Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of New Student Orientations on the Retention of Online Students

While there is a lack consensus as to whether orientations for online students should be completed on campus or online, research suggests that having an in-depth orientation and onboarding process increases the academic preparedness of online students and, consequently, improves retention. This action research study attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of an in-depth, virtual, student orientation on the retention and academic preparedness of online students at a small, private college. There was an increase of 7% in the retention rate from the fall to spring in the year the institution implemented the online orientation. Additionally, the results indicate students felt more academically prepared, a ﬁnding also supported by the results of a faculty survey. While the number in the sample was small, the results are promising and signal a need for additional research on the link between a formal orientation, retention, and academic preparedness for online students.
Probabilistic Microgrid Energy Management with Interval Predictions

In this paper, we consider a probabilistic microgrid dispatch problem where the predictions of the load and the Renewable Energy Source (RES) generation are given in the form of intervals. A hybrid method combining scenario-selected optimization and reserve strategy using the Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework is proposed. Specifically, first of all, an appropriate scenario is selected by the optimizer at each optimization stage, and then the optimal scheduling and reservation of system capacity are determined based on the selected scenario and possible variations in the future as provided by the predictors. In addition, a new reserve strategy is introduced to adaptively maintain system reliability and respond to variations in the hierarchical microgrid control. Simulations are conducted to compare our proposed method with the existing robust method and the deterministic dispatch with perfect information. Results show that our proposed method significantly improves the system efficiency while maintaining system reliability.
Notes for a Discussion on Latin American Cross-Border Regions

ABSTRACT One of the most significant outcomes of the neoliberal globalization – and of its consequent relativization of borderland spaces – has been the emergence of cross-border regions. These regions constitute complex spaces that operate as locus for capital appreciation based on the exploitation of differential advantages and unequal exchanges. This paper acknowledges the multi-dimensional nature of such territorialities and goes on to suggest a preliminary typology of cross-border situations in Latin America, based on the economic scales on which these regions are fundamentally constituted. We suggest four types of regions – consuetudinary, self-contained, corridors and globalized – which are described as territorial overlapping and multidimensional space–time assemblies. Lastly, the article raises the need for further research on spatiality, development and governance of these space/time assemblies.
Energy Management Through Optimal Logistics Planning. Case Study of a Power Electrical Distribution Company in Southern Chile

Climate change is a real fact. The increase in temperatures, the change in rain cycles, the generation of more extreme seasons and natural disasters at a global and local level, are examples of its effects. In the electricity environment, the interruption of supply caused by extreme weather events is increasingly frequent; while electricity distribution companies in Chile are required by law to maintain the electric service constantly, guaranteeing the service quality and the quality of life of their customers. The adequate fulfillment of this legal mandate, require attend opportunely the client’s energy supply, before any eventuality. Consequently, electric companies must assign repair units to guarantee this objective. However, this process involves the assignment and displacement of these units in vehicles. This allocation, without efficient planning, involve an excessive consumption of resources such as fuel and other inputs that affect the environment. This leads to having to review the logistics processes and establish mechanisms to promote sustainable development, looking for tools that provide data to support and improve the evaluation process of alternatives for friendly building and architectural structures, which help to improve the environment and mitigate visual pollution, as well as the use of less polluting alternative energies (wind or solar energy, for example) that allow the direct supply of electrical energy. Therefore, this study seeks to present mechanisms to determine an optimal allocation of repair units to minimize the amount of contamination in the operational process and, in turn, establish a reference value, which can be used as a complementary element in the evaluation of the use of new non-polluting electrical technologies.
Empowering Teachers through Design Thinking: Developing Learning Prototypes for Multilingual Students

This paper argues that developing teachers’ design literacy will enable them to better respond to the demands of their work in schools. Our approach involves partnering with teachers and other educators through professional development. They learn design thinking tools from us and apply them to a problem faced at their schools, while we research their progress solving the problem and putting design thinking tools into practice. We present a case of schools challenged by how to support students in the process of learning English. We ask, how might teachers learn and use design thinking to develop effective supports for their multilingual students? The research team used mixed methods to gather data. Overall, we noticed our teacher-partners shift from conceptualizing language learning as vocabulary and grammatical structures, to thinking holistically about the range of challenges multilingual students face in schools. We present two teacher cases that highlight how design thinking was used to cultivate design literacy and help their students develop academic and social language skills. Our research was with elementary and middle schools, but we believe that the principles outlined in our design thinking project could extend beyond grade level and content areas.
Response of Newly Introduced Tomato Cultivars to different levels of potassium fertilizer under controlled Environment condition

