Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of climate change on range expansion by the mountain pine beetle in British Columbia

The current latitudinal and elevational range of mountain pine beetle is not limited by available hosts. Instead, its potential to expand north and east has been restricted by climatic conditions unfavorable for brood development. We combined a model of the impact of climatic conditions on the establishment and persistence of mountain pine beetle populations with a spatially explicit, climate-driven simulation tool. Historic weather records were used to produce maps of the distribution of past climatically suitable habitats for mountain pine beetles in British Columbia. Overlays of annual mountain pine beetle occurrence on these maps were used to determine if the beetle has expanded its range in recent years due to changing climate. An examination of the distribution of climatically suitable habitats in 10year increments derived from climate normals (1921-1950 to 1971-2000) clearly shows an increase in the range of benign habitats. Furthermore, an increase (at an increasing rate) in the number of infestations since 1970 in formerly climatically unsuitable habitats indicates that mountain pine beetle populations have expanded into these new areas. Given the rapid colonization by mountain pine beetles of former climatically unsuitable areas during the last several decades, continued warming in western North America associated with climate change will allow the beetle to further expand its range northward, eastward and toward higher elevations. Introduction Every aspect of an insect’s life cycle is dependent upon temperature because they are cold blooded. Therefore, these organisms should respond quickly to changing climate by shifting their geographical distribution and population behaviour to take advantage of new climatically benign environments. Rapid ecological and genetic adaptation by insects in response to global warming has already been documented in Europe (Thomas et al. 2001). However, for North America, despite the development of several models predicting climate change impacts (e.g., Logan and Powell 2001), there is little empirical evidence that global warming has affected insect populations. In long-lived ecosystems such as forests, insects are often primary disturbance agents (e.g., Dale et al. 2001; Logan et al. 2003). The mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae (Hopkins), is one of the most Mountain Pine Beetle Symposium: Challenges and Solutions. October 30-31, 2003, Kelowna, British Columbia. T.L. Shore, J.E. Brooks, and J.E. Stone (editors). Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacifi c Forestry Centre, Information Report BC-X-399, Victoria, BC. 298 p.
SAMI SJÖBLOM COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE – CONDUCTING AN ANALYSIS OF A BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

SAMI SJÖBLOM: Competitive Intelligence – Conducting an Analysis of a Business Environment Tampere University of Technology Master of Science Thesis, 76 pages, 1 Appendix page November 2015 Master’s Degree Programme in Information and Knowledge Management Major: Information Management and Systems Examiner: Professor Mika Hannula, MSc. Jussi Myllärniemi
The effects of Saccharomyces cerevisiae on the morphological and biomechanical characteristics of the tibiotarsus in broiler chickens

Abstract. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of different levels of the feed supplement Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast metabolite, on broiler tibiotarsus traits and to reduce leg problems by identifying the pathological changes in leg skeletal system. Thus, reducing leg disorders due to the skeletal system, the cause of significant economic losses in our country (Turkey), was investigated by the supplementation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in broiler feed. In the study, 300 male day-old, Ross 308 broiler chicks were used. Experiment groups were designed as follows: control; 0.1 % Saccharomyces cerevisiae; 0.2 % Saccharomyces cerevisiae; 0.4 % Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The experimental diets were chemically analyzed according to the methods of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists. Twelve groups were obtained, including three replicates for each experimental group. Each replicated group was comprised of 25 chicks, and thus 75 chicks were placed in each experimental group. After 42 days, broiler chickens were slaughtered. Tibiotarsi were weighed with a digital scale, and the lengths were measured with a digital caliper after the drying process. Cortical areas were measured with the ImageJ Image Processing and Analysis Program. A UTEST Model-7014 tension and compression machine and a Maxtest software were used to determine the bone strength of the tibiotarsus. The severity of the tibial dyschondroplasia lesion was evaluated as 0, +1, +2 and +3. Crude ash, calcium and phosphorus analyses were performed to determine the inorganic matter of tibiotarsi. For radiographic evaluations of epiphyseal growth plates, tibiotarsi from the right legs were photographed in lateral and craniocaudal positions and examined. Statistical analyses were performed with the SPSS statistics program. It was observed that the use of Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a feed supplement led to an increase in the bone traits of broiler chickens. Optimum results for bone mineral content, biomechanical traits and strength were provided by the addition of 0.2 % Saccharomyces cerevisiae in broiler feed. As a result, the use of yeast as feed supplements in broilers is considered to be an economic and convenient way of providing animal welfare and preventing commercial losses due to leg problems.
Investigating Entrepreneurial Orientation and Firm Performance in the Iranian Agricultural Context

