Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Control of Pathogenic Fungi on Pleurotus tuber-regium cultures

The inhibitory effect of the pesticides was tested against the growth of the pathogenic fungi associated with cultures of the Pleurotus tuber-regium. Aspergillus niger, A. flavus, Trichoderma sp. and Mucor sp. were isolated in the mycelia culture plates of P. tuber-regium. The pesticides applied were copper sulphate, benlate (benomyl), formalin, ridomil, (metalaxyl), demosan, tecto-60, brestan and kocide. The results obtained indicated that copper sulphate, formalin, brestan and kocide at 50 ppm and 100 ppm showed highly inhibitory effect on the sporulation and mycelia growth of the pathogenic fungi. The effect of CuS04 on A. niger is significantly different from benlate, nacl, ridomil,kocide,na2s204, formalin, tecto-dust and demosan while brestan shows the highest significant effect on A. niger and significantly different from CuS04. NaCl, Tecto-Dust and Demosan produced high significant effect on A. flavus while the effect were non significantly different from each other. The tecto-dust effect on Trichoderma sp is significantly different from formalin on Trichoderma sp. The effect of Tecto-dust is higher Formalin, Tecto-Dust and Demosan Mucor sp and significantly different from all other pesticides used. There is a high significant effect on A. niger at the concentration of 200ppm.The effect of the concentration at 100,200 and 250ppm are non-significantly different for A. flavus but significant different from 0 concentration. The effect of the concentration at 50,100,150, 200 and 250ppm were non significantly different on Trichoderma sp but significantly different from concentration at 0 ppm, also the same effect was recorded for Mucor sp. The effect of pesticides is highly (p<0.01) significant for A. flavus, Trichoderma sp and Mucor sp but non significant for A. niger. The effect of concentration on the A . niger is significant (p<0.05) but highly significant for A. flavus, Trichoderma sp and Mucor sp. A. niger shows significant relation to A. flavus and Trichoderma sp but non significantly correlated with Mucor sp and negatively related to concentration. The results in this study showed the usage of chemicals to control contaminating fungi. [Oyelakin AO . , Fasidi IO . , Odebode AC . , Jonathan SG and Babalola BJ . Control of Pathogenic Fungi on Pleurotus tuber-regium cultures. World Rural Observ 2014;6(1):107-113]. ISSN: 1944-6543 (Print); ISSN: 19446551 (Online). http://www.sciencepub. net/rural. 19
Characterization of the complete mitochondrial genome of Cassin’s auklet, Ptychoramphus aleuticus

Abstract In this study, the complete mitochondrial genome of Cassin’s auklet, Ptychoramphus aleuticus, was determined using Illumina sequencing. The complete mitochondrial genome of P. aleuticuss was 16,524 bp in length and encoded 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, and 2 ribosomal RNA genes. The overall nucleotide composition is: 30.8% A, 24.4% T, 30.6% C, and 14.2% G, with a total G + C content of 44.8%. By phylogenetic analysis using ML method, P. aleuticuss clustered with two Synthliboramphus species that belong to Alcidae.
A sense of being needed: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of hospital-based allied health professionals' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background. The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a large number of hospitalizations in the Netherlands and worldwide. As a result, the work of hospital-based allied health professionals changed rapidly. In such a healthcare crisis, professionals may not be able to fulfill their own professional values about good care, resulting in ethical issues and moral distress. The aim of this study was to explore the lived experiences of allied health professionals working in hospitals during COVID-19 pandemic, with attention to the ethical issues and moral distress these professionals might have encountered. Methods and findings. Lived experiences were collected in semi-structured interviews with a total of 39 allied health professionals working in four different hospitals. Interviews were held in June and July 2020, after waning of the first-wave of COVID-19 spreading in the Netherlands. Interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed four themes: 'a disease with large impact', 'personal health and safety', 'staying human in chaotic times' and 'solidarity and changing roles'. Participant experiences show that the virus and COVID-19 measures had an enormous impact on the in-hospital working environment due to the massive downscaling of regular care, infection prevention measures and unknown risks to allied health professionals' personal health. At the same time, participants experienced a certain freedom, which made room for authentic motives, connection and solidarity. The themes and accompanying ethical issues reflected a wide range of situations that were morally complex and led to moral distress. Conclusions. To diminish long-lasting negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and moral distress, employers should empathize with experiences of allied health professionals and create conditions for ethical reflection. Our data show that allied health professionals value professional autonomy. Creating room for professional autonomy makes them feel needed, connected and energized. However, the needs of allied health professionals may conflict with organizational rules and structures.
Dormancy overcoming and germination test in Piptadenia stipulacea (Benth.) Ducke
 seeds

