destruction and fragmentation caused by highways can negatively affect animal populations, but a better understanding of the effects of highways on population genetic structure is still needed to improve conservation plans in urbanized landscapes. We investigated the degree of genetic variability and differentiation within and among seven Rana dalmatina populations located far from highly trafficked roads (non-fragmented populations) and four populations sampled on both sides of a major highway (fragmented populations). The degree of population subdivision was significantly higher among fragmented (FST = 0.238) as compared to non-fragmented populations (FST = 0.022). Furthermore, in the four fragmented populations, significantly lower allelic richness as compared to non-fragmented populations was observed. Together with potential high levels of road mortality leading to smaller population size, these results suggest that separation by highways not only has reduced the genetic diversity and polymorphism in local populations over two decades, but also has resulted in a higher degree of population differentiation, most likely due to genetic drift.
New results on reciprocal series related to Fibonacci and Lucas numbers with subscripts in arithmetic progression

In this paper, we derive new expressions for some Fibonacci and Lucas number related reciprocal series with subscripts in arithmetic progression. We give expressions for both finite and infinite sums. The results, which we believe to be new, appear as special cases of some more general series identities, which we prove to be true. Mathematics Subject Classification: 11B39, 11Y60
The Mathematics of Extinction Across Scales: From Populations to the Biosphere

The sixth mass extinction poses an unparalleled quantitative challenge to conservation biologists. Mathematicians and ecologists alike face the problem of developing models that can scale predictions of extinction rates from populations to the level of a species, or even to an entire ecosystem. We review some of the most basic stochastic and analytical methods of calculating extinction risk at different scales, including population viability analysis, stochastic metapopulation occupancy models, and the species area relationship. We also consider two major extensions of theory: the possibility of evolutionary rescue from extinction in a changing environment, and the posthumous assignment of an extinction date from sighting records. In the case of the latter, we provide an example using data on Spix's macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii), the "rarest bird in the world," to demonstrate the challenges associated with extinction date research.
Mutual Coupling in Phased Arrays: A Review

The mutual coupling between antenna elements affects the antenna parameters like terminal impedances, reflection coefficients and hence the antenna array performance in terms of radiation characteristics, output signal-to-interference noise ratio (SINR), and radar cross section (RCS). This coupling effect is also known to directly or indirectly influence the steady state and transient response, the resolution capability, interference rejection, and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation competence of the array. Researchers have proposed several techniques and designs for optimal performance of phased array in a given signal environment, counteracting the coupling effect. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the methods that model and mitigate the mutual coupling effect for different types of arrays. The parameters that get affected due to the presence of coupling thereby degrading the array performance are discussed. The techniques for optimization of the antenna characteristics in the presence of coupling are also included.
Protective Effect of a Non-Bacteriocinogenic Lactococcus piscium CNCM I-4031 Strain Against Listeria monocytogenes in Sterilized Tropical Cooked Peeled Shrimp

The protective activity of a non-bacteriocinogenic Lactococcus piscium CNCM I-4031 strain against Listeria monocytogenes was investigated in tropical cooked peeled shrimp stored at 8°C in modified atmosphere packaging (50% N2–50% CO2). When inoculated alone (L. piscium 107 CFU g−1 and L. monocytogenes 104 CFU g−1), protective culture and target strain grew very well on shrimp reaching a maximum cell number of 109 CFU g−1 after 7 and 14 days, respectively. In the presence of L. piscium, growth of L. monocytogenes was totally prevented after 3 days of storage. The count was 3.4 log CFU g−1 lower than in the control after 10 days and until the end of storage (31 days). Using the Seafood Spoilage and Safety Predictor Software (http://sssp.dtuaqua.dk), it was shown that pH decrease from 6.58 to 5.94 and lactic acid concentration of 89.65 mM measured in the co-inoculated batch did not fully explain the inhibition observed.
PERSONALITY TRAITS AND BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

The people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) show pathological personality traits in three of the five domains (APA 2013). In addition to diagnostic criteria for BPD, described by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the dimensional model of personality disorder, based on five-factor model of personality, seems to gain interest as it promisses to eliminate problems associated with poor-fit, co-morbidity and unclear diagnosis. The purpose of this study is to identify the personality traits by people who are already diagnosed with BPD using the DSM-5 categorical criteria. Based on the theoretical concepts and existing research findings as well as increased interest in the dimensional personality theory, we assume that people diagnosed with BPD will show high levels of pathology on three trait domains: negative affectivity, disinhibition and antagonism. This study was conducted in Germany in psychiatric clinic. Fifteen participants represented a convenience sample, of patients already diagnosed with BPD. For this study Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) was used. The findings supported the assumptions that people with BPD show some degree of anxiousness, emotional lability, hostility, impulsivity, risk taking and separation anxiety. The study also found that traits such as distractibility, withdrawal and submissiveness were also present in this participant group. Even though, study was conducted with small number of participants it has provided contribution to the already existing knowledge and understanding in regards to common personality treats for people diagnosed with BPD.
The dative alternation in L 2 German ? Conceptualization transfer from L 1

