Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stranding trends of Steller sea lions Eumetopias jubatus 1990-2015

Distinct population segments of Steller sea lion (SSL) Eumetopias jubatus have experienced different population trends over the last 5 decades, rendering the need for retrospective study. By identifying long-term stranding trends of SSLs we can develop a better understanding of factors contributing to mortality that may affect SSL population dynamics. We characterized spatial and temporal trends of SSL strandings (n = 1507) in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, USA, over a 25 yr period. Stranding reports were obtained from the Alaska and Northwest Region’s Marine Mammal Stranding Networks. Temporal trends were assessed by identifying seasonal patterns across all years (1990-2015), analyzing sex, age class, body length, and characterizing signs of human interaction including factors contributing to mortality. An apparent increase in strandings occurred after 2000, likely due to increased stranding response effort resulting from increased federal grant awards. Adult males were the most frequently stranded sex and age class in the Alaska (AK) and Northwest (NW) Regions. Clear seasonality trends were evident, with the greatest reported stranding occurrences during the spring and summer. Gunshot wounds and fishery interactions accounted for a large proportion (90%) of human interaction cases. In Alaska, the southeast region had the highest number of strandings. In the NW Region, Oregon had the highest documented strandings. Despite caveats associated with stranding data, our findings suggest rapid timing of continued stranding response is imperative for a better understanding of cause-specific mortality trends and other factors contributing to stranding events.
Rapid Light-Dependent Degradation of Fluorescent Dyes in Formulated Serum-Free Media

Chemically defined serum-free media are increasingly used as a tool to help standardize experiments by eliminating the potential variability contributed by pooled serum. These media are formulated for the culture and expansion of specific cell types, maintaining cell viability without the need for exogenous animal proteins. Formulated serum-free media could thus help improve viability and reduce variability during sample preparation for flow cytometry, yet a thorough analysis of how such media impact fluorochrome–Ab conjugates has not been performed. In this study, we expose fluorescent Ab-labeled cells or Ab capture beads to white light in the presence of various hematopoietic cell culture media and provide evidence that formulated serum-free media permit rapid light-initiated fluorescent dye degradation in a cell-independent manner. We observed fluorescence signal loss of several dyes, which included fluorescence spillover into adjacent detectors. Finally, photostability of Ab–fluorochrome conjugates in formulated serum-free media is partially restored in the presence of either serum or vitamin C, implicating reactive oxygen species in the observed signal loss. Thus, our data indicate that formulated serum-free media designed to standardize cell culture are not currently optimized for use with fluorochrome–Ab conjugates, and thus, extreme caution should be exercised when using these media in cytometric experiments.
Beneficial Microbes: Roles in the Era of Antimicrobial Resistance

The upsurge of resistance in classes of antibiotics in varied bacterial species has increased the search for alternatives to antibiotics in bacterial infections. However, one alternative is the beneficial bacteria in foods, environment and gut. Probiotics is now being embraced as an alternative strategy to combat antibiotic resistant pathogens. A newer application is gut microbiota in its healthy state combating pathogenic and antibiotic resistant microbes. There have been numerous applications of beneficial bacteria against different infectious agents. This article describes the concept of beneficial microbes as antimicrobial agents with current applications as antimicrobial agents, various applica tions in the human gut with future directions.
Somatization disorder mediates the association of depression and anxiety with functional impairment in patients with heart failure

ABSTRACT Previous studies have suggested that depression, anxiety, and somatization disorder are strongly associated with diminished functional status. However, research has not tested the mediational models of how depression and anxiety lead to functional impairment. The aim of this study was to examine whether somatization disorder mediates the association of depression and anxiety with functional impairment in heart failure (HF) patients. The self-reported questionnaires were applied to measure depression, anxiety, and somatization disorder. Functional status was evaluated by the NYHA Class. Ordinal logistic regression analysis was performed to examine the association of depression, anxiety, and somatization disorder with functional status. Mediation analysis was conducted to determine indirect effects. Functional impairment was both related to depression (OR = 2.257, 95% CI = 1.534–3.322, P < 0.001) and elevated somatization severity (OR = 1.042, 95% CI = 1.003–1.082, P = 0.032) in HF patients, whereas anxiety was not associated with functional impairment (OR = 0.659, 95% CI = 0.429–1.012, P > 0.05). Mediation analysis indicated that both depression and anxiety have indirect effects on functional impairment as mediated by somatization disorder in HF patients. Additionally, depression has direct effect on functional impairment of the patients.
Turbulence Asymmetries in Bottom Boundary Layer Velocity Pulses Associated with Onshore-Propagating Nonlinear Internal Waves