An explanatory survey was carried out in 2008 to investigate the relationship between Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), environmental factors, human capital and organizational characteristics vs. entrepreneurial performance among entrepreneurial firms in Iranian agricultural sector. Data were obtained from a sample of 120 Iranian agricultural establishments, using an interview-oriented questionnaire. The hierarchical regression analysis revealed that: although there is a positive direct relationship between EO and entrepreneurial performance in an agricultural business setting, applying main- effect or contingency models only, provides a distracting picture of entrepreneurial performance in agricultural settings. It was also found that configurational approach may better explain the relationship between EO, environmental factors, human capital and organizational characteristics vs. entrepreneurial performance over and above contingency and above main- effect models.
Prevalence of Bovine Trypanosomosis in Didessa Woreda, Oromiya Region, Ethiopia

A cross sectional study was conducted at Didessa Woreda, Oromiya region, south west Ethiopia. The study was carried out from November, 2011 to April 2012 on indigenous cattle breed managed under mixed corop-livestok production system, to determine the prevalence of bovine trypanosomosis. This study employs parasitological survey by the use of Buffy coat examination, thin smear and hematological study. The overall prevalence of bovine trypanosomosis in the present study was 5.47%. The predominant species recovered was Trypanosome congolense (61.9%) followed by Trypanosome vivax (23.8%) the Trypanasome brucei (9.5%). Mixed infection due to Trypanosome congolense and Trypanosome vivax (4.7%) was also recorded in the study. Discrepancy in the prevalence of Trypanosome infection was recorded in the different age groups, between sex and different body conditioned animals, but the difference was not statically siginificant (p>0.05). The mean PCV of parasitemic animals was significantly lower (21.15=4.675) than the parasitemic animals (24.316=4.93) (p<0.05). Although the present study came up with low prevalence of bovine trypanosomiasis in the stydy area, the potential impact of this disease on production and productivity of cattle shall not undermined. Therefore, sustainable community based tsetse and trypanosomsis control program should be implemented.
Towards A Workload-Driven Flow Scheduler For Modern Datacenters

Modern datacenters run different applications with various communication requirements in terms of bandwidth and deadlines. Of particular interest are deadlines that are driving web-search workloads e.g. when submitting requests to Bing search engine or loading Facebook home page. Serving the submitted requests in a timely fashion relies on meeting the deadlines of the generated scatter/gather flows for each request. The current flow-schedulers are deadline unaware, and they just start flows as soon as they arrive when the bandwidth resource is available. In this thesis, we present Artemis: a workload-driven flow-scheduler at the end-hosts that learns via reinforcement how to schedule flows to meet their deadlines. The flowscheduling policy in Artemis is not hard-coded and is instead computed in real-time based on a reinforcement-learning control loop. In Artemis, we model flow-scheduling as a deep reinforcement learning problem, and we use the actor-critic architecture to solve it. Flows in Artemis do not start as soon as they arrive, and a source starts sending a particular flow upon requesting and acquiring a token from the destination node. The token-request is issued by the source node and it exposes the flow’s requirements to the destination. At the destination side, Artemis flow-scheduler is a decision-making agent that learns how to serve the awaiting token-requests based on their embedded requirements, using the deep reinforcement learning actor-critic model. We use two gather workloads to demonstrate (1) Artemis’s ability to learn how to schedule deadline flows on its own and (2) its effectiveness to meet deadlines. We compare the performance of Artemis against Earliest Deadline First (EDF), and two other rule-based flow-scheduling policies that, unlike EDF, are aware of both the sizes and the deadlines of the flows: Largest Size Deadline ratio First (LSDF) and Smallest Size Deadline ratio First (SSDF). LSDF schedules arrived flows with largest size deadline ratio first, while LSDF does the inverse logic. Our experimental results show that Artemis flow-scheduler is able to capture the structure of the gather workloads, maps the requirements of the arrived flows to the order at which they need be served and computes a flow-scheduling strategy based on that. Using the first gather workload that has an equal distribution of flows with (size, deadline) pairs that are equal to (350KB, 40ms) and (250KB, 50ms), Artemis met +35.58% more deadlines than EDF, +24.93% more than SSDF, and performed marginally better than LSDF with +4.42%. For the second workload, 60% of flows have a (size, deadline) pair equals to (350KB, 40ms) and 40% flows with (250KB, 50ms), Artemis outperformed all three flows-schedulers, meeting +16.34% more deadlines than the second best SSDF.
Analysis of the Crust Deformations before and after the 2008 Wenchuan Ms8.0 Earthquake Based on GPS Measurements

