Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Exploration into the Effects of Fiscal Variables on Regional Growth

This paper explores the effects of several fiscal variables on regional economic growth in Spain over period 1965-1997. Panel estimates are provided for this sample. The results show that public consumption affects negatively growth, public investment exerts a positive (but non significant) effect on growth rate and public deficit reduces private investment and hence economic growth. The effects of taxes and social benefits seem not to be beneficial for regional growth. Alternative estimates to deal with specification problems are considered.
Restoration of Libido in WNIN / GROb Male Rats by Administration of High Dose Testosterone Propionate

WNIN/GR-Ob mutant rat strain was isolated and established from our Wistar rat stock and the strain exhibits physical, physiological and biochemical indices of obesity, along with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Obese male rats lack libido, have small testis and accessory glands, but with normal spermatogenesis. They are thus infertile, and even testosterone levels were also found to be low. In the present study, we administered testosterone propionate to the animals to see whether this can reverse the reproductive abnormalities and also restore fertility as well. 12 homozygous obese (-/-) male rats of 7578 days of age were taken and divided into two groups, control and experimental. The experimental animals received a subcutaneous injection of testosterone propionate in thiomersal, and controls received vehicle alone. The experiment was conducted for a period of 90 days. Parameters like growth, food intake and selected biochemical parameters like plasma glucose, insulin, cholesterol, triglycerides and testosterone levels were analyzed in control and experimental animals at the start of the experiment and also before mating with selected proven heterozygous carrier (+/-) females. At the end of the study animals were euthanized and organ weights and body composition were determined. The experimental animals though lost weight, after testosterone propionate injection, gained high testosterone levels, and even successfully mated with the females, which gave viable litters as well. Lipid and insulin parameters all remained high, indicative of clinical obesity. Testosterone administration thus proves to be a method of choice, where one can restore fertility in these animals.
Integrating GIS in the Middle School Curriculum: Impacts on Diverse Students’ Standardized Test Scores

This case study conducted with 1,425 middle school students in Palm Beach County, Florida, included a treatment group receiving GIS instruction (256) and a control group without GIS instruction (1,169). Quantitative analyses on standardized test scores indicated that inclusion of GIS in middle school curriculum had a significant effect on student achievement on both high stakes Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT) reading scores and on final course grades in science and social studies. The most significant increases were found among the English language learners (ELLs).
Efficiency in Health Care and Surge Capability in Disasters. Is it a Trade- Off?

The global economic downturn has affected many aspects of modern life. In such times of financial uncertainty with competing priorities, drastic funding cuts are often made to lower priority projects. Health policy makers argue that limited funds and resources mean rationing and prioritization are required. They call for efficient health care by trimming funds to “luxury” services and focusing on high priority services. Health care disaster preparedness is rarely a priority issue for policy makers except immediately after major disasters for a short time until complacency sets in. Therefore, disaster preparedness has always been under-funded and the current difficult financial times exacerbate the situation. This article provides a conceptual overview of the relationship between efficiency in health care and its impact on surge capability. This relationship resembles an inverted-U curve where the peak of the U is the maximum efficiency point and the maximum surge capability in a balanced funding situation for a health care system. A question that stems from this is how to estimate the level of funding required to achieve maximum efficiency and surge capability?
Testing for allele- versus genotype-specific transmission ratio distortion

The transmission ratio distortion (TRD) is defined as the departure from expected frequencies under Mendelian inheritance. Current statistical approaches to investigate TRD account for two independent scenarios, model parametrizations assuming that TRD relies on allelic or genotypic mechanisms, respectively. If compared, results may provide additional information about the mechanism underlying TRD. Both analytical approaches have been compared by Bayes factors on simulated data sets with 1,000 individuals each. Analyses revealed trustworthy patterns where the model used for simulation was systematically favoured. Moreover, the correlation between simulated and predicted distortion parameters was high (>0.85). The only weakness was suggested for genotypic TRD with small to null dominance distortions. As a whole, the comparison of allelic and genotypic TRD models must be viewed as an appealing tool that should contribute to fostering research on TRD.
Coreference resolution for Italian: Assessing the impact of linguistic components

English. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of two linguistic components required to build a coreference resolution system: mention detection and mention description. We compare gold standard annotations against the output of the modules based on the state-of-the-art NLP for Italian. Our experiments suggest the most promising direction for future work on coreference in Italian: we show that, while automatic mention description affects the performance only mildly, the mention detection module plays a crucial role for the end-to-end coreference performance. We also show that, while a considerable number of mentions in Italian are zero pronouns, their omission doesn’t affect a general-purpose coreference resolver, suggesting that more specialized algorithms are needed for this subtask. Italiano. Questo articolo presenta una valutazione sistematica di due componenti linguistiche necessarie per costruire un sistema di risoluzione delle coreferenze: (i) selezione automatica delle menzioni ad entita e (ii) la loro descrizione in termini di features. Per questo scopo si confrontano i risultati dei moduli che sono allo stato dell’arte per l’italiano basati sul NLP con le annotazioni gold standard. Questi esperimenti suggeriscono le direzioni di ricerca piu promettenti per futuri lavori sulla coreferenza per l’italiano: infatti, si dimostra che, mentre la descrizione automatica delle menzioni influisce sulle prestazioni solo leggermente, il modulo di selezione delle menzioni svolge un ruolo fondamentale per la prestazione del risolutore di coreferenze (end-to-end). Si dimostra anche che, mentre un numero considerevole di menzioni in italiano sono zero-pronouns, la loro omissione non pregiudica il risultato di coreferenza. Questo suggerisce che algoritmi piu specializzati sono necessari per questa sottoattivita.
The Interobserver Agreement of The Hysteroscopy in Evaluation of Uterine Cavity Uterin Kavitenin Değerlendirilmesinde Histeroskopinin Gözlemciler Arasi Tutarliliği

Aim: To evaluate the inter-observer agreement of hysteroscopy procedures in the assessment of uterine cavity of patients with benign uterine disease. Material and Methods: Patients that underwent hysteroscopy procedures for benign uterine disease at our gynecology department were included into this prospective study. Three expert gynecologists evaluated the digitalized images of each patient. Kappa statistics were performed to assess the inter-observer agreement. The equivalent of the overall weighted Kappa (κ) values and the intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) were applied to calculate the mean κ values. Results: Fifty-seven patients who underwent a hysteroscopy proceduredue to benign uterine pathology were enrolled. Reproducibility of the hysteroscopy procedure showed poor to moderate agreement for detection of normal uterine cavity, endometrial polyp, submucous myoma, uterus subseptus with ICCs values of0.59, 0.60, 0.41, 0.32, respectively. The reproducibility of hysteroscopy was moderate for uterine cavity abnormalities. There was good agreement for the diagnosis of endometrial polyps, whereas this was poor for the diagnosis of uterus subseptus. Conclusion: Inter-observer agreement of hysteroscopy for the diagnosis of benign uterine conditions was generally moderate in our setting.
Mental and Cardiovascular Health of Portuguese Subjects in a Situation of Economic Insufficiency

Economic insufficiency causes stress and negative affects. Poverty is self-perpetuated, also due to a particular pattern of economic behaviors induced by negative affects and stress. Often, loneliness occurs together with economic insufficiency. For this study, it has been selected a sample of convenience. A positive correlation between anxiety/depression and negative affects is presented. Dispositional optimism and social support, factors which contribute to health, serve as buffers, in negative correlation, of the negative impact of negative affects, due to financial restraint, on health. Financial management is negatively correlated with the lack of cardiovascular health, and cardiovascular dysfunction correlates positively with loneliness, in this study. Positive affects correlate positively with resilience skills, which correlate negatively with depression. Within this context, psychobiological therapeutic interventions and psychotherapy, which also target psychological dysfunction related to economic behavior of persons in a situation of poverty, would be beneficial.
Sulphate and chloride aerosols during Holocene and last glacial periods preserved in the Talos Dome Ice Core, a peripheral region of Antarctica

Antarctic ice cores preserve the record of past aerosols, an important proxy of past atmospheric chemistry. Here we present the aerosol compositions of sulphate and chloride particles in the Talos Dome (TD) ice core from the Holocene and Last Glacial Period. We find that the main salt types of both periods are NaCl, Na2SO4 and CaSO4, indicating that TD ice contains relatively abundant sea salt (NaCl) from marine primary particles. By evaluating the molar ratio of NaCl to Na2SO4, we show that about half of the sea salt does not undergo sulphatisation during late Holocene. Compared to in inland Antarctica, the lower sulphatisation rate at TD is probably due to relatively little contact between sea salt and sulphuric acid. This low contact rate can be related to a reduced time of reaction for marine-sourced aerosol before reaching TD and/or to a reduced post-depositional effect from the higher accumulation rate at TD. Many sulphate and chloride salts are adhered to silicate minerals. The ratio of sulphate-adhered mineral to particle mass and the corresponding ratio of chloride-adhered mineral both increase with increasing dust concentration. Also, the TD ice appears to contain Ca(NO3)2 or CaCO3 particles, thus differing from aerosol compositions in inland Antarctica, and indicating the proximity of peripheral regions to marine aerosols.
Anatomic Characterization and Profilometry of Tissues with Natural Shape: A Real-time Approach for Robotic-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