The inner shelf is a region inshore of that part of the shelf that roughly obeys Ekman dynamics and offshore of the surf zone. Importantly, this is where surface and bottom boundary layers are in close proximity, overlap, and interact. The internal tide carries a substantial amount of energy into the inner shelf region were it eventually dissipates and contributes to mixing. A part of this energy transformation is due to a complex interaction with the bottom, where distinctions between nonlinear internal waves of depression and elevation are blurred, indeed, where polarity reversals of incoming waves take place. From an intensive set of measurements over the inner shelf off central California, we identify salient differences between onshore pulses from waves with properties of elevation waves and offshore pulses from shallowing depression waves. While the velocity structures and amplitudes of on/offshore pulses 1 m above the seafloor are not detectably different, onshore pulses are both more energetically turbulent and carry more sediments than offshore pulses. Their turbulence is also oppositely skewed: onshore pulses slightly to the leading edges, offshore pulses to the trailing edges of the pulses. We consider in turn three independent mechanisms that may contribute to the observed asymmetry: propagation in adverse pressure gradients and the resultant inflection point instability, residence time of a fluid parcel in the pulse, and turbulence suppression by stratification. The first mechanism may largely explain higher turbulence in the trailing edge of offshore pulses. The extended residence time may be responsible for the high and more uniform turbulence distribution across onshore compared to offshore pulses. Stratification does not play a leading role in turbulence modification inside of the pulses 1 m above the bed.
Insights into the human gut microbiome - A review

Various microbial communities and their genes collectively known as microbiome exist throughout the human body. The microbiome endows us with physiologic capacities that we have not had to evolve on our own and thus is both a manifestation of who we are genetically and metabolically, and a reflection of our state of well-being. Our distal gut is the known ecosystem with highest density of microbial population and the most comprehensively surveyed to date. The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem that affects the development, immunological responses and nutritional status of the host. This review briefly discusses the significance of the gut microbiome in human health and wellness.
Seepage Characteristics of Karst Water System Using Temperature Tracer Technique

In order to reveal the hydrodynamic characteristics of the karst aquifer system, the water temperature dynamic data of a hydrological year in the direct recharge area of Jinan spring area were analyzed using the temperature tracer method, and the runoff intensity of karst water was estimated. The results revealed that, affected by the regional groundwater flow, the vertical temperature profile of the study area consists of four types, a gradual cooling type, a gradual heating type, a temperature‐increasing type, and “S” type. Based on these four geothermal types, three heat transfer models adapted to the region were developed. The inflection point method is used to discriminate the horizontal runoff channels of the three depth segments in the Ordovician strata in the recharge area, and the shallow groundwater horizontal runoff intensity is greater than the deep. According to the calculation of the thermal transport model, the Ordovician limestone in the direct recharge area of the spring area is shallow (at a depth of 100 m), and the vertical flow velocity of the groundwater is around 1.28 × 10−7–3 × 10−6 cm/s, and the flow rate is slow. Based on the field tracer test, the visual flow of the karst water system was found to range between 29.41 and 115.02 m/day, indicating that the karst water is dominated by horizontal motion. Since the method of temperature measurement in the hole is relatively simple, the temperature change signal could be used to reveal the seepage characteristics of the groundwater.
Feeling the Service Product Closer: Triggering Visit Intention via Virtual Reality

This study examines the essential characteristics of Virtual Reality (VR) that influence individual visit intention towards a touristic product. Despite the extensive research about VR, however, only little has examined the impact of factors that alter customers’ attitudes and trigger purchasing intention. This study applied Information Systems Success Model and conducted a survey using the convenience sampling method with international tourists who visited North Cyprus. The data were analyzed using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique, and findings demonstrated that VR has great potential to influence visitors’ final destination by promoting tourism products and services. This paper revealed that VR—as a marketing medium—creates positive impacts and stimulates individuals’ intentions to visit a destination. The study provides implications for tourism sector actors such as tourism planners, policymakers, travel agencies, and hotel managers as well as prosocial guest experience to improve their marketing strategies.
Improving Abstractive Summarization via Dilated Convolution

In this paper, a sequence-to-sequence based hybrid neural network model is proposed for abstractive summarization. Our method utilizes Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and multi-level dilated convolutions (MDC) to capture the global semantic information and semantic-unit level information, respectively. In decoding phrase, our model generates words according to summary relevant information captured by attention mechanism. Experiment shows that this proposed model outperforms several strong baselines on both of Gigawords corpus and DUC-2004 task.
Coping with multiple enemies: pairwise interactions do not predict evolutionary change in complex multitrophic communities