The experiment was carried out during growing season (2016-2017) at station of greenhouses, AL-muthanna university- collage of agriculture- second research station (Al-Bander) to study the response of introduced tomato cultivars to different concentrations of potassium under protected agriculture conditions. The research included three cultivars (Pusa ruby - Arka vikash- Arka Alok) and three levels of Potassium Fertilizer (90-180-270 kg/ha-1). The Randomized Complete Block Design with factorial experiment (RCBD) with three replicates. The results showed the superiority of Arka Alok variety over others in plant height 121.76 cm, fruit width 6.82 cm, fruit length 4.23 cm, average fruit weight 130.61g, leaf area 129.5 cm2, the yield per plant 2.16 kg. The potassium level (270 Kg/ha-1) was also significantly higher in plant height 118.79 cm, fruit width 5.477 cm, fruit length 3.536 cm, 84.60 g, leaf area 127.3 cm2, TSS 4.97 and chlorophyll content 406.89 mg.m2 and yield per plant 2.16 kg. While the interaction showed significant difference (Arka Alok × 270 Kg.ha-1) in fruit length was 4.24 cm, chlorophyll content was 374.91 mg. m2 and the yield per plant was 2.82 kg. plant-1
Insular Cortex Projections to Nucleus Accumbens Core Mediate Social Approach to Stressed Juvenile Rats

Social interactions are shaped by features of the interactants, including age, emotion, sex, and familiarity. Age-specific responses to social affect are evident when an adult male rat is presented with a pair of unfamiliar male conspecifics, one of which is stressed via two foot shocks and the other naive to treatment. Adult test rats prefer to interact with stressed juvenile (postnatal day 30, PN30) conspecifics but avoid stressed adult (PN50) conspecifics. This pattern depends upon the insular cortex (IC), which is anatomically connected to the nucleus accumbens core (NAc). The goal of this work was to test the necessity of IC projections to NAc during social affective behavior. Here, bilateral pharmacological inhibition of the NAc with tetrodotoxin (1 μm; 0.5 μl/side) abolished the preference for stressed PN30, but did not alter interactions with PN50 conspecifics. Using a combination of retrograding tracing and c-Fos immunohistochemistry, we report that social interactions with stressed PN30 conspecifics elicit greater Fos immunoreactivity in IC → NAc neurons than interactions with naive PN30 conspecifics. Chemogenetic stimulation of IC terminals in the NAc increased social exploration with juvenile, but not adult, conspecifics, whereas chemogenetic inhibition of this tract blocked the preference to investigate stressed PN30 conspecifics, which expands upon our previous finding that optogenetic inhibition of IC projection neurons mediated approach and avoidance. These new findings suggest that outputs of IC to the NAc modulate social approach, which provides new insight to the neural circuitry underlying social decision-making. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Social decision-making underlies an animal's behavioral response to others in a range of social contexts. Previous findings indicate the insular cortex (IC) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc) play important roles in social behaviors, and human neuroimaging implicates both IC and NAc in autism and other psychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant social cognition. To test whether IC projections to the NAc are involved in social decision-making, circuit-specific chemogenetic manipulations demonstrated that the IC → NAc pathway mediates social approach toward distressed juvenile, but not adult, conspecifics. This finding is the first to implicate this circuit in rodent socioemotional behaviors and may be a neuroanatomical substrate for integration of emotion with social reward.
Sex-specific nestling growth in an obligate brood parasite: Common Cuckoo males grow larger than females

ABSTRACT Growth is a key life history trait that is closely related to individual fitness. In altricial birds, growth is restricted to a relatively short period, and depends primarily on the amount or quality of food and hence on parental care. Obligate brood parasites do not care for their own offspring but impose this burden on other species (hosts). As many brood parasites exploit various host species, their progeny are expected to receive different levels of parental care. Parasite growth has thus often been explored in the context of host parenting abilities and only rarely with respect to its sex specificity. Here, we fill this gap in knowledge and explore sex differences in the growth of Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) nestlings reared by 2 warbler hosts in the genus Acrocephalus. As adult Common Cuckoo males are 5–16% heavier than females, we assumed that nestlings would also differ in size and thus in growth performance. To test this assumption, we used a nonlinear mixed effects modeling approach to fit an overall logistic curve across all nestling masses and ages. We chose the logistic growth model over its alternatives because it is one of the most used models for birds and it is suitable for the growth of Common Cuckoo nestlings. We found that both sexes exhibited similar mass after hatching and grew at a similar rate. Nevertheless, males reached ∼10% higher asymptotic mass than females, while fledging at a similar age as females. These findings imply that male Common Cuckoo nestlings may have higher needs than female nestlings; however, this still awaits proper testing.
Vaccination in Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Utility and Future Perspective

