Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Xylanase immobilization on functionalized polyaniline support by covalent attachment

Chemically synthesized polyaniline (PANI) was used as polymeric support for xylanase immobilization. The polymer was first activated with glutaraldehyde and then xylanase was successfully immobilized. Xylanase bound polymer was characterized using FTIR. The optimum pH of the immobilized enzyme was at pH 5, which was shifted 1.0 pH unit to the acidic region when compared to the free enzyme. Thermal stability of the xylanase was improved with the immobilization. The characteristic properties of the immobilized and native enzyme, such as kinetic activity, reusability and storage stability were also studied at optimum pH and temperature. Immobilized enzyme exhibited better reusability and storage stability than the free one. Vmax values for the free and immobilized enzymes were calculated as 1.44 and 0.44 mg/mL/min, respectively. The Km values for the immobilized xylanase were found to be lower.
Fungal contamination of some poultry houses in Kaduna State, Nigeria.

The study was conducted to assess the level of fungal contamination of poultry houses with emphasis on Aspergillus species contamination of litter, feeders, drinkers and the housing materials. Ten swabs each from ten locations and materials (100) of the 10 poultry houses were collected for fungal isolation. A total of 126 fungi belonging to 5 genera were isolated from the different parts of the poultry environment viz; Aspergillus, Mucor, Candida, Rhizopusand Penecillium species with Aspergillus and Candida species having the highest frequency of isolation, 69 (54.76%) and 27 (20.93%) respectively. Three species of Aspergillus were isolated A. fumigatus (22), A. flavus (22) and A. niger (18). Fungi were isolated from all parts of the poultry sampled with a higher rate of isolation from the doors, window nets, roof and feeders. The presence of Aspergillus and Candida species which are important poultry pathogens i.e causing Aspergillosis, mycotoxicosis and Candidaisis indicates an economic threat the farmers as well as to the health of the bird.
Sustainable Collaborator Recommendation Based on Conference Closure

It is always difficult for researchers to find a new collaborator due to the academic information overload. Although several scientific collaborator recommendation systems have been proposed, most existing methods cannot meet scholars’ requirements comprehensively due to the neglect of sustainable collaborations in their schemes. Studies have shown that a sustainable collaboration has a significant positive impact on the productivity and influence for a researcher. To address this problem, we develop a sustainable collaborator recommendation (SCORE) system by utilizing the weak tie relationships brought by academic conferences for SCORE. Through defining and quantifying the conference closure, we incorporate the conference coattending relationships into collaborator recommendation system inspired by the principles of “diversified recommendation. ” The experimental results on attendees of ten academic conferences show that the SCORE outperforms state-of-the-art collaborator recommendation systems in accuracy and sustainability. Our model can be used to improve the sociability of academic conferences by recommending sustainable collaborators to conference attendees.
Effect of Two Doses of Different Zinc Sources (inorganic vs. Chelated form) on the Epithelial Proliferative Activity and the Apoptotic Index of Intestinal Mucosa of Early-weaned Pigs Orally Challenged with E. coli K88

The effect of two doses of different sources of zinc, inorganic (zinc oxide) or chelated (zinc glutamate chelate), on morphology and turn-over of the small intestine was assessed in early-weaned pigs orally challenged with enterotoxigenic E. coli K88 (ETEC). Sixty pigs weaned at 21 days were assigned to one of the following 5 diets: control (C); C+Zinc oxide (ZnO), either a 200 or a 2,500 mg Zn/kg dose; or C+zinc chelate with glutamic acid (Glu-Zn), either a 200 or a 2,500 mg Zn/kg dose. On d 2, the pigs were orally inoculated with 1.5 ml of a 10 10 CFU/ml E. coli K88ac 0148 suspension. Zinc supplements did not improve the performance of the pigs, but on d 5 faecal excretion of ETEC was reduced, and this was mainly due to high zinc doses (p<0.05). The villous height in the duodenum was improved by the zinc supplements (p<0.01 ) whatever the source and the level, whereas no effect was seen in the other two tracts of small intestine. The diet did not affect apoptosis and mitosis counts, while ETEC-susceptible pigs had more mitotic cells in the villi than non-susceptible pigs, particularly in the jejunum (p<0.01). The duodenum had fewer mitotic cells in the villi (p<0.05) and in the crypts (p<0.01) and more apoptotic cells in the villi. High dietary doses of ZnO or Zn-Glutamate improve villous height of the duodenum, but not of the jejunum and the ileum, and do not affect the epithelial proliferative activity and apoptotic index of intestinal mucosa of early-weaned pigs orally challenged with ETEC.
DISSECTING THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF ECOLOGICAL DATA AT MULTIPLE SCALES