We use the movement velocities of GPS stations in western Sichuan province, China, to determine the distribution of horizontal strain accumulation before the 2008 Wenchuan Ms8.0 earthquake with a piecewise approximation approach and the coseismic displacements to determine the fault slips of the earthquake with an inversion analysis method. The results show that the distribution of the principal strain rates is strongly related to the active faults in the region, but along Longmenshan fault where the earthquake occurred, the strain rates are much lower than the others. The fault slip distribution shows mainly a thrusting with dextral striking, and the fault slips in the upper parts of the fault plane are in general bigger. Using the current strain accumulation rate and the released energy by the earthquake, we predict such a big earthquake in Longmenshan fault zone will happen in 460 to 1380 years.
Analysis of moisture and total sugar content of Huizao based on surface images

Moisture and total sugar content are two important internal qualities of Huizao. In order to explore their correlation with external qualities, a novel method of moisture and total sugar content analysis was proposed based on surface images. Firstly, five geometric features and seven texture features of Huizao were obtained to be the external quality indexes by digital image processing technology. Secondly, the wrinkle degree as an important index was extracted by marked watershed segmentation algorithm. According to the external quality the Huizao samples were grouped, and the moisture and total sugar content were determined through physical and chemical methods. Lastly, the moisture and total sugar content and twelve external indexes were all processed by step discriminatory analysis. Meanwhile, the regression models of moisture content with short diameter, contrast, and wrinkle degree and total sugar with wrinkle degree were established. The coefficients of the model were 0.9992 and 0.9978 respectively, and all the significance was less than 0.01, which show that the regression equation and regression coefficient effect are highly significant. The results indicate that the moisture and total sugar content of Huizao are greatly correlated with the wrinkle degree. The moisture and total sugar content are the highest when the wrinkle degree is at 2 to 3 grade, and they decrease gradually with the wrinkle degree increasing. Moisture content shows positive correlation with the size of Huizao. The results of model analysis agree well with the experimental results, which can provide valuable reference for improving Huizao grade diversity. Keywords: Huizao, step discriminatory analysis, moisture content, total sugar DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe. 20181104.3386 Citation: Zhang J X, Ma Q Q, He F, Qu F, Li W. Analysis of moisture and total sugar content of Huizao based on surface images. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2018; 11(4): 238-243.
The Incidence and Wage Effects of Overskilling among Employed VET Graduates. NCVER Monograph Series 03/2009.

When the skills workers have do not match the skills that jobs require, a number of negative labour market outcomes can occur, including productivity and efficiency losses, lowered earnings and reduced job satisfaction. Using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this study examines the degree of job mismatch experienced by workers. The mismatch between the perceived skill level of the worker and the skill level of the job is considered as overskilling. The report finds that workers with vocational qualifications, particularly at the certificate III or IV level, are less likely to experience overskilling.
Peak Effect and the Transition from Elastic to Plastic Depinning

We demonstrate for the first time an observation of the peak effect in simulations of magnetic vortices in a superconductor. The shear modulus $c_{66}$ of the vortex lattice is tuned by adding a fictitious {attractive} short range potential to the usual long-range repulsion between vortices. The peak effect is found to be most pronounced in low densities of pinning centers, and is always associated with a transition from elastic to plastic depinning. The simulations suggest in some situations that over a range of values of $c_{66}$ the production of lattice defects by a driving force enhances the pinning of the lattice.
Addition of monomeric and polymeric organic substrates alleviates viral lytic pressure on bacterial communities in coastal seawaters

We examined the effect of growth conditions on the fraction of bacterial production lysed by viruses (Flysed). Time-course changes in bacterial and viral variables were determined in coastal seawater cultures with and without the addition of monomeric (glucose or amino acids) or polymeric (protein) substrates. Substrate-induced enhancement of bacterial production was much more pronounced than that of viral production during the incubation period of 60 to 90 h. Estimates of Flysed were highest in non-addition controls (range = 0.3 to 1.0), followed by the monomer addition treatment (0.1 to 0.2), and lowest in the protein addition treatment (0.04 to 0.1). These data are con- sistent with the proposition that bacterial communities grown under substrate-rich conditions are less subject to viral attacks. Low Flysed values in the protein addition treatment were associated with high activities of leucine aminopeptidase, indicating a role of extracellular proteases in alleviating viral lytic pressure. Our data support the notion that supplies of dissolved organic matter affect the mag- nitude of bacteria-virus couplings in marine environments.
A New Model of Inflation, Trend Inflation, and Long-Run Inflation Expectations