Piptadenia stipulacea (Benth.) Ducke presents slow and uneven germination due to integumentary dormancy. In addition, there are no standardized indications as to the temperature and substrate for conducting the germination test in the laboratory. Thus, the objective was to evaluate methods of dormancy overcoming, temperatures and substrates in the germination and vigor of P. stipulacea seeds. For this, two experiments were installed, the first one in a completely randomized design, with 4 replicates of 25 seeds and treatments to overcome dormancy were: immersion in water at 100 °C for 1; 2; 3; 4; 5 and 6 min; immersion in concentrated sulfuric acid (H2SO4 - 98% P.A) for 1; 4; 7; 10 and 13 min; scarification on sandpaper no 80; in the region opposite the micropyle and intact seeds. At 21 days after sowing, emergency, emergency speed index and mean emergency time were evaluated. In experiment II, the experimental design was completely randomized in a 4 x 6 factorial scheme, with four replicates of 25 seeds, using the substrates between sand, paper, paper roll and vermiculite at temperatures of 20; 25; 30; 35; 40 °C and alternated 20-30 °C, the variables analyzed were first count, germination, mean germination time and germination speed index. In order to overcome seed dormancy of P. stipulacea, it is recommended that the pre-germinating treatment be set in the region opposite to the micropyle, and to evaluate the germination and vigor of these seeds, the temperature of 30 °C and 20-30 °C can be used with the roller substrate of paper.
Molecular Diversity of Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Genotypes Resistance to Rice Weevil (Sitophilus oryzae L.) Revealed by SSR Markers

ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 7 Number 07 (2018) Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com The present investigation was carried out to analyse for the presence of α-amylase inhibitor gene which is responsible for resistance to rice weevil. A total of 30 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were used to study the genetic diversity among 30 wheat genotypes resistant to rice weevil. Among them, seventeen primers were found polymorphic on agarose gel and depicted the significant diversity among susceptible and resistant genotypes while rest thirteen primers were found monomorphic. The number of polymorphic bands per loci ranged from 1 to 3 with an average of 1.6 alleles per locus. A clear cut differentiation was exhibited among the genotypes. The average PIC value was 0.37 ranging from 0.17 (WMC120/ WMC76/WMC245) to 0.67 (WMC267), indicating diverse nature of the wheat genotypes and/or highly informative SSR markers used in this study. The analyzed wheat genotypes showed a good level of genetic variability for assessed quantitative, physio-chemical and molecular characters. Molecular markers linked with major genes for traits of interest which have been amplified by the primer set UCW108, a genic marker for GPC-B1. The range of similarity coefficient varied from 54% (PBN-51) to 74% (K 20). SAHN cluster analysis using UPGMA method separated the parental genotypes into four cluster groups, PBN 51 was positioned as single genotype in separate groups i.e., in cluster-I, K 50, K 76 and K 77 in cluster-II, K 2I and K 50 in cluster-III and K 20 in cluster-IV. In dendrogram, based on results of markers validated were able to diversify the resistant and susceptible parents, first group member PBN51 and fourth group member K20 found on the two distant groups, which were observed as most susceptible and resistant genotypes respectively, according to our controlled experiment on weevil infestation and molecular analysis done and hence, the study supports and correlates the result, obtained by these analysis. The present study also indicates that microsatellite markers able to access the genetic diversity among studied genotypes of wheat for weevil resistance. K e y w o r d s Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), Molecular diversity, SSR marker, Weevil resistance Accepted: 06 June 2018 Available Online: 10 July 2018 Article Info Int.J.Curr.Microbiol. App.Sci (2018) 7(7): 761-772
Of Wheat and Men: Changes in Genetic Markers for Celiac Disease Over Time

In the recent past, sequencing of ancient human genomes has become increasingly common, leading to an immense amount of data to be explored. For this study we focused on comparing a set of ancient individuals with modern populations on behalf of markers for celiac disease. We analyzed a panel of 64 SNPs related to this disease, trying to detect changes in allele frequencies between ancient and modern individuals. We hope to make a contribution to the subject of genetic health throughout human history.
Drought Stresses on Seed Germination and Early Growth of Maize and Sorghum

Seeds of maize (Zea mays L.) and sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench. ] were submitted to different osmotic potential levels induced by polyethylene glycol (PEG) with the objective of evaluating the effects of drought stress on seed germination and early seedling growth. Seeds were arranged in paper rolls and soaked in PEG solutions prepared with osmotic potentials 0.0 (control), -0.2, -0.4, and -0.8 MPa and kept into a seed germinator, at 25 °C for 18 days. A completely randomized design in a 2 × 4 factorial scheme with four replications of 50 seeds each was used. The results showed that by increasing of the osmotic potential level, germinated seed number, germination rate index, root and shoot length, shoot and root dry matter, and seedling vigor index (SVI) decreased, while mean germination time (MGT) and root: shoot ratio (RSR) increased in both crops. Additionally, the maize was more susceptible than sorghum to drought stress, with germination response declining more rapidly with decreasing osmotic potential. Sorghum crop tolerates water stress of up to -0.2 MPa, without reducing germination of the seeds; however, the growth of shoots and roots are inhibited. Drought stress limits the process of seed germination and early growth of maize seedlings.
More Informed Random Sample Consensus