Spatial structures may not only result from ecological interactions, they may also play an essential functional role in organizing the interactions. Modeling spatial patterns at multiple spatial and temporal scales is thus a crucial step to understand the functioning of ecological communities. PCNM (principal coordinates of neighbor matrices) analysis achieves a spectral decomposition of the spatial relationships among the sampling sites, creating variables that correspond to all the spatial scales that can be perceived in a given data set. The analysis then finds the scales to which a data table of interest responds. The significant PCNM variables can be directly interpreted in terms of spatial scales, or included in a procedure of variation decomposition with respect to spatial and environmental components. This paper presents four applications of PCNM analysis to ecological data representing combinations of: transect or surface data, regular or irregular sampling schemes, univariate or multivariate data. The data sets include Amazonian ferns, tropical marine zooplankton, chlorophyll in a marine lagoon, and oribatid mites in a peat bog. In each case, new ecological knowledge was obtained through PCNM analysis.
Flapping-wing aerodynamics study on the wake of DelFly II by means of Robotic Volumetric Particle Tracking Velocimetry

The aim of this investigation is to provide an experimental volumetric visualization of the near wake topology of the vortex structures generated by a flapping-wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) by means of large-scale Robotic PIV. This novel technique implements coaxial illumination and imaging in combination with the use of Helium Filled Soap Bubbles (HFSB) as tracing particles to achieve large measurement volumes of the order of 10 liters. Information of different phases throughout the flapping cycle is obtained by means of a phase-locked averaging procedure. The MAV used for this study is called DelFly II. It is a platform composed a two pairs of wings attached to a slip body with horizontal and vertical tailplanes for stability and maneuverability. Measurements are performed at regular free-flight scenarios within the DelFly flying envelope. The configurations selected have different reduces frequencies which allows to analyze the effect of this important parameter. Same configurations are also measured with and without the presence of the tails to see their influence of the wake topology. In addition, experiments in both tethered and free-flight conditions have been performed, yielding an unprecedented comparison between the aerodynamics of the two conditions. The significance of the proposed project lies on the ability of assess the complete three-dimensional wake of the DelFly II. This is the first experimental study performed that can achieve such measuring volumes for any flapping-wing platform, to the knowledge of the present author. Another major benefit of this study is the use of standard flight configuration to observe the wake structures when the MAV is able to sustain level flight. Therefore, the proposed work is expected to be a relevant addition to the understanding of the flapping-wing mechanism.
Object-oriented distributed software component development and integration in common object environments

The component-based software development would allow application software to be largely constructed from existing software units. This approach would dramatically improve the productivity of software development. Although there are many reusable software packages available, the integration of the selected components remains to be a very difficult problem because there are many barriers, including programming languages, operating systems, communication mechanism, interface, etc. Especially in distributed systems, most of application software developers have to face these barriers because of the heterogeneity of the software running environments and hardware platforms. In this dissertation, an approach to cross-platform and cross-language object-oriented distributed fault-tolerance software development through distributed component integration based on Common Object Environments, like Object Management Group's CORBA, is presented to overcome these integration barriers. Following a distributed component architecture which defines common interfaces for distributed components using IDL, distributed components that facilitate easy information retrieval at integration time can be developed. By dynamically generating adapters for distributed components using an integration tool, the component connecting process can be transparent to both component developers and software developers for integration, and hence significantly reduces the development effort. Group adapters are also developed for replicated component groups to automatically maintain state consistency and active group membership and provide fault-tolerance feature in the resulting application software.
Jamaican Field Cricket Mate Attraction Signals Provide Age Cues

Older males often have a mating advantage, either resulting from the fact that they live longer or resulting from the fact that they both live longer and signal this to females. Male field crickets signal acoustically to attract potential mates. Some field cricket mating signals provide cues about male age while others do not. We explored whether male Jamaican field crickets, Gryllus assimilis, mating signals change with age. Our results show that older males produce chirps with longer pulses, more pulses, at higher pulse and chirp rates, and their chirps are both longer and louder than those produced by younger males. Our findings suggest that Jamaican field cricket mating signals provide cues about male age, explaining between 10% and 54% of the variation in signaling traits. Females might be able to use these mating signal differences to distinguish between older and younger mates.
Differentially-Private Deep Learning from an optimization Perspective