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an immune-mediated disease, which often require lifetime treatment with immunomodulators and immunosuppressive drugs. Both IBD and its treatments are associated with an increased risk of infectious disease and mortality. Several of these diseases are vaccine preventable and could be avoided, reducing morbidity and mortality. However, vaccination rates among patients with IBD are lower than in the general population and both patients and doctors are not fully aware of the problem. Education campaigns and well planned vaccination schemes are necessary to improve vaccination coverage in patients with IBD. Immunomodulators and immunosuppressive drugs may reduce the seroprotection levels. For this reason, new vaccination schemes are being studied in patients with IBD. It is therefore important to understand which and when vaccines can be administrated based on immunocompetence or immunosuppression of patients. Usually, live-attenuated vaccines should be avoided in immunosuppressed patients, so assessing vaccination status and planning vaccination before immunosuppressive treatments are pivotal to reduce infection risk. The aim of this review is to increase the awareness of the problem and provide a quick reference for vaccination plan tailoring, especially for gastroenterologists and primary care physicians, who have the skills and knowledge to implement vaccination strategies.
Quantifying the individual impact of artificial barriers in freshwaters: A standardized and absolute genetic index of fragmentation

Fragmentation by artificial barriers is an important threat to freshwater biodiversity. Mitigating the negative aftermaths of fragmentation is of crucial importance, and it is now essential for environmental managers to benefit from a precise estimate of the individual impact of weirs and dams on river connectivity. Although the indirect monitoring of fragmentation using molecular data constitutes a promising approach, it is plagued with several constraints preventing a standardized quantification of barrier effects. Indeed, observed levels of genetic differentiation GD depend on both the age of the obstacle and the effective size of the populations it separates, making comparisons of the actual barrier effect of different obstacles difficult. Here, we developed a standardized genetic index of fragmentation (FINDEX), allowing an absolute and independent assessment of the individual effects of obstacles on connectivity. The FINDEX is the standardized ratio between the observed GD between pairs of populations located on either side of an obstacle and the GD expected if this obstacle completely prevented gene flow. The expected GD is calculated from simulations taking into account two parameters: the number of generations since barrier creation and the expected heterozygosity of the populations, a proxy for effective population size. Using both simulated and empirical datasets, we explored the validity and the limits of the FINDEX. We demonstrated that it allows quantifying effects of fragmentation only from a few generations after barrier creation and provides valid comparisons among obstacles of different ages and populations (or species) of different effective sizes. The FINDEX requires a minimum amount of fieldwork and genotypic data and solves some of the difficulties inherent to the study of artificial fragmentation in rivers and potentially in other ecosystems. This makes the FINDEX promising to support the management of freshwater species affected by barriers, notably for planning and evaluating restoration programs.
Analysis of diagonal 
G
 and subspace 
W
 approximations within fully self-consistent 
GW
 calculations for bulk semiconducting systems

Fully self-consistent GW ($sc$-GW) methods are now available to evaluate quasiparticle and spectral properties of various molecular and bulk systems. However, such techniques based on the full matrix of G and W are computationally demanding. The routinely used single-shot GW approximation (${G}_{0}{W}_{0}$) has an undesirable dependency on the choice of initial exchange-correlation functional. In the literature, many so-called self-consistent GW methods are based on diagonal approximation of G and low-ranking approximation of W. It is thus worth checking how good such approximations are in comparison with the full matrix method. In this work, we consider AlAs, AlP, GaP, and ZnS as the prototype systems to perform $sc$-GW calculations by expressing the full G matrix using a plane-wave basis set. We compared our sc-GW results with the diagonal G and subspace W approximated $sc$-GW results ($sc$-GW-diagG and $sc$-GW-subW methods). In the $sc$-GW-diagG method, interacting G is expanded in the eigenvectors of noninteracting G such that only diagonal elements are retained, whereas the number of eigenmodes is truncated in $sc$-GW-subW calculations. A systematic analysis of the results obtained from the above techniques is presented. The differences in the quasiparticle band gap between the approximated and the full matrix sc-GW approaches are mostly less than 1.7%, which validates such widely adopted approximations, and also shows how such low-ranking approximation can be used to include higher-order terms such as the vertex correction.
Rearing practices in each life period of beef heifers can be used to influence the carcass characteristics

