Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Length Weight Relationship and Condition Factor of Guinean Tilapia Coptodon guineensis (Gunther, 1862) from the New Calabar River and Buguma Creek, Nigeria

| This research was carried out to investigate the length-weight relationship and condition factor of Coptodon guineensis from the New Calabar River and Buguma Creek, Nigeria. Assessments of the length and weight parameters indicated that the total length ranged from 12.4 cm to 29.8 cm with a mean value of 17.84±0.40 and the weight varied between 41g to 640g in subject collected from New Calabar River population. In Buguma Creek, the total length ranged from 10.9 cm to 23.5 cm with a mean value of 14.99 ± 0.26 and the weight was from 21g to 520g. The b value varied between 2.96, which were recorded for New Calabar River population, and 3.28 that was observed for Buguma Creek population. However, the condition factor of C. guineensis from Buguma Creek was significantly (p<0.005) higher than New Calabar River. These results demonstrate that the well-being of the species was slightly better in Buguma Creek than New Calabar River. Collectively these findings confirmed the ability of the species to thrive in brackish water and freshwater, and that these parameters support the assessment of the well-being of different fish in different locations. Article History Received: September 25, 2017 Revised: March 18, 2018 Accepted: April 09, 2018 Published: May 10, 2018 Authors’ Contributions OAO designed the research and wrote the manuscript. IOT and OAO identified fish species. HED and BJ collected the data while NAB, HED and BJ analysed it.
Quantifying the influences of grazing, climate and their interactions on grasslands using Landsat TM images

Appropriate grazing management ensures sustainable productivities of grassland ecosystems while maintaining grassland services. Thus, it is important to understand the influences of grazing management on grassland ecosystems, which can be monitored by measuring grassland response (e.g. leaf area index [LAI]) to grazing management. However, the measured grassland response includes the impact not only of grazing management, but also of other factors and their interactions, such as climate variability and fire. Therefore, to better study the effects of grazing management, grassland response to grazing needs to be quantified separately from that of other factors which influence grasslands and their interactions. The aim of our research was to quantify these interactions using Landsat thematic mapper (TM) images with longterm datasets at a regional scale. We studied vegetation using a manipulative grazing experiment that applied a range of low to high cattle stocking rates from 2008 to 2011 in a northern native mixed-prairie in Saskatchewan. Results show that precipitation, temperature, interaction between temperature and precipitation, cattle density, interaction between temperature and cattle density, and the interaction among cattle density and climate parameters explained 65.5, 14.5, 9.8, 1.7, 1.4 and 0.5% of the variation in grassland LAI, respectively; thus, precipitation has the dominant effect in mixed-grass prairies, while temperature and the interaction between temperature and precipitation have only moderate effects, and grazing intensity and the interaction between grazing intensity and climate variations have relatively low effects. The results also suggest that grassland response to grazing can be quantitatively separated from that of climate variability with the prior knowledge of grazing intensity, even though the influences of precipitation on LAI overrode the effects of short term grazing.
Death is not the end: radiocarbon and histo-taphonomic evidence for the curation and excarnation of human remains in Bronze Age Britain

Abstract Cremated and unburnt human remains have been recovered from a variety of British Bronze and earliest Iron Age archaeological contexts (c. 2500–600 BC). Chronological modelling of 189 new and extant radiocarbon dates from a selection of these deposits provides evidence for the curation of human remains for an average of two generations following death, while histological analysis of bone samples indicates mortuary treatment involving both excarnation and the exhumation of primary burials. Curated bones came from people who had been alive within living or cultural memory, and their power probably derived from relationships between the living and the dead.
Intelligent Size Matching Recommender System: Fuzzy Logic Approach in Children Clothing Selection

Choosing right-fit clothing is important for children since it is related to the conformity of clothes to the body, especially as we know that children normally engage in active routine activities. During the growth period, children grow-up rapidly in a different pattern. Nowadays, with internet and technology advancement, the online retail business has become the preferred shopping mode for internet-savvy customers, especially in the clothing and textile sector. The recent Coronavirus Pandemic has made online retail a necessity. Therefore, this research focuses on establishing a prototype of the children size matching recommender system, a “sizing advisor” for parents to identify the best clothes fitting which matches the requirement of their children’s body size to the sizing of existing brands. The fuzzy logic approach was applied as a heart of the matching system where the triangular membership function has been used in predicting the suitable clothing size. Nine children aged between 6 years old and 12 years old were selected to test the system. The fit was validated by an expert in sizing. The research aims to provide a size matching system to increase buying satisfaction among parents while shopping for children’s clothes online. The manufacturers, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which engage in online retailing of children’s clothing, may also benefit from reducing return and thus will help increase sales and profitability.
Biotechnology for detecting oxidative modifications to fibrinogen