Predicting the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of populations in multispecies communities is one of the fundamental challenges in ecology. Many of these predictions are made by scaling patterns observed from pairwise interactions. Here, we show that the coupling of ecological and evolutionary outcomes is likely to be weaker in increasingly complex communities due to greater chance of life-history trait correlations. Using model microbial communities comprising a focal bacterial species (Bacillus subtilis), a bacterial competitor, protist predator and phage parasite, we found that increasing the number of enemies in a community had an overall negative effect on B. subtilis population growth. However, only the competitor imposed direct selection for B. subtilis trait evolution in pairwise cultures and this effect was weakened in the presence of other antagonists that had a negative effect on the competitor. In contrast, adaptation to parasites was driven indirectly by correlated selection where competitors had a positive and predators a negative effect. For all measured traits, selection in pairwise communities was a poor predictor of B. subtilis evolution in more complex communities. Together, our results suggest that coupling of ecological and evolutionary outcomes is interaction-specific and generally less evident in more complex communities where the increasing number of trait correlations could mask weak ecological signals.
Case hacks: Four hacks for promoting critical thinking in case-based management education for sustainable development

In management education at engineering and business schools, the case-based method is commonly used. The case-based method has a strong action orientation but is seen to downplay critical thinking, which is an important component in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Current literature suggests two ways in which the case-based method can be improved, namely by producing better cases, and by improving classroom practice. This paper contributes to research and practice on case-based ESD within management education by outlining a third way: hacking cases, in other words, making modifications to existing cases to promote critical thinking. The hacks presented in this paper are based on a review of previous empirical and conceptual research about, and, on our own experiences of critical thinking. They are: (1) exploring synergies and conflicts; (2) expanding empirical knowledge; (3) shifting perspective; and (4) creating spaces for dialogue. By employing the hacks, case-based management ESD can be adapted to promote both action and critical thinking and, thereby, become an improved educational method in management ESD. An illustration of these four hacks within the course Managing sustainability in global industrial companies is provided.
Boosting Classifiers in Diabetes Disease Prediction

Diabetes is considered to be one of the most deadly and chronic diseases that causes an increase in blood sugar. Many complications, such as cardiovascular disease, nerve damage, kidney damage, eye damage (retinopathy), etc., may occur if diabetes remains untreated and unidentified. The time-consuming process for the identification of the disease involves the visit of the patient to the diagnostic center, the consultation of the doctor and further clinical testing. But the rise in data mining approaches solves this critical problem of early-stage diabetes prediction. The focus of this paper is to analyze the reliability of different booster classifiers to design a model that can predict the likelihood of diabetes in patients with the highest precision. Therefore, the boosting classifiers AdaBoost, GBM, XGBoost, CatBoost and LightGBM were used in this experiment to detect diabetes at an early stage. Experiments are conducted on the publicly available diabetes database of Kaggle and also the efficiency of the various classifiers is evaluated on the basis of accuracy.
The Virus, the Settler, and the Siege: Gaza in the Age of Corona

This essay explores the challenges and opportunities that the Covid-19 pandemic has afforded Israel as it broadens its settler-colonial objectives internally, in Gaza, and elsewhere In particular, it sheds light on the heightened militaristic and economic approaches taken by Israel to further entrench its siege of Palestinians in Gaza and to export increasingly advanced technologies of surveillance and state control long deployed against the Palestinian people This investigation thus offers an opportunity to probe settler colonialism's strategic opportunism in the face of the historic pandemic
Spatial and temporal diversity in hyperparasitoid communities of Cotesia glomerata on garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata

1. Interactions between two trophic levels can be very intimate, often making species dependent on each other, something that increases with specialisation. Some specialised multivoltine herbivores may depend on multiple plant species for their survival over the course of a growing season, especially if their food plants are short‐lived and grow at different times. Later generations may exploit different plant species from those exploited by previous generations.
Piezoelectric Sensor with a Helical Structure on the Thread Core

In this paper, we introduce a piezoelectric sensor curled on a thread core in a helical structure. In particular, a polyvinylidene fluoride film was curled and fixed on a thread core. A series of experiments were designed to deliver flexural loading to the piezoelectric sensor, to study its sensing characteristics. The experimental results show that the sensing output of the sensor is in phase with the applied flexural loading. In addition, the output voltage of the textile-based piezoelectric sensor was measured according to various flexural loadings. The flexural bending angle applied to the piezoelectric sensor is expected to be a power function of the voltage output. In addition, we demonstrate a smart textile by weaving the piezoelectric sensor.
Robustness of Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting against False Data Injection Attacks