In Dutch, a ditransitive verb can take two alternating patterns (“the dative alternation”): the Double Object Construction (DOC) (‘Jan geeft het meisje een boek’) and the prepositional construction (POC) (‘Jan geeft een boek aan het meisje’). The choice of one of both constructions is associated with multiple discoursepragmatic factors. In German, however, the POC is ungrammatical with a verb such as geben‚ ‘to give‘: ‘Jan gibt ein Buch *[an das Mädchen]’. This article reports on two sentence rating experiments (acceptability judgments) to test whether Dutch learners of German transfer their preferences about the dative alternation to the ditransitive construction in German. If no transfer were involved, (proficient) learners of L2 German are expected to consistently rate the DOC as the only possible choice in German. We found, however, a positive correlation between the sentence ratings of Dutch native speakers and learners of German. Our results further indicated that the DOC construction was consistently rated higher in German than in Dutch. Taken together, these findings suggest that although the German learners seem to be aware that the DOC is the default order in German, their choice is nonetheless associated with their L1-intuitions about the dative alternation. We discuss these results in the context of Slobin’s Thinking-for-Speaking Hypothesis and Jarvis’ Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis (more specifically, Conceptualization Transfer). We argue more specifically that the conceptualization of the dative alternation in the L1 Dutch is the blueprint, i.e. the thinking-for-speaking, for the structures in L2.
WORKING CAPITAL MANAGEMENT AND PROFITABILITY-CASE OF PAKISTANI FIRMS

Working Capital Management has its effect on liquidity as well on profitability of the firm. In this research, we have selected a sample of 94 Pakistani firms listed on Karachi Stock Exchange for a period of 6 years from 1999 – 2004, we have studied the effect of different variables of working capital management including the Average collection period, Inventory turnover in days, Average payment period, Cash conversion cycle and Current ratio on the Net operating profitability of Pakistani firms. Debt ratio, size of the firm (measured in terms of natural logarithm of sales) and financial assets to total assets ratio have been used as control variables. Pearson’s correlation, and regression analysis (Pooled least square and general least square with cross section weight models) are used for analysis. The results show that there is a strong negative relationship between variables of the working capital management and profitability of the firm. It means that as the cash conversion cycle increases it will lead to decreasing profitability of the firm, and managers can create a positive value for the shareholders by reducing the cash conversion cycle to a possible minimum level. We find that there is a significant negative relationship between liquidity and profitability. We also find that there is a positive relationship between size of the firm and its profitability. There is also a significant negative relationship between debt used by the firm and its profitability.
Recognising audio-visual speech in vehicles using the AVICAR database

Interacting with technology within a vehicle environment using a voice interface can greatly reduce the effects of driver distraction. Most current approaches to this problem only utilise the audio signal, making them susceptible to acoustic noise. An obvious approach to circumvent this is to use the visual modality in addition. However, capturing, storing and distributing audio-visual data in a vehicle environment is very costly and difficult. One current dataset available for such research is the AVICAR [1] database. Unfortunately this database is largely unusable due to timing mismatch between the two streams and in addition, no protocol is available. We have overcome this problem by re-synchronising the streams on the phone-number portion of the dataset and established a protocol for further research. This paper presents the first audio-visual results on this dataset for speaker-independent speech recognition. We hope this will serve as a catalyst for future research in this area. Index Terms: AVICAR database, Audio-visual automatic speech recognition, Feature extraction, Multi-stream HMM.
Ocean ventilation as a driver of interannual variability in atmospheric potential oxygen

We present observations of interannual variability on 2–5 yr timescales in atmospheric potential oxygen (APO≈O2+CO2) from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography global flask sampling network. Interannual variations in the tracer APO are expected to arise from air–sea fluxes alone, because APO is insensitive to exchanges with the terrestrial biosphere. These interannual variations are shown to be regionally coherent and robust to analytical artefacts. We focus on explaining a feature dominant in records from the Northern Hemisphere stations, marked by increasing APO in the late 1990s, followed by an abrupt drawdown in 2000–2001. The timing of the drawdown matches a renewal of deep convection in the North Atlantic, followed the next year by a severe winter in the western North Pacific that may have allowed ventilation of denser isopycnals than usual. We find a weak correlation between changes in the interhemispheric APO difference and El Ni˜no indices, and the observations show no strong features of the 1997–98 El Ni˜no. Comparisons with estimates of variations in ocean productivity and ocean heat content demonstrate that these processes are secondary influences at these timescales. We conclude that the evidence points to variability in ocean ventilation as the main driver of interannual variability in APO.
Sarbanes-Oxley and its Aftermath: A Review of the Evidence

Introduced in response to several high profile US corporate collapses the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 has proven to be a gold mine for academic researchers: after only five years no less than 528 studies of SOX appear on the Social Sciences Research Network (www.ssrn.com). This essay seeks to review the results of this research and provide a concise summary of the available evidence as of late 2007. Overall although SOX appears to have had some beneficial effects it has also: increased the costs of auditing governance and human capital and compliance more generally; induced a mis-match between auditors and firms; encouraged firms to delist or otherwise stay below the regulatory radar; lowered corporate investment and risk-taking; and had ambiguous effects on the quality of investor information and capital market eeffciency.
Between the Laboratory and the Policy Process: Research, Scientific Community, and Administration in Japan's Chemical Biology