Systemic inflammation has been recognized as a risk factor for a number of diseases, including type 2 diabetes. There is a growing awareness that inflammatory diseases have an oxidative pathology, which can result in specific oxidation of amino acids within proteins. Patients with inflammatory disease have higher levels of plasma protein 3-nitrotyrosine than healthy controls. Fibrinogen is an abundant plasma protein, and has been shown to be highly susceptible to such oxidative modifications, and is therefore a potential marker. Oxidative damage and modifications to fibrinogen offer potential as biomarkers of disease, and for diagnosis and a greater understanding of the pathology. The aim of this study was to map the in-vitro locations of oxidatively-modified fibrinogen, and test the possibility of producing antibodies that show increased binding to protein-specific modification sites. Fibrinogen was nitrated using the peroxynitrite generator SIN-1, and analyzed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Several modified peptides that consistently occurred were identified with the Mascot© search engine and manually validated. Based on literature or mass spectrometry results, peptides with the core amino acid sequence STSYGTGC or DYEDDQQKQLC, either unmodified, or containing 3-chlorotyrosine or 3-nitrotyrosine were synthesized and subsequently antibodies were produced. Each subsequently produced sheep anti-serum was tested against various native and modified peptides containing a variety of different amino acid sequences. Anti-STSY-(NO2)-GTGC serum showed modification site specificity, whereas anti-DY-(Cl)-EDDQQKQLC serum showed sequence specificity but was unable to distinguish between 3-chlorotyrosine and 3-nitrotyrosine. This cross-reactivity between chlorinated and nitrated modification sites might allow broader detection of modified fibrinogen in inflammation. The anti-STSY-(NO2)-GTGC serum was also tested against plasma from healthy control volunteers and type 2 diabetic patients, but showed limited binding and ability to discriminate the disease state. In conclusion, it has been shown that antibodies can be produced to differentiate between native and modified proteins; however, further work is required to understand sequence-specificity better and monoclonal antibodies might be better suited to achieving sequence-specificity.
Warburg effect in lymph gland of Drosophila melanogaster upon parasitoid wasp infection

The aim of this thesis was to develop an ex vivo set-up for the measurement of lactate and adenosine produced by the lymph gland of Drosophila melanogaster and to measure the difference in concentration between infected and uninfected larvae using a parasitoid wasp infection by Leptopilina boulardi to further understand the metabolic switch and its needs during the onset of the immune system.
Biotic and abiotic factors influencing host-pathogen dynamics in a zooplankton-fungus system

Host-pathogen interactions can be influenced by environmental conditions and interactions with other hosts, either directly through the modification of pathogen transmission or development inside of hosts, or indirectly by influencing host or pathogen demography, survival, or functional traits. In this dissertation, I investigate several environmental (e.g. nitrate) and ecological (e.g., competition) factors that could influence host-pathogen interactions, using a model system of Daphnia species infected by an environmentally-transmitted fungal pathogen. I use this system to examine 1) the effect of nitrate pollution on host demography, pathogen survival, and infection dynamics, 2) how host-pathogen interactions respond to variable environments, 3) if a critical host density is present, and predictable, 4) how competition with a non-susceptible competitor influences epidemic dynamics, and 5) how pathogen exposure and infection influences host fitness for a number of host species differing in susceptibility. Index words: Disease ecology, Host-parasite interactions, Daphnia, Fungal parasite Biotic and abiotic factors influencing host-pathogen dynamics in a zooplankton-fungus system
Digging Hierarchical Information For Visual Place Recognition With Weighting Similarity Metric

Visual place recognition is a challenging task due to the appearance of a place varying with the change of illumination, seasonal variations, and diverse viewpoints. Although significant progress has been made recently, how to dig sufficient hierarchical information in the real scenario for visual place recognition remains a problem. To this end, a hierarchical feature extraction module (HFM), as well as a weighting similarity metric module (WSM), is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the context-aware feature extraction block in HFM is designed to exploit multi-scale features containing contextual information. The additional complementary features extracted from the shallow layer are refined by a recalibration block for reserving detailed information. Furthermore, the WSM, which consists of a part-based similarity metric layer and a weighting layer, can make the best of the hierarchical information to calculate the similarity scores. Experiments conducted on three typical benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual place recognition.
Preparation and characterization of cellulose/in situ generated silver nanoparticle composite films prepared using Pongamia pinnata leaf extract as a reducing and stabilizing agent