Random sample consensus (RANSAC) is a robust model-fitting algorithm. It is widely used in many fields including image-stitching and point cloud registration. In RANSAC, data is uniformly sampled for hypothesis generation. However, this uniform sampling strategy does not fully utilize all the information on many problems. In this paper, we propose a method that samples data with a Lévy distribution together with a data sorting algorithm. In the hypothesis sampling step of the proposed method, data is sorted with a sorting algorithm we proposed, which sorts data based on the likelihood of a data point being in the inlier set. Then, hypotheses are sampled from the sorted data with Lévy distribution. The proposed method is evaluated on both simulation and real-world public datasets. Our method shows better results compared with the uniform baseline method.
Emotions in Online Content Diffusion

Social media-transmitted online information, particularly content that is emotionally charged, shapes our thoughts and actions. In this study, we incorporate social network theories and analyses to investigate how emotions shape online content diffusion, using a computational approach. We rigorously quantify and characterize the structural properties of diffusion cascades, in which more than six million unique individuals transmitted 387,486 articles in a massive-scale online social network, WeChat. We detected the degree of eight discrete emotions (i.e., surprise, joy, anticipation, love, anxiety, sadness, anger, and disgust) embedded in these articles, using a newly generated domain-specific and up-to-date emotion lexicon. We found that articles with a higher degree of anxiety and love reached a larger number of individuals and diffused more deeply, broadly, and virally, whereas sadness had the opposite effect. Age and network degree of the individuals who transmitted an article and, in particular, the social ties between senders and receivers, significantly mediated how emotions affect article diffusion. These findings offer valuable insight into how emotions facilitate or hinder information spread through social networks and how people receive and transmit online content that induces various emotions.
An Incentive Compatible Mechanism for Market Coupling

The term market "coupling" refers to mechanisms used to price and allocate the available transmission capacity between interconnected electricity markets. In this paper, we propose a market coupling mechanism that is guaranteed to provide the necessary incentives for identifying the efficient allocation of interconnection capacity. Each individual area (or market) operator participates in this coupling mechanism by iteratively submitting bids for trading energy across interties and the prices for interconnection capacity is adjusted as a function of excess demand. The mechanism is scalable as the informational demands placed on each market operator at each iteration are limited. We show that the mechanism's outcome converges to the optimal intertie flows when market operators are truthful. We devise incentive transfers based on the individual area contribution to total operational cost savings that guarantee truthful participation is an approximate Nash equilibrium, i.e., no individual market operator has an incentive to manipulate bids on energy import/export over interties if all other market operators are truthful. We identify a sufficient condition on a uniform participation fee ensuring the mechanism incurs no deficit. The proposed decentralized mechanism is implemented on the three-area IEEE Reliability Test System where the simulation results showcase the efficiency of proposed model.
Weighted Entropy Modification for Soft Actor-Critic

We generalize the existing principle of the maximum Shannon entropy in reinforcement learning (RL) to weighted entropy by characterizing the state-action pairs with some qualitative weights, which can be connected with prior knowledge, experience replay, and evolution process of the policy. We propose an algorithm motivated for self-balancing exploration with the introduced weight function, which leads to state-of-the-art performance on Mujoco tasks despite its simplicity in implementation.
EasyTransfer: A Simple and Scalable Deep Transfer Learning Platform for NLP Applications

The literature has witnessed the success of leveraging Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and Transfer Learning (TL) algorithms to a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, yet it is not easy to build an easy-to-use and scalable TL toolkit for this purpose. To bridge this gap, the EasyTransfer platform is designed to develop deep TL algorithms for NLP applications. EasyTransfer is backended with a high-performance and scalable engine for efficient training and inference, and also integrates comprehensive deep TL algorithms, to make the development of industrial-scale TL applications easier. In EasyTransfer, the built-in data and model parallelism strategies, combined with AI compiler optimization, show to be 4.0x faster than the community version of distributed training. EasyTransfer supports various NLP models in the ModelZoo, including mainstream PLMs and multi-modality models. It also features various in-house developed TL algorithms, together with the AppZoo for NLP applications. The toolkit is convenient for users to quickly start model training, evaluation, and online deployment. EasyTransfer is currently deployed at Alibaba to support a variety of business scenarios, including item recommendation, personalized search, conversational question answering, etc. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets and online applications show that EasyTransfer is suitable for online production with cutting-edge performance for various applications. The source code of EasyTransfer is released at Github1.
Preformed Scour Holes Associated with Road Building May Maintain Anuran Diversity in Urbanizing Areas