This master thesis is divided into two major sections. First, anatomic characterization and profilometry of tissues with natural shape: a real-time approach for robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS); and second, design and characterization of a novel tactile array sensor capable of differentiating among different viscoelastic tissues that exhibit time-dependent behaviour. The first part of this thesis is focused on a tissue characterization system for RMIS applications. RMIS has gained immense popularity with the advent of high-precision robotic systems. The lack of haptic feedback, however, is considered as being one of the main drawbacks of present-day RMIS systems. In order to compensate for this deficiency, a novel tissue characterization system is proposed which is inspired from the human haptic system. Hence, kinesthetic and tactile feedback which are constitutive components of human haptic system are used to characterize naturally shaped tissues. Toward this goal, a 5-degree-of-freedom robot which is called Catalys5 is equipped with a ball caster force-cell. The system is used to simulate robotic surgery maneuvers in which an admittance control approach is implemented to design the force feedback controller. The proposed method characterizes naturally shaped tissues, which is capable of touching and palpating to: a) Identify the 2D or 3D surface profile of the target tissue (profilometry), b) Measure the modulus of elasticity of any desired point on the tissue’s surface, c) Find and map the location of any lump in the tissue, and d) Map hardness distribution around the lump. Initially, silicon-rubber materials were used to build tissue phantoms with different curvatures and degrees of softness. The surface profiles were obtained using the developed profilometry algorithm and validated using a 3D scanner. In addition, several experiments were conducted on bovine tissues to evaluate all above mentioned capabilities of the system. The results of experiments on real tissues were also compared to those that are available in current literature. The results indicate that the proposed approach can be used for reliable material characterization for RMIS application. The second part of this thesis is focused on developing an array tactile sensor for distinguishing softness of viscoelastic tissues with time-dependent behaviour for use in MIS and RMIS. Review of literature on tactile sensors reveals that the vast majority deals with determining the applied contact force and object elasticity. In this research, a novel idea is proposed in which a tactile sensor array can measure rate of displacement in addition to force and displacement of any viscoelastic material during the course of a single touch. In order to verify this new array sensor, several experiments were conducted on a range of biological tissues. It was concluded that this novel tactile sensor can distinguish among the softness of real biological tissue with time-dependent behaviour.
Behavioral rules of bank's point-of-sale for segments description and scoring prediction

Article history: Received 1 March 2010 Received in revised form 1 July 2010 Accepted 10 July 2010 Available online 10 July 2010 One of the important factors for the success of a bank industry is to monitor their customers' behavior and their point-of-sale (POS). The bank needs to know its merchants' behavior to find interesting ones to attract more transactions which results in the growth of its income and assets. The recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) analysis is a famous approach for extracting behavior of customers and is a basis for marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), but it is not aligned enough for banking context. Introducing RFM in this article results in a better understanding of groups of merchants. Another artifact of RFM is RFM scoring which is applied in two ways, preprocessing the POSs and assigning behavioral meaningful labels to the merchants’ segments. The class labels and the RFM parameters are entered into a rule-based classification algorithm to achieve descriptive rules of the clusters. These descriptive rules outlined the boundaries of RFM parameters for each cluster. Since the rules are generated by a classification algorithm, they can also be applied for predicting the behavioral label and scoring of the upcoming POSs. These rules are called behavioral rules. © 2011 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Diversity of gut–microorganisms in Bt–resistant and Bt–susceptible larvae of the maize stem borer (Busseola fusca) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

UITTREKSEL ii iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v DECLARATION vi TABLE OF CONTENTS vii LIST OF FIGURES xi LIST OF TABLES xiv CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE OVERVIEW 1 1.1 Importance of agricultural activities with regards to maize 1 1.2 Stem borer pests of maize in South Africa 2 1.2.1 Ecology of Busseola fusca 2 1.2.2 Control of Busseola fusca 4 1.2.2.1 Biological control 5 1.2.2.2 Chemical control 5 1.2.2.3 Cultural control 5 1.3 Genetic modification of plants 6 1.3. 1 Bacillus thuringiensis as bio-pesticide 6 1.3. 2 Mode of action of Bt toxin 8 1.3. 2.1 Activation of the toxin produced by Bacillus thuringiensis. 8 1.3. 2.2 Binding of toxin 9 1.3. 2.3 Role of bacteria in the mode of action of Bt 10
Impact of users inter-contact times on information dissemination in pervasive social networks