Abstract The present study is aimed at drawing the synergies by combining the microbial potential of Silver nanoparticles, the medicinally important plant and develop biodegradable nanocomposites. The silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were in situ generated in Pongamia pinnata leaf extract infused cellulose. The cellulose, the matrix, and the resulting nanocomposite films were characterized. The Fourier transform infrared spectra, confirms that the amide groups present in the leaf extract are responsible for the formation of AgNPs through the reduction process, the energy dispersive X-ray analysis and the scanning electron microscopy revealed that the average AgNPs size is around 76 nm. These cellulose nanocomposites films showed enhanced tensile properties, indicating the reinforcing effect of AgNPs. The antibacterial studies shown good antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli. These studies validate the feasibility of using pinnata leaves for in situ generations of AgNPs in modified cellulose matrix, which makes these nanocomposite suitable for food and medical applications.
Immunotherapy or other anti-cancer treatments and risk of exacerbation and mortality in cancer patients with COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis

ABSTRACT Background This study was designed to investigate whether COVID-19 patients with recently received immunotherapy or other anti-cancer treatments had more severe symptoms and higher mortality. Methods A literature search was performed using the electronic platforms to obtain relevant research studies published up to June 28, 2020. Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of research endpoints in each study were calculated and merged. Statistical analyses were performed with Stata 12.0 (Stata Corp LP, College Station, TX). Results A total of 17 studies comprising 3581 cancer patients with COVID-19 were included in this meta-analysis. SARS-CoV-2-infected cancer patients who recently received anti-cancer treatment did not observe a higher risk of exacerbation and mortality (All p-value >0.05). We also found that surgery, targeted therapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiotherapy were not associated with increased risk of exacerbation and mortality (All p-value >0.05). Chemotherapy within 28 d increased the risk of death events (OR 1.45, 95% CI 1.10–1.91, P = .008, p-value = 0.015 for test of interaction), and immunotherapy within 90 d increased the risk of exacerbation (OR 2.53,95%1.30–4.91, P = .006, p-value = 0.170 for test of interaction). Conclusion Cancer patients recently under anti-cancer treatment before diagnosed with COVID-19, including surgery, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, and radiotherapy, were not associated with increased risk of exacerbation and mortality. Chemotherapy within 28 d increased the risk of mortality, and chemotherapy was not associated with increased risk of severe COVID-19. The role of anti-cancer therapy in cancer patients with COVID-19 still needs further exploration, especially chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
Redistribution and Recognition in Spanish Transgender Laws

Since 2012, 16 laws granting rights to trans individuals have been passed in Spanish regions. How can we assess the quality of these laws? Do they all profoundly and positively transform trans people’s well-being? Do they tackle the economic marginalization of trans people? Do they have a symbolic impact? Using multidimensional criteria, I analyze trans-specific and LGBTI+ antidiscrimination policies to define trans-positivity in policymaking. This article uses feminist theory to judge this legislation’s value, contrasting that with the insights of activists and policymakers interviewed for this purpose. Benefiting from the discussion between Nancy Fraser (1995) and Judith Butler (1997), the quality of trans legislation can be assessed by looking at both cultural recognition and economic redistribution. In addition, following Andrea Krizsan and Emanuela Lombardo (2013), I also analyze these laws through the lens of empowerment and transformation. Having made the elusive relationship between sexuality and political economy in trans laws in Spain visible, I call for greater imagination to envisage other sorts of political actions for trans people.
The Framework for Android Apps Testing using Mutation Technique

This paper presents the framework for Android apps testing using mutation technique. A systematic comparative analysis is done based on various approaches and techniques formutation testing. The analysis examines the development of research on this subject and its inspiring objectives and practices. Using comparative analysis, the framework exhibits that Android mutation testing can create assessment cases that are very efficient at distinguishing both naturally happening errors and crowd-sourced errors for Android apps. The framework can be used as a basis to test the Android apps using mutation technique.
Clustering of Endorsements of Techniques of Neutralization as Predictors of Offending Among College Students: A Latent Profile Analysis Approach

Past research has provided evidence that techniques of neutralization may be used to rationalize offending, and individuals who endorse such rationalizations demonstrate greater offending risk. However, there is a dearth of research focused on how the endorsement of multiple techniques of neutralization may cluster together within an individual. There is also little understanding of how different clusters predict offending risk. The present study utilized data from 248 undergraduate students. Latent profile analysis was utilized to identify unobserved clusters of stronger/weaker endorsement of techniques of neutralization. Logistic regression was utilized to model the impact of differential clustering to predict offending risk. Results indicated that a five-profile solution best fits the data (low, responsibility deniers, moderate, victim deniers, and high). Participants assigned to the high profile demonstrated elevated offending risk relative to participants assigned to any of the other profiles. Participants assigned to the high profile reported relatively high endorsement of all techniques of neutralization but especially appeal to higher loyalties and denial of injury. Identification of college students demonstrating endorsement of techniques of neutralization consistent with the high profile should be targeted for intervention. Mentoring programs that take a social learning theory approach may be useful in this regard.
New image reconstruction algorithm for CCERT: LBP + Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering

This work focuses on the study of the image reconstruction algorithm of capacitively coupled electrical resistance tomography (CCERT). With the combination of a linear back projection (LBP) algorithm and an unsupervised Gaussian mixture model (GMM) algorithm, a new image reconstruction algorithm for CCERT is proposed. The LBP algorithm is used to implement the initial image reconstruction. The GMM algorithm is adopted to acquire the gray level threshold which will be used for the establishment of the gray level threshold filter. The final reconstructed image can be obtained with the thresholding operation. With a developed 12-electrode CCERT prototype system, the new image reconstruction algorithm is tested in image reconstruction experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed new image reconstruction algorithm is effective. The image reconstruction results are satisfactory. Compared with the conventional image reconstruction algorithms, the new image reconstruction algorithm (LBP + GMM) can obtain better reconstructed images with smaller relative image errors. It can obtain the reconstructed images with fewer empirical preset parameters and less manual intervention. In addition, with the introduction of the GMM algorithm, a relatively more suitable and reasonable gray level threshold can be obtained because the GMM algorithm implements the clustering process by utilizing both mean and variance information on the gray level distribution. Thus, better image reconstruction results can be obtained.
Characterization of Two Undescribed Mucoralean Species with Specific Habitats in Korea

The order Mucorales, the largest in number of species within the Mucoromycotina, 10 comprises typically fast-growing saprotrophic fungi. During a study of the fungal diversity of 11 undiscovered taxa in Korea, two mucoralean strains, CNUFC-GWD3-9 and CNUFC-EGF1-4, were 12 isolated from specific habitats including freshwater and fecal samples, respectively, in Korea. The 13 strains were analyzed both for morphology and phylogeny based on the internal transcribed 14 spacer (ITS) and large subunit (LSU) of 28S ribosomal DNA regions. On the basis of their 15 morphological characteristics and sequence analyses, isolates CNUFC-GWD3-9 and CNUFC16 EGF1-4 were confirmed to be Gilbertella persicaria and Pilobolus crystallinus, respectively.To the 17 best of our knowledge, there are no published literature records of these two genera in Korea. 18
Kiből lehet sikeres vállalkozó? Vállalkozói vezetői kompetenciák vegyes módszertanú vizsgálata

It has been a popular theme in both the professional literature and in the pop-culture to identify critical success factors of entrepreneurs, thus forecasting entrepreneurial success. This study presents the preliminary results of an exploratory, multi-stage study applying qualitative and quantitative research steps. The research approaches the issue from the angle of competencies aiming to examine if an entrepreneur-specific leadership competency model can be constructed. The paper introduces four leadership dimensions and three leadership styles that are specific for successful entrepreneurs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Successful entrepreneurs employ various leadership strategies and rely on a wide-range of leadership competencies. Beyond the competency sets distinguish entrepreneurs from each other, the paper presents a further leadership competency dimension that separates entrepreneurs from the rest of the word. This leadership dimension contributes to answering the question of who becomes an entrepreneur.
The Benthic B/Ca Record at Site 806: New Constraints on the Temperature of the West Pacific Warm Pool and the “El Padre” State in the Pliocene

The West Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP)'s response to increased pCO2 during the Pliocene is a key model validation target. Different temperature proxies show different trends: The foraminiferal Mg/Ca sea surface temperature (SST) record shows Pliocene WPWP temperatures ~1.2°C cooler than today (Wara et al., 2005, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1112596), whereas a TEX86 study finds a cooling trend and claims the Pliocene WPWP was warmer than today (Zhang et al., 2014, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1246172). We focus on understanding biases in Mg/Ca data as the best way to constrain the temperature of the Pliocene WPWP. The strongest nonthermal controls on foraminiferal Mg/Ca are Mg/Ca of seawater and dissolution. Dissolution, which imparts a cool bias to Mg/Ca temperatures, depends on Δ[CO32−], the difference from the carbonate ion concentration needed for calcite saturation. Thus, Pliocene proxy discrepancies might stem from varying Δ[CO32−] over time. To constrain the effect of changing dissolution on the Mg/Ca data, we collected benthic foraminiferal B/Ca data (a proxy for Δ[CO32−]) from the WPWP spanning 0–5.5 Ma. We find no long‐term trend in Δ[CO32−], but variations above and below the threshold of foraminiferal dissolution yield an ~0.4°C cold bias when averaged over the middle to early Pliocene. Changes in seawater Mg/Ca create an ~0.6°C cold bias in the Pliocene Mg/Ca data. After accounting for these biases, we find that the Pliocene WPWP was ~0.1°C cooler than the late Holocene, ranging from −0.5°C to +0.5°C including all uncertainties. Our reconstruction shows a much lower east‐west temperature gradient in the Pliocene tropical Pacific than today, supporting a permanent El Niño‐like “El Padre” state.