Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Family Stress and Coping Among African Americans in the Age of COVID-19

Abstract:The Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19 has wrecked havoc on the world's economy, health, industry, education, and social systems. While the impact of the Coronavirus is being felt by millions of individuals in the United States, this manuscript will focus on the impact of COVID-19 on African Americans, examining it through the lens of family stress theory. This focus is deliberate because when compared to other racial groups, African Americans have a disproportionately higher rate of contracting and dying from the virus, are more likely to be poor, be employed as essential workers in low-paying service jobs that substantially increases their risk of contracting and dying from the virus, and experience poor physical health. In addition to the aforementioned, this work will discuss how various components of McCubbin and Patterson's (1982) Double ABC-X Model of family stress relates to the physical, mental, and emotional health of African Americans. In addition to highlighting the unique stressors of Blacks, this work will provide future directions for researchers and practitioners. Résumé:Le coronavirus, également connu sous le nom de COVID-19, a ravagé l'économie, la santé, l'industrie, l'éducation et les systèmes sociaux du monde. Alors que l'impact du Coronavirus est ressenti par des millions de personnes aux États-Unis, ce manuscrit se concentrera sur l'impact de COVID-19 sur les Afro-Américains, en l'examinant à travers la lentille de la théorie du stress familial. Cette focalisation est délibérée car par rapport à d'autres groupes raciaux, les Afro-Américains ont un taux disproportionnellement plus élevé de contracter et de mourir du virus, sont plus susceptibles d'être pauvres, d'être employés comme travailleurs essentiels dans des emplois de service peu rémunérés qui augmentent considérablement leur risque de contracter et de mourir du virus, et connaissent une mauvaise santé physique. En plus de ce qui précède, ce travail examinera comment les diverses composantes du modèle Double ABC-X du stress familial de McCubbin et Patterson (1982) sont liées à la santé physique, mentale et émotionnelle des Afro-Américains. En plus de mettre en évidence les facteurs de stress uniques des Noirs, ce travail fournira des orientations futures pour les chercheurs et les praticiens.
Correlates of population genetic differentiation in marine and terrestrial environments

Theory predicts that differences in phylogeographic structure between species should be related to differences in life history, environment, and evolutionary time. Reviews of empirical studies suggest sometimes complex interactions and possibly a preponderance of exceptions to the predicted relationship that greater population genetic differentiation results from lower dispersal potential, as a function of life history. We apply an analytical framework, which controls for effects of environment and time, to test the hypothesis that contrasts in population genetic differentiation are proportional to contrasts in life history traits.
Optimization of a simplified method for fruit phenolic extraction and analysis to be used in olive breeding

Phenolic compounds are generally accepted as key components of virgin olive oil with a great impact on its organoleptic and health promoting properties. However, olive phenolic components are not commonly used as quality traits in olive breeding programs mainly due to the difficulties of evaluating a large number of new genotypes with very little oil production at the early stages of breeding. In the present work, we describe and optimize a fast and reliable method for the extraction and further analysis of the main phenolic compounds found in olive fruit. The analytical methodology has been validated with the two most relevant olive varieties grown in Spain, “Picual” and “Arbequina”, which possess very different phenolic profiles. The significant correlation found between specific phenolic compounds, or groups of phenolic compounds in the olive fruit analyzed with this method, and the phenolic content of virgin olive oil suggest that this method may be a very useful predictive tool which could prevent the selection of olive genotypes whose oils will never reach an optimum phenolic content.
Trait-based evaluation of plant assemblages in traditional farm ponds in Korea: Ecological and management implications

The Korean traditional farm pond called dumbeong is an important rural landscape element that supports local biodiversity and is useful in irrigating agricultural fields during dry periods. This study assesses how plant communities in dumbeongs respond to adjacent land use, water depth, open-water surface, and nutrient levels and irrigation usage. Plant functional and species groups, based on trait and species data respectively from 20 dumbeongs in Seocheon-gun, South Korea, were classified by hierarchical analysis and non-metric multidimensional scaling. Relationships between the plant community composition and explanatory variables at both the species and functional group levels were tested through redundancy analysis. The results showed that irrigation usage prevented nutrient accumulation and water depth reduction of the ponds, and we found water depth was the only significant factor that determined plant composition at both species and functional group levels. The plant functional groups were more useful than plant species in predicting plant composition in dumbeongs, owing to their collective response to water depth and open-water surface. Our results demonstrate that management practices of dumbeong, such as periodic drainage, sediment removal and control of dominant plant species, alter its plant communities and thus need to be considered for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes.
Reformulation of Mice Fodder with Encapsulated Lactobacillus fermentum E5