It is commonly perceived that the design principles of the future Internet might be drastically different from today. It is natural to ask what will be the impact of such evolution on the design of future Online Social Networks (OSNs). There is evidence that human social networks may be invariant with respect to the underlying online technology supporting them. Furthermore, the increasing pervasiveness of communication technologies is likely to enable any two users to communicate anytime and anywhere. Thus, a possible evolution of OSN design could map directly the structure of human social networks, and build future OSN services on top of a network whose edges represent “communication channels” between users sharing social relationships, and acti vated when they interact because of their social ties. In thi s paper we look, in the perspective of future OSN designed according to this concept, at how the patterns of interactio ns between people in human social networks impact on information dissemination properties. Based on well-established theories from the anthropology field, we study the propertie s of inter-contact times between users, i.e. the time between successive communication opportunities. This is a crucial feature for information dissemination, as previous result s obtained in a conceptually similar environment have shown that the distribution of inter-contact times determines th e convergence properties of information diffusion protocols. In the paper we investigate, by analysis, simulation and experimental results, the impact of different users interact ion patterns on the properties of inter-contact times and, thus , on the convergence properties of information dissemination protocols.
Capacitive Readout Circuit for Tri-axes Microaccelerometer with Sub-fF Offset Calibration

This paper presents a capacitive readout circuit for tri-axes microaccelerometer with sub-fF offset calibration capability. A charge sensitive amplifier (CSA) with correlated double sampling (CDS) and digital to equivalent capacitance converter (DECC) is proposed. The DECC is implemented using 10-bit DAC, charge transfer switches, and a chargestoring capacitor. The DECC circuit can realize the equivalent capacitance of sub-fF range with a smaller area and higher accuracy than previous offset cancelling circuit using series-connected capacitor arrays. The readout circuit and MEMS sensing element are integrated in a single package. The supply voltage and the current consumption of analog blocks are 3.3 V and 230 μA, respectively. The sensitivities of tri-axes are measured to be 3.87 mg/LSB, 3.87 mg/LSB and 3.90 mg/LSB, respectively. The offset calibration which is controlled by 10-bit DECC has a resolution of 12.4 LSB per step with high linearity. The noise levels of tri-axes are 349 μg/√Hz, 341 μg/√Hz and 411 μg/√Hz, respectively.
Krypton gas for high quality single wall carbon nanotubes synthesis by KrF excimer laser ablation

We report for the first time the production of single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) by KrF excimer laser ablation method under the krypton gas atmosphere. For the ablation experiment 450 mJ energy and 30 Hz repetition rate KrF excimer laser was used, and the target was prepared with the following composition: 0.6% Ni, 0.6% Co, and 98.8% C (atomic percentage). The ablation product was characterized by confocal Raman microspectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The SWCNTs obtained are a mixture of semiconducting and metallic types with narrow diameters distribution of 1.26 to 1.49 nm, are micrometers long, and contain low amount of graphite and amorphous carbon.
Technologically important properties of lactic acid bacteria isolated from raw milk of three breeds of Algerian dromedary ( Camelus dromedarius )

A total of 9 samples of individual dromedary raw milks from N’ajjer (3), Targui (3) and Reguibi (3) breeds were collected from 3 camels nomad herd in south Algeria and were analysed for bacterial load. A total of 23 strains of lactic acid bacteria were isolated, out of which 12 strains were cocci and 11 strains were facultatively heterofermentative lactobacilli. Lactic acid bacteria were identified on the basis of phenotypic characters as Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis, Enterococcus faecalis, Enterococcus faecium, Enterococcus durans, Lactobacillus paracasei subsp. paracasei, Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus rhamnosus. Whole cells of lactococci, enterococci and lactobacilli showed proteolytic activity and were found to differed in terms of their acidifying activities. Proteolytic and autolytic activity were generally higher for most lactobacilli compared to other isolates and none of the strains produced biogenic amines in the method applied. A wide variety of this 23 lactic acid bacteria strains isolated from Algerian dromedary milks that showed potentially important properties suggest that they are good candidate for camels milk processing or other dairy fermentation process.
A Survey on Concrete Floors in Pig Houses and their Degradation

Abstract On farms with fattening pigs, degradation of slatted and solid concrete floors can result in animal injuries and early failure of slat beams. A survey in East and West Flanders was conducted to gauge the extent of this problem, the causes and consequences. Entrusting mixing and placing of the concrete to specialized firms, appeared to increase the life of the floor. However, even concrete slats cast by specialized manufacturers, showed degradation within five years of use on 40% of the farms. No relation could be found between the use of high-pressure cleaning and the speed of attack. The use of cleaners seemed to delay the attack rather than cause degradation. The feeding method had a major influence on attack. The smaller the distance between water and feed supply, the faster the degradation proceeded. Therefore the use of liquid feed made the problems significantly worse. Almost half of the farmers had already taken measures to protect or repair the floor. The life of coatings appeared to be rather limited. Surface layers with ordinary portland cement and ‘‘product S’’, which is said to be based on ground tuff, seemed to have a much longer life than the regular concrete or sand-cement finishes.