With the amount of user data crowdsourced for data mining dramatically increasing, there is an urgent need to protect the privacy of individuals. Differential privacy mechanisms are conventionally adopted to add noise to the user data, so that an adversary is not able to gain any additional knowledge about individuals participating in the crowdsourcing, by inferring from the learned model. However, such protection is usually achieved with significantly degraded learning results. We have observed that the fundamental cause of this problem is that the relationship between model utility and data privacy is not accurately characterized, leading to privacy constraints that are overly strict. In this paper, we address this problem from an optimization perspective, and formulate the problem as one that minimizes the accuracy loss given a set of privacy constraints. We use sensitivity to describe the impact of perturbation noise to the model utility, and propose a new optimized additive noise mechanism that improves overall learning accuracy while conforming to individual privacy constraints. As a highlight of our privacy mechanism, it is highly robust in the high privacy regime (when $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$), and against any changes in the model structure and experimental settings.
Can texture features computed from the joint intensity distribution of different MRI sequences accurately predict prostate cancer grade?

The diagnostic landscape of prostate cancer has evolved rapidly, from prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing to exciting new technologies that allow visualization of the disease, moving away from random sampling to targeted biopsies. Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) is a new modality that combines T2-weighted (T2W), diffusion-weighted (DW) and dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) sequences, each designed to reveal specific microstructural features typically associated with malignancy such as increased vascularity and cellularity.
Ghost-busting fashion: Symbolic boundaries and the politics of time in fashion journalism

This article examines the rhetorical tools that leading fashion journalists have used over the past 60 years when they seek to protect the idea of impenetrable temporal boundaries between contemporary fashionable dress and its history. Journalists have always taken a dim view of fashion practices that recycle historical styles in contemporary fashion design. Yet in the late 20th century they intensified this repudiation by the previously unseen use of negatively connoted temporal fashion words, like ‘retro’ and ‘nostalgia’. Journalists further combined such fashion words, declaring specific styles as passé or fashion-dead, with chronological designations to evoke the idea that such styles belong to an irretrievable chronological past. In doing so, they are ‘ghost-busting’ the presence of fashion history for the benefit of a cultural industry that is centred on a rhythmic transcendence of its own past in order to convince consumers of the apparent newness of fashion products.
The Use of Molecular Methods for Detecting and Discriminating Salmonella Associated with Foods — A Review

The genus Salmonella is composed of two species, Salmonella enterica and Salmonella bongori. Only S. enterica subsp. enterica is considered of human clinical significance and consists of 1478 serotypes. A large number of virulence genes and virulence-enhancing genes have been described for Salmonella. There are more than 30 Salmonella specific genes that have been used for the polymerase chain reaction to detect and characterize Salmonella. The sensitivity of detection of Salmonella from complex matrices such as food and feces by PCR is invariably enhanced using nonselective or selective enrichment, particularly if followed by immuno-magnetic separation in addition to coupling the PCR with ELISA formats. R-plasmids are considered to be the main factors responsible for the horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance genes in Salmonella. A sizeable number of primer pairs are available for determining by the PCR the presence of many antibiotic resistance genes in Salmonella isolates that are not necessarily specific for Salmonella. The collective PCR detection of members of the genus Salmonella in foods and environmental samples has been achieved by amplification of invA gene sequences that are highly conserved among all Salmonella serotypes in addition to the amplification of his gene sequences also present throughout the genus Salmonella. Amplification of 16S rDNA sequences have also been found useful for genus specific detection of Salmonella. d-Tartrate (dT+) fermenting strains have been found to result in less severe gastrointestinal infections than d-tartrate-nonfermenting (dT-) strains. Primers have therefore been developed for distinguishing between (dT+) and (dT-) strains. Among the molecular techniques available for strain discrimination of Salmonella isolates, pulsed field gel electrophoresis, random amplified polymporphic DNA analysis, ribotyping, multilocus sequence typing, subtracted finger printing, and enterobacterial repetitive intergeneric consensus typing have been found useful. Multiplex PCR has been found effective for simultaneously detecting Salmonella and other pathogens in foods, particularly with real-time PCR.
Further observations on small green flagellates with special reference to possible relatives of Chromulina pusilla Butcher

The observations to be recorded here have been carried out primarily for the purpose of clarifying the taxonomic position and naming of the small organism previously known as Chromulina pusilla Butcher. This had been shown (Manton, 1959a) to possess the pigments and fine structure appropriate to a position in or near the Chlorophyceae but quite inappropriate to a position within the Chrysophyceae to which the genus Chromulina properly belongs. Before selecting a new generic name, it was highly desirable to make some comparative electron microscopical observations on authentically named material of appropriate kinds since the fallibility of the light microscope for study of organisms of this order of size (1–3µ) had been all too clearly exposed. A search was therefore made for a representative or representatives of the only genus of green flagellates known to us from the literature to possess a single posteriorly directed flagellum, namely Pedinomonas.
On the Accumulated Loopback Self-Interference of Two-Way Full-Duplex AF Relaying Systems