Common in vivo probiotic delivery through oral gavage may result in esophagealinjury as well as restraint-associated-distress particularly with repeated application. To overcome the issue, in this study, Lactobacillus fermentum E5 was embedded in sodium alginate-chitosan capsules and incorporated with commercial mice fodder. The survival of probiotic following various procedures and storage was evaluated. More than 90% of viable cells were successfully recovered from fresh microcapsules and 95% of the encapsulated probiotics survived freeze drying process. Furthermore, the encapsulated cells exhibitedsurvivability of more than 85% after 28 days storage period at 4°C and room temperature. Reformulation of mice fodder was done by crushing the commercial pellet, adding encapsulated probiotic, mixing, re-pelleting using 3% (v/v) sodium alginate solution as binder. After storing at room temperature, almost 80% of encapsulated L. fermentum E5 in mice fodder survived.
Effects of prescribed burning on the yellow-footed antechinus Antechinus flavipes

This research examined how a small mammal species, known as Antechinus, responded to planned burning in a dry Victorian forest. Burning primarily affected Antechinus indirectly, through changes to resources used for shelter, denning and food, such as large trees and logs. These findings provide valuable insights for ecosystem management.
President and Congress in Paraguay: legislative success in foreign and domestic policy

ABSTRACT The president's ability to legislate is a central element in studies of presidential regimes. A debate persists about the existence of ‘two presidencies’, that is, whether presidential legislative proposals are more successful in Congress when the subject is foreign policy compared to domestic politics. The article makes an empirical contribution in confirming the thesis of the two presidents in a case whose legislative powers of the president are the lowest in the region: Paraguay. Statistical analysis also reveals the importance of political and economic variables in the propensity to approve matters in the Paraguayan legislature, such as presidential popularity, unemployment and the effective number of parties. While the National Congress constrains the legislative production of the Paraguayan president in domestic issues, the president's foreign policy receives high support from legislators. The different characteristics of foreign policy stimulate congressional delegation of the matter to the president.
Detection of Financial Statement Frauds Using Beneish Model: Empirical Evidence From Listed Pharmaceutical Companies in Bangladesh

Financial statement fraud had the most significant financial impact on companies when compared to the other categories of occupational fraud as per ACFE Report to the Nations 2014. This study aims to determine the value of Beneish M-Score and to identify whether selected pharmaceutical companies were manipulating there earnings or not. Financial information of 14 pharmaceutical companies was collected from their annual reports of 2014-18. This study finds that pharmaceutical companies of Bangladesh are engaged in Earnings Manipulation and they are doing it on a continuous basis. The results of our study show a deteriorating financial condition of pharmaceutical industry which should make the auditors and regulators more cautious in detecting financial statement frauds.
Text-driven Speech Animation with Emotion Control

In this paper, we present a new approach to creating speech animation with emotional expressions using a small set of example models. To generate realistic facial animation, two example models called key visemes and expressions are used for lip-synchronization and facial expressions, respectively. The key visemes represent lip shapes of phonemes such as vowels and consonants while the key expressions represent basic emotions of a face. Our approach utilizes a text-to-speech (TTS) system to create a phonetic transcript for the speech animation. Based on a phonetic transcript, a sequence of speech animation is synthesized by interpolating the corresponding sequence of key visemes. Using an input parameter vector, the key expressions are blended by a method of scattered data interpolation. During the synthesizing process, an importance-based scheme is introduced to combine both lip-synchronization and facial expressions into one animation sequence in real time (over 120Hz). The proposed approach can be applied to diverse types of digital content and applications that use facial animation with high accuracy (over 90%) in speech recognition.
Daily abnormal price changes and trading strategies in the FOREX

This paper explores abnormal price changes in the FOREX by using both daily and intraday data on the EURUSD, USDJPY, USDCAD, AUDUSD and EURJPY exchange rates over the period 01.01. 2008–31.12. 2018. ,It applies a dynamic trigger approach to detect abnormal price changes and then various statistical methods, including cumulative abnormal returns analysis, to test the following hypotheses: the intraday behaviour of hourly returns on overreaction days is different from that on normal days (H1), there are detectable patterns in intraday price dynamics on days with abnormal price changes (H2) and on the following days (H3). ,The results suggest that there are statistically significant differences between intraday dynamics on days with abnormal price changes and normal days respectively; also, prices tend to change in the direction of the abnormal change during that day, but move in the opposite direction on the following day. Finally, there exist trading strategies that generate abnormal profits by exploiting the detected anomalies, which can be seen as evidence of market inefficiency. ,New evidence on abnormal price changes and related trading strategies in the FOREX.
Forage or Biofuel: Assessing Native Warm-Season Grass Production among Seed Mixes and Harvest Frequencies within a Wildlife Conservation Framework