This article analyzes the emergent new discipline known as chemical biology as part of the rapidly developing postgenomic research agenda. Despite chemical biology's academic as well as political significance in terms of its expected contribution to drug discovery, the international STS community has failed to pay serious attention to its dynamism thus far. The objective of this paper is to fill this gap by conducting a case study on the rapid formation of the Japanese Association of Chemical Biology, which is a global pioneer, in 2006. By bridging different theoretical concerns, namely laboratory studies in STS and the study of policy process, particularly the theory of policy window by Kingdon, this paper analyzes how three different levels—laboratory practices, community of scientists, and policy process—are mutually constitutive, and why both Japanese scientists and policy makers believe that chemical biology is important both in science and policy. This paper will substantiate the all-encompassing notion of coproductionism given by Jasanoff, by emphasizing more specific instances such as the role of policy entrepreneurs, international competition, and sense of scientific tradition, which are crucial for enabling coproduction.
Size Does Matter: Implied Object Size is Mentally Simulated During Language Comprehension

Embodied theories of language comprehension propose that readers construct a mental simulation of described objects that contains perceptual characteristics of their real-world referents. The present study is the first to investigate directly whether implied object size is mentally simulated during sentence comprehension and to study the potential influence of developmental factors on mental simulation by comparing adults' and children's mental simulation processing. Participants performed a sentence-picture verification task in which they read a sentence that implied a large or a small size for an object and then saw a picture of the object that matched or mismatched the implied size. Responses to pictures were faster when implied size and pictured size matched, suggesting that readers activated perceptual information on object size during sentence comprehension. The magnitude of the match effect was equal across age groups. The results contribute to refining and advancing knowledge with respect to the nature of mental simulations.
Preferential Discrete Model-based Diagnosis for Intermittent and Permanent Faults

In this paper we consider the diagnosis of intermittent and permanent faults in discrete event systems. We present a logic based modeling approach associated with conditional preferences in order to produce a single diagnosis at each time step. Like all incomplete diagnosis approaches, ours is subject to deadlocks between the system and its diagnoser. In this paper, we address the detection of such deadlocks at design time with the rich semantic model-checker ELECTRUM.
Two Photon Composite Electron Model: QFT Aspects

In a previous paper “A Physical Electron-Positron Model”[1] an electron model was developed in a geometrical algebra (GA) construct developed by Doran et.al. [2] The model shows the mathematical structure, and the physical description required for the existence of a composite electron but not delineating the physical processes. This paper will develop the model from the perspective of classical and QM mechanics and make the connection to the QFT and Lorentz structure that underlies the physical basis, and illustrates how the interaction of photons can create charge. The path integral formulations of QFT fit well with the model and it is absent the infinities indicative of the standard model. The concept of charge has heretofore not had any theoretical explanation, accept for some unknown substance sprinkling in with the mass. The model therefore offers the QFT community an idea on how to convert the concept of Charge and Pair Production from magic to mechanics.
Construction and Characterization of Cyanobacterial Bioreporters to Assess Phosphorus Bioavailability in Marine Environments

Dr. George S. Bullerjahn, Advisor Deficiency of essential nutrients for phytoplankton such as iron and phosphorus is well documented in the world oceans. As a relatively novel approach for identification of bioavailable P in marine systems, this research is focused on the construction and initial characterization of P-responsive cyanobacterial bioreporters for assessing the bioavailability of P in marine environments. Three bioreporters were constructed by transforming the fusion of P-responsive promoter sequences with luxAB into Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002. All obtained bioreporters were shown to produce luminescence after addition of aldehyde; however, the intensity of bioluminescence did not always correlate to the concentration of inorganic phosphate in medium. The analysis of the promoter sequences revealed a similar 15 bp motif that can be a potential consensus sequence conserved in P-responsive promoters of Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 and some other genetically similar microorganisms.
Ersoz Qualitative Data Analysis for Health Care Services

This study was designed enable application of multivariate technique in the interpretation of categorical data for measuring health care services satisfaction in Turkey. The data was collected from a total of 17726 respondents. The establishment of the sample group and collection of the data were carried out by a joint team from The Ministry of Health and Turkish Statistical Institute (Turk Stat) of Turkey. The multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) was used on the data of 2882 respondents who answered the questionnaire in full. The multiple correspondence analysis indicated that, in the evaluation of health services females, public employees, younger and more highly educated individuals were more concerned and complainant than males, private sector employees, older and less educated individuals. Overall 53 % of the respondents were pleased with the improvements in health care services in the past three years. This study demonstrates the public consciousness in health services and health care satisfaction in Turkey. It was found that most the respondents were pleased with the improvements in health care services over the past three years. Awareness of health service quality increases with education levels. Older individuals and males would appear to have lower expectancies in health services. Keywords—Multiple correspondence analysis, optimal scaling, multivariate categorical data, health care services, health satisfaction survey, statistical visualizing, Turkey.