A knowledge of the level of trend inflation is key to many current policy decisions, and several methods of estimating trend inflation exist. This paper adds to the growing literature which uses survey-based long-run forecasts of inflation to estimate trend inflation. We develop a bivariate model of inflation and long-run forecasts of inflation which allows for the estimation of the link between trend inflation and the long-run forecast. Thus, our model allows for the possibilities that long-run forecasts taken from surveys can be equated with trend inflation, that the two are completely unrelated, or anything in between. By including stochastic volatility and time-variation in coefficients, it extends existing methods in empirically important ways. We use our model with a variety of inflation measures and survey-based forecasts. We find that long-run forecasts can provide substantial help in refining estimates of trend inflation over popular alternatives. But simply equating trend inflation with the long-run forecasts is not appropriate.
UK Planning Controls and the Market Responsiveness of Housing Supply

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects from a sample of local authorities in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. Hedonic analysis indicated that there is considerable variation in time it takes local authorities to process planning applications, with the worst being four times slower than the best. Smaller builders and housing association developments are processed more quickly than those of large developers and small sites appear to be particularly time intensive. These results suggest that delays in development control may be a significant contributory factor to the low responsiveness of UK housing supply to upturns in market activity.
Public Health Problems in Bangladesh: Issues and challenges

In South-East Asia the main public health issues are infectious diseases and communicable diseases. Public health has improved markedly in Bangladesh over the past three decades. Nevertheless, Bangladesh faces major health challenges. A scoping study was performed according to York methodology. The study was aimed to find out the major public health issues and challenges in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has one of the worst burdens of childhood malnutrition in the world. Communicable diseases are a major cause of death and disability in Bangladesh. Unsafe food remains a major threat to public health each year, citizens suffer from the acute effects of food contaminated by microbial pathogens, chemical substances and toxins. Bangladesh still ranks among the top ten countries in the world with the highest TB burden. Pneumonia and other infections are major causes of death among young children. In Bangladesh only 1% of the population is reported to be HIV-positive, but rates are much higher among high-risk populations: injecting drug users, sex workers, and men who have sex with men. The toll of non-communicable diseases — chronic diseases, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and chronic respiratory diseases — is increasing in Bangladesh as the population becomes more urbanized. The converging pressures of global climate change and urbanization have a devastating effect on Bangladesh’s most vulnerable populations. The disease burden Bangladesh is further exacerbated by unsanitary living conditions that underscore the poor economic conditions of both urban and rural home dwellers. There are still several issues that Bangladesh health care system is yet to tackle, governance, accessibility, and affordability are key issues that are preventing the implementation of solutions to the public health issues in Bangladesh. South East Asia Journal of Public Health Vol.6(2) 2016: 11-16
The Association of Prenatal Depression and Body Mass Index (BMI) in Pregnant Women Referred to Health Centers in Qom

Abstract Introduction : Pregnancy is a period during which women experience physical and psychological changes. The considerable changes can be found in their bodies and weights and they are quickly exposed to being overweight and obesity. On the other hand, few studies have assessed the association of depression with body mass index (BMI). This study explored whether depression and BMI affect each other in pregnancy. It aimed to investigate the correlation between prenatal depression and BMI in pregnant women in Qom. Methods : This was a descriptive-correlational study conducted on pregnant women referred to health centers in 2016. Participants were selected using multi-stage cluster sampling. Samples of 236 pregnant women were divided into two groups: the second (14-28 weeks) and third (28-40 weeks) trimesters of pregnancy. Height and weight were measured to determine the initial BMI as well as BMI during pregnancy. Demographic information was collected from demographic and obstetric forms. Depression was measured using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II). Data were analyzed using SPSS software and descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, regression analysis and Pearson’s correlation coefficient, significant at P < 0.05. Results : The results showed BMI in the second trimester to be 48.3% in the normal range, 16.1% overweight, and 30.5% obese. In the third trimester, BMI was 16.9% in the normal range, 34.4% overweight, and 46.6% obese. The rate of depression was 19.5% in the second trimester and 17.8% in the third trimester. Pearson’s correlation test showed that the association between prenatal depression and BMI did not exist in the second trimester (P = 0.499). In the third trimester, there was a significant negative correlation (P = 0.024). Based on regression analysis, among the factors related to BMI (depression, number of family members, gravidity, number of living children, parity, mother’s age, unwanted pregnancy by father, unwanted pregnancy by mother), depression and were are the only predictive factors strongly associated with BMI (P = 0.002 and P = 0.028, respectively). Conclusions : In our study, there was an inverse correlation between depression and BMI of pregnant women, so that with increase in depression, BMI decreased. According to the different results of the research, further studies should be carried out regarding the effect of depression on BMI in order to be able to provide further assistance to pregnant women.