Abstract Native warm-season grasses (NWSG) are gaining merit as biofuel feedstocks for ethanol production with potential for concomitant production of cattle forage and wildlife habitat provision. However, uncertainty continues regarding optimal production approaches for biofuel yield and forage quality within landscapes of competing wildlife conservation objectives. We used a randomized complete block design of 4 treatments to compare vegetation structure, forage and biomass nutrients, and biomass yield between Panicum virgatum (Switchgrass) monocultures and NWSG polycultures harvested once or multiple times near West Point, MS, 2011–2013. Despite taller vegetation and greater biomass in Switchgrass monocultures, NWSG polycultures had greater vegetation structure heterogeneity and plant diversity that could benefit wildlife. However, nutritional content from harvest timings optimal for wildlife conservation (i.e., late dormant season-collected biomass and mid-summer hay samples) demonstrated greater support for biofuel production than quality cattle forage. Future research should consider testing various seed mixes for maximizing biofuel or forage production among multiple site conditions with parallel observations of wildlife use.
Bayesian Tip-dated Phylogenetics: Topological Effects, Stratigraphic Fit and the Early Evolution of Mammals

The incorporation of stratigraphic data into phylogenetic analysis has a long history of debate, but is not currently standard practice for palaeontologists. Bayesian tip-dating (or morphological clock) phylogenetic methods have returned these arguments to the spotlight, but how tip-dating affects the recovery of evolutionary relationships has yet to be fully explored. Here we show, through analysis of several datasets with multiple phylogenetic methods, that topologies produced by tip-dating are outliers when compared to topologies produced by parsimony and undated Bayesian methods, which retrieve broadly similar trees. Unsurprisingly, trees recovered by tip-dating have better fit to stratigraphy than trees recovered by other methods, due to trees with better stratigraphic fit being assigned a higher prior probability. Differences in stratigraphic fit and tree topology between tip-dating and other methods appear to be concentrated in parts of the tree with weaker character signal and a stronger influence of the prior, as shown by successive deletion of the most incomplete taxa from a sauropod dataset. Tip-dating applied to Mesozoic mammals firmly rejects a monophyletic Allotheria, and strongly supports diphyly of haramiyidans, with the late Triassic Haramiyavia and Thomasia forming a clade with tritylodontids, which is distant from the middle Jurassic euharamiyidans. This result is not sensitive to the controversial age of the eutherian Juramaia. A Test of the age of Juramaia using a less restrictive prior reveals strong support from the data for an Early Cretaceous age. Our results suggest that tip-dating incorporates stratigraphic data in an intuitive way, with good stratigraphic fit a prior expectation that can be overturned by strong evidence from character data.
Consumers value healthy eating and environmental responsibility: how negative food contexts aid decision-making

Food contamination and food poisoning have been causing serious problems (My et al., 2017; Nga & Tuan, 2019) and deteriorate consumers’ confidence in Vietnam (Ifft et al., 2009; Dang et al., 2019). Food safety incidents and scandals in the pig rearing industry have been reported with unsafe practices such as the use of beta-agonists and antibiotic residues (Nguyen et al., 2015; Nga & Tuan, 2019). Also, evidence was found on the severe impact of pig farms on the environment. For example, the practice of releasing contaminated animal waste into the environment leads to environmental contamination, specifically the surface or underground water, or the discharge of excessive unprocessed biogas directly into the air could be a contribution to climate change. Thus, the environmental sustainability aspect of producing food emerges in Vietnam as well as in many other territories around the world (My et al., 2017). Moreover, the contemporary food safety concerns in Vietnam could be exacerbated with the presence of the health risk of contracting animal diseases (e.g. the African Swine Fever – ASF) during its outbreak commenced in February 2019 and later spread over 63 cities and provinces in Vietnam and ended up with the culling of 4.5 million infected pigs (BBC News, 2019). In late May 2020, the recurrence of the ASF disease was reported in 20 provinces in Vietnam. In this escalating food safety-related context, experts recommended the investigation of consumers’ perceptions into the health and safety-related aspects (My et al., 2017) due to the increasing concern of consumers worldwide about the quality, safety, and environmental friendliness of foods (Teng & Lu, 2016). While a myriad of studies has analyzed healthand environmental relevant factors for the purchase intention of organic and functional food, no attempt was made toward traceable food, which was believed to be trustworthy, transparent, accurate (Chen & Huang, 2013), and a potential solution to food safety issues (Dang et al., 2019). Furthermore, limited studies examine consumers’ purchase intention toward traceable food, particularly in the context of animal disease outbreak. This study sets out to bridge these gaps. The results of this article could assist traceable food marketers in developing pertinent marketing and communication strategies.
Agenda-setting in public policies: the strategy for financial education in Brazil through the lens of the multiple streams model