The accuracy of wind power forecasting depends a great deal on the data quality, which is so susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. In this paper, we study the cybersecurity issue of short-term wind power forecasting. We present one class of data attacks, called false data injection attacks, against wind power deterministic and probabilistic forecasting. We show that any malicious data can be injected to historical data without being discovered by one of the commonly-used anomaly detection techniques. Moreover, we testify that attackers can launch such data attacks even with limited resources. To study the impact of data attacks on the forecasting accuracy, we establish the framework of simulating false data injection attacks using the Monte Carlo method. Then, the robustness of six representative wind power forecasting models is tested. Numerical results on real-world data demonstrate that the support vector machine and k-nearest neighbors combined with kernel density estimator are the most robust deterministic and probabilistic forecasting ones among six representative models, respectively. Nevertheless, none of them can issue accurate forecasts under very strong false data attacks. This presents a serious challenge to the community of wind power forecasting. The challenge is to study robust wind power forecasting models dealing with false data attacks.
The Mediating Effect of Technical Efficiency on the Relationship between Revenue Diversification and Financial Performance of Commercial Banks in Kenya

Banks generate revenue through the intermediation process and perceive revenue diversification as a possible solution to financial performance challenges. The banks’ income statements attest to this argument with banking activities moving gradually from interest-bearing activities to non-interest-bearing activities. The objectives of this paper were to assess the relationship between revenue diversification and return on assets and establish the mediation effect of technical efficiency on the relationship between revenue diversification and return on assets. The research used unbalanced panel data sourced from forty-two commercial banks spanning 2009 to 2018. The study measured revenue diversification using the Hirschman-Herfindahl index while technical efficiency level was measured using data envelopment analysis. The performance attribute, return on assets was measured as a ratio of earnings before interest and tax over the total assets. The paper assessed the relationships using the panel least square regression guided by the mediation assessment process proposed by Baron and Kenny. The cross-section randomeffects model results revealed a significant positive relationship between revenue diversification and return on assets. Further, results indicated the absence of technical efficiency mediation effect on the relationship between revenue diversification and return on assets. The study recommends policy and regulatory programs that allows banks to diversify in revenue-generating activities as well as initiatives that synchronize technical efficiency in the intermediation process to improve financial performance of commercial banks, especially in emerging economies.
Can the State Accelerate the Secular Transition? Secularization in East and West Germany as a Natural Experiment

Germany was a divided country from 1949 until 1989. During this period, West Germany remained a rather religious country, while East Germany became, under socialist rule, one of the most secular regions in the world. We use this case of socialist state intervention as a natural experiment to test Voas’ model of secular transition, which states that all Western and Central European countries follow the same path and speed of secularization. We employ ESS, GSS, and KMU surveys, as well as church statistics, to show that Voas’ model holds for West Germany but not for the East. In East Germany, the state accelerated the secular transition substantially: through coercion, incentive structures, and education, it succeeded in triggering mass disaffiliations from the church irrespective of age, and in discouraging parents from socializing their children religiously. This led to a self-perpetuating process that resulted in a rapid increase in the number of people who were never socialized religiously at all.
Evolution of sperm competition: Natural variation and genetic determinants of Caenorhabditis elegans sperm size

Sperm morphology is critical for sperm competition and thus for reproductive fitness. In the male-hermaphrodite nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, sperm size is a key feature of sperm competitive ability. Yet despite extensive research, the molecular mechanisms regulating C. elegans sperm size and the genetic basis underlying its natural variation remain unknown. Examining 97 genetically distinct C. elegans strains, we observe significant heritable variation in male sperm size but genome-wide association mapping did not yield any QTL (Quantitative Trait Loci). While we confirm larger male sperm to consistently outcompete smaller hermaphrodite sperm, we find natural variation in male sperm size to poorly predict male fertility and competitive ability. In addition, although hermaphrodite sperm size also shows significant natural variation, male and hermaphrodite sperm size do not correlate, implying a sex-specific genetic regulation of sperm size. To elucidate the molecular basis of intraspecific sperm size variation, we focused on recently diverged laboratory strains, which evolved extreme sperm size differences. Using mutants and quantitative complementation tests, we demonstrate that variation in the gene nurf-1 – previously shown to underlie the evolution of improved hermaphrodite reproduction – also explains the evolution of reduced male sperm size. This result illustrates how adaptive changes in C. elegans hermaphrodite function can cause the deterioration of a male-specific fitness trait due to a sexually antagonistic variant, representing an example of intralocus sexual conflict with resolution at the molecular level. Our results further provide first insights into the genetic determinants of C. elegans sperm size, pointing at an involvement of the NURF chromatin remodelling complex.