Abstract To improve their income, European cattle breeders have to produce cattle carcasses with the best score on the EUROP system. The objectives of this study were to identify the rearing practices applied on farms at each period of a heifer’s life and to study the relationship between these practices and the carcass characteristics. Farm surveys (n = 45) were performed to assess the rearing practices. A factorial analysis of mixed data followed by a hierarchical clustering on principal components was performed for each life period. The clusters resulting from these typologies were related to the carcass characteristics (weight, conformation and fat scores). For the suckling period, the cluster characterised by a calving season in autumn, a short pasture period and systematic supplies of stored grass and concentrate in stall gave heavy carcasses with the highest conformation scores. For the growth period, the best cluster for producing favourable carcass characteristics was characterised by the longest pasture period, feeding the most stored grass and feeding a regular concentrate supply throughout the year. For the fattening period, the cluster characterised by the oldest age at the beginning of the period and at slaughter, slaughter in winter and autumn, a long pasture period and regular concentrate supply gave the heaviest carcasses with the highest conformation scores. This study highlights several rearing practices that could be used as a means to influence the carcass characteristics, and also the life periods at which animals are sensitive to changes in management practices to improve weight and conformation scores. Highlights Carcass characteristics are related to rearing practices applied at each life period of heifers. Rearing practices can be used as a means to influence carcass characteristics.
Evaluating University-Business Collaboration at Science Parks: a Business Perspective

The evaluation of the companies’ performance at University Science Parks (SPs) becomes essential in identifying the needs of the companies and the feasibility of the University-Business Collaboration (ubc). The companies’ real needs are also of interest for universities and SPs, since they face the challenge of designing strategies that best help them to transfer knowledge more effectively. This research article focuses on Key Performance Indicators (kpis) in ubc, needs and business objectives of companies co-located at SPs in Spain and Mexico. This article (i) aims to identify the kpis in ubc used by co-located companies at SPs, and (ii) explore the kpis in ubc and critical success factors of SPs. This article focuses on the perspective of companies, with a secondary focus on the perspectives of SPs and universities. For this study, data was collected through online company surveys in Spain and Mexico. Moreover, the empirical analysis uses fourteen semi-structured interviews addressed to SPs directors to explore kpis in ubc and success factors of SPs in both countries. In addition, two frameworks were developed with the main kpis in ubc, taking into account university and company perspectives. They show the objectives, strategies and long-term kpis as well as progress kpis, and they are a useful guide to evaluate the accomplishments and the alignment of goals in ubc.
Differential gene behavior in barley plants challenged with biotrophic and necrotrophic pathogens

The biotrophic [ Blumeria graminis (DC.) Speer] and necrotrophic [ Cochliobolus sativus (S. Ito & Kurib.) Drechsler ex Dastur] are economically important pathogens of barley found worldwide. To better understand the defense responses initiated by resistant barley challenged with B. graminis and C. sativus, important known defense-related genes at early points of infection were analyzed using PCR (qPCR) approach. Time-course experiments revealed a remarkable discrepancy in the expression patterns of the defense-related genes between barley B. graminis or C. sativus interactions, and all of them exhibited significant differential accumulations compared to the non-inoculated controls. The most outstanding differences were observed in PR1 and PR5 expression which were 6 and 9 folds higher respectively at the 72-hpi of barley B. graminis interaction as compared with C. sativus . Data showed that barley plants triggered different defense mechanisms to strengthen their B. graminis and C. sativus resistance, and the expression patterns of the same defense-associated genes were altered in adaptation to each pathogen. Taken together, our study might provide useful information for a deeper molecular research on barley defense responses against pathogens with different lifestyles.
DFR and PAL gene transcription and their correlation with anthocyanin accumulation in Rhodomyrtus tomentosa (Aiton.) Hassk.

Abstract Objectives Rhodomyrtus tomentosa (Aiton.) Hassk. (R. tomentosa) is rich in nutrients and has multiple pharmacological applications. Anthocyanins confer color to the flowers and berries of R. tomentosa and provide protection against photodamage. The dihydroflavonol 4-reductase gene (DFR) and phenylalanine ammonialyase gene (PAL) are crucial for anthocyanin synthesis. Methods DFR and PAL transcript levels and anthocyanin content in the pigmented organs of R. tomentosa were investigated through qRT-PCR analysis and spectrophotometry, respectively. The glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) gene was selected as the reference gene for the normalization of DFR and PAL transcript levels. Results Transcript levels of DFR and PAL were higher in organs with vigorous metabolism than those in senescent organs. DFR and PAL transcript levels were up-regulated during the initial and middle-maturity periods of fruit. These expression patterns are consistent with fruit color development. The highest transcript levels of PAL and DFR were observed during the middle-maturity period or the red-fruit period. Conclusion During the late maturity period of R. tomentosa fruit, the transcript levels of the two genes were down-regulated even though anthocyanins were continuously accumulated, which was different from the accumulation of anthocyanins in some late mature fruits.