This article analyzes how the National Financial Education Strategy was established in Brazil. This case study on the agenda-setting and policy formulation in the field of public policies is based on John Kingdon’s multiple streams model. It aims to contribute to the understanding of government decision-making processes by identifying theoretical elements in an empirical situation. Since the early 2000s, financial inclusion is considered by international organizations and governments as a way of fighting poverty. This culminated in the G20’s Principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion, launched in 2010. However, the perception that the population’s financial education is important for social inclusion was disseminated years earlier by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Since 2003, this organization has actively developed content and recommendations for the adoption of financial education strategies by countries. In Brazil, the topic gained space in the government agenda in 2007 and was a permanent public policy by December 2010. Based on bibliographical and documentary research methods, this study demonstrates that the influence exerted by the OECD was not sufficient to raise immediate government attention to the topic and points to a more complex set of factors and actors that allow the coupling of the three streams, resulting in the escalation of the topic to the decision agenda.
Iron and manganese content and uptake with the yield of potato tubers as affected by herbicides and biostimulants, and potato tuber nutritional value

The study material consisted of table potato tubers produced in a three-year field experiment. The following factors were examined: three potato cultivars – Bartek, Gawin and Honorata, five herbicide application methods: herbicides alone (Harrier 295 ZC and Sencor 70 WG) and mixed with growth regulators (Harrier 295 ZC + Kelpak SL, Sencor 70 WG + Asahi SL), and a control unit where weeds were mechanically controlled. The objective of the study was to assess the effect of herbicides and their mixtures with growth regulators on potato tuber nutritive value as well as iron and manganese contents and uptake with the yield of potato tubers. Iron and manganese contents of tubers and uptake with tuber yield were significantly affected by cultivars, herbicides and biostimulants applied as well as weather conditions during the growing season. The herbicides and biostimulants increased iron and manganese contents and uptake with the yield of potato tubers compared with control tubers. The highest amounts of the examined microelements were accumulated by cv. Honorata compared with cv. Bartek and Gawin. Consumption of 100 g potato tubers in 9 and 21% satisfied the daily requirement for iron and manganese, the daily requirements in the human diet being 14.0 and 2.0 mg, respectively.
Tailoring the Cyber Security Framework: How to Overcome the Complexities of Secure Live Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Computing

This paper proposes a novel secure live virtual machine migration framework by using a virtual trusted platform module instance to improve the integrity of the migration process from one virtual machine to another on the same platform. The proposed framework, called Koror\=a, is designed and developed on a public infrastructure-as-a-service cloud-computing environment and runs concurrently on the same hardware components (Input/Output, Central Processing Unit, Memory) and the same hypervisor (Xen); however, a combination of parameters needs to be evaluated before implementing Koror\=a. The implementation of Koror\=a is not practically feasible in traditional distributed computing environments. It requires fixed resources with high-performance capabilities, connected through a high-speed, reliable network. The following research objectives were determined to identify the integrity features of live virtual machine migration in the cloud system: To understand the security issues associated with cloud computing, virtual trusted platform modules, virtualization, live virtual machine migration, and hypervisors; To identify the requirements for the proposed framework, including those related to live VM migration among different hypervisors; To design and validate the model, processes, and architectural features of the proposed framework; To propose and implement an end-to-end security architectural blueprint for cloud environments, providing an integrated view of protection mechanisms, and then to validate the proposed framework to improve the integrity of live VM migration. This is followed by a comprehensive review of the evaluation system architecture and the proposed framework state machine. The overarching aim of this paper, therefore, is to present a detailed analysis of the cloud computing security problem, from the perspective of cloud architectures and the cloud. [Abridged]
Corporate Environmental Accountability in International Law

This book explores the evolving role of international law in directing and controlling the conduct of business enterprises, in particular multinational corporations, with respect to the protection of the environment, the sustainable use of natural resources, and the respect of inter-related human rights. It assesses the progress and continuing limitations in the identification of international standards of corporate environmental accountability and responsibility, and their implementation by international organizations. This assessment indicates the extent to which the international community has conceptually and operationally clarified its expectations about acceptable corporate conduct. This second edition relates the intensified convergence of international standard-setting efforts on corporate environmental accountability, with parallel international developments on business and human rights and on the inter-relationship between human rights and the environment. It also explores the more recent emergence of substantive international standards of corporate environmental responsibility, which have arisen from a growing number of sectoral guidelines. In addition, this edition points to remaining divergences in the content of international standards of corporate environmental accountability and responsibility, which reflect differing views between States of their international obligations to ensure the protection of the environment and the respect of human rights.