Two-way full-duplex (TWFD) transmissions in cooperative amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems provide a promising way of communications with the improved spectral efficiency by concurrently transmitting/receiving data in the same frequency band and by the two-way transmission protocol. However, the loopback self-interference, caused by the imperfect channel estimation in the loopback link, at the AF relay accumulates and is forwarded to the end users recurrently, which substantially degrades the end users’ error performance if this accumulated loopback self-interference (ALSI) does not converge. It is therefore of critical importance to analyze the convergence behavior of the ALSI in the TWFD systems with AF relaying. In this paper, we establish sufficient conditions on the relay power to ensure the convergence of the ALSI, with which the average limiting signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio at the infinite time horizon is derived. In addition, we specify the relay power at which the signal-to-noise ratio reaches the maximal value under different scenarios and obtain an upper bound to the symbol error rate. Finally, extensive computer simulations results are provided to corroborate the analytic derivations.
An improved multimodal medical image fusion scheme based on hybrid combination of nonsubsampled contourlet transform and stationary wavelet transform

This research proposes an improved hybrid fusion scheme for non‐subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) and stationary wavelet transform (SWT). Initially, the source images are decomposed into different sub‐bands using NSCT. The locally weighted sum of square of the coefficients based fusion rule with consistency verification is used to fuse the detailed coefficients of NSCT. The SWT is employed to decompose approximation coefficients of NSCT into different sub‐bands. The entropy of square of the coefficients and weighted sum‐modified Laplacian is employed as the fusion rules with SWT. The final output is obtained using inverse NSCT. The proposed research is compared with existing fusion schemes visually and quantitatively. From the visual analysis, it is observed that the proposed scheme retained important complementary information of source images in a better way. From the quantitative comparison, it is seen that this scheme gave improved edge information, clarity, contrast, texture, and brightness in the fused image.
Effect of Hibiscus sabdariffa anthocyanins on 2, 4- dinitrophenylhydrazine-induced tissue damage in rabbits

This study examines the effects of anthocyanin extract of the dried calyces of Hibiscus sabdariffa Linn. on the 2, 4 -dinitrophenylhydrazine (2, 4 -DNPH)-induced cytotoxic effects in rabbits. Twenty male adult rabbits used for the study were divided into four groups. Group 1, the control took only water while animals in groups 2 and 4 received 100 mg/kg body weight of the anthocyanin extract of H. sabdariffa once daily for 28 days. After the 22nd day of treatment, the rabbits in groups 3 and 4 received 28 mg/kg body weight of DNPH for the remaining 5 days of treatment, after which the animals were sacrificed. Relative to control, DNPH caused significant (p < 0.05) increase in the formation of malondialdehyde (MDA) in serum, liver and brain and decreased the levels of reduced glutathione (GSH) in liver and brain. Also, DNPH caused a significant (p < 0.05) elevation in the activity of glucose- 6 -phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) in the serum and liver. However, pretreatment with H. sabdariffa anthocyanin extract significantly (p < 0.05) reduced MDA formation, increased the levels of GSH and maintained at normalcy the activity of G6PD in the tissues, thereby effectively ameliorated the toxic effects of DNPH. These findings indicate that anthocyanin extract from dried calyces of H. sabdariffa protects the rabbit against 2, 4 -DNPH lipoperoxidative and cytotoxic effects. Key words: Anthocyanin extract, 2, 4-dinitrophenylhydrazine, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, Hibiscus sabdariffa, rabbit, reduced glutathione, malondialdehyde
Maximum survival of eggs as the key parameter of stock–recruit meta-analysis: accounting for parameter and structural uncertainty

Despite their name, hierarchical stock–recruit meta-analyses are often parameterized in terms of steepness, which depends not only on the assumed stock–recruitment relationship but also on the recruit–spawner relationship. This parameterization requires assumptions about the reproductive potential of the recruit that are not desirable if the focus of the study is limited to the spawning–recruitment phase instead of the full life cycle. Thus, usage of steepness should be avoided in studies that aim to produce informative priors for the stock–recruit relationship for use in studies of other salmon stocks. An alternative key parameter for stock–recruit models is the maximum survival of eggs, which is the slope at the origin of the stock–recruitment curve when spawning stock size is defined in terms of the number of eggs. Furthermore, the current widely used practices in stock–recruit modeling could be improved by taking into account the stock-specific model uncertainty. We use the method of Bayesian model av.