To mitigate erosion and stream pollution from road runoff, the North Carolina Department of Transportation implemented new stormwater-control structures: preformed scour holes (PSH). PSH may also provide habitat for amphibians in the urbanizing southeast United States. We surveyed anuran species in PSH in the Piedmont region of North Carolina and correlated species richness with local and regional factors associated with PSH. Degree of urbanization was negatively associated with total species richness, and PSH surface area and the presence of riparian vegetation were positively associated with total species richness. Our results suggest that PSH and similar stormwater-control measures may help to mitigate anuran diversity loss due to urbanization. Further study is warranted to determine if PSH act positively or negatively (e.g., as ecological traps) on amphibian diversity in urbanizing areas.
Chemical screening of sixty-one actinomycete strains and anti-methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus assays of target strains

Abstract Aim To discover actinomycete strains-producing analogs and structure-types with anti-methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureu (anti-MRSA) activity from a soil used as an anti-infection folk medicine. Methods Plate method was used for the isolation of actinomycete strains with an improved Gauss medium, and chemical screening of these strains was achieved with HPLC-UV technique. The anti-MRSA activities and minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of the extracts of the cultures of target strains were performed by agar diffusion and broth microdilution respectively, and their cytotoxicity was evaluated by MTT (3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) method using human colon tumor cell HCT-116. Results Sixty-one actinomycete strains were isolated from the soil sample collected in Zhuzhou County, Hunan, China. Based on the analogs and structure-types in the HPLC profiles of the extracts of their cultures, three strains ZZ027, ZZ021 and ZZ044 were targeted by chemical screening. The extract (500 g) of the culture of ZZ027 and ZZ021 showed anti-MRSA activity with inhibition zones of 29–35 and 17–24 mm respectively, and their MICs were 0.625–1.25 and 2.50 mg·mL −1 respectively. The extract obtained from ZZ021 showed remarkable cytotoxicity against HCT-116 in vitro with IC 50 value of 6.4 μg·mL −1 , while those of ZZ027 and ZZ044 showed no cytotoxicity (IC 50 values were more than 20 μg·mL −1 ). Conclusion From a soil sample used as an anti-infectious folk medicine, three strains ZZ027, ZZ021 and ZZ044 were obtained by selective isolation and chemical screening. ZZ027 and ZZ021 showed anti-MRSA activities, and ZZ021 showed remarkable cytotoxicity.
Sydr: Cutting Edge Dynamic Symbolic Execution

The security development lifecycle (SDL) is becoming an industry standard. Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) has enormous amount of applications in computer security (fuzzing, vulnerability discovery, reverse-engineering, etc.). We propose several performance and accuracy improvements for dynamic symbolic execution. Skipping non-symbolic instructions allows to build a path predicate 1.2–3.5 times faster. Symbolic engine simplifies formulas during symbolic execution. Path predicate slicing eliminates irrelevant conjuncts from solver queries. We handle each jump table (switch statement) as multiple branches and describe the method for symbolic execution of multi-threaded programs. The proposed solutions were implemented in Sydr tool. Sydr performs inversion of branches in path predicate. Sydr combines DynamoRIO dynamic binary instrumentation tool with Triton symbolic engine. We evaluated Sydr features on 64-bit Linux executables.
FLAT: Fast, Lightweight and Accurate Method for Cardinality Estimation

Query optimizers rely on accurate cardinality estimation (CardEst) to produce good execution plans. The core problem of CardEst is how to model the rich joint distribution of attributes in an accurate and compact manner. Despite decades of research, existing methods either over simplify the models only using independent factorization which leads to inaccurate estimates and sub optimal query plans, or over-complicate them by lossless conditional factorization without any independent assumption which results in slow probability computation. In this paper, we propose FLAT, a CardEst method that is simultaneously fast in probability computation, lightweight in model size and accurate in estimation quality. The key idea of FLAT is a novel unsupervised graphical model, called FSPN. It utilizes both independent and conditional factorization to adaptively model different levels of attributes correlations, and thus subsumes all existing CardEst models and dovetails their advantages. FLAT supports efficient online probability computation in near liner time on the underlying FSPN model, and provides effective offline model construction. It can estimate cardinality for both single table queries and multi-table join queries. Extensive experimental study demonstrates the superiority of FLAT over existing CardEst methods on well-known benchmarks: FLAT achieves 1 to 5 orders of magnitude better accuracy, 1 to 3 orders of magnitude faster probability computation speed (around 0.2ms) and 1 to 2 orders of magnitude lower storage cost (only tens of KB).
Diverse and Non-redundant Answer Set Extraction on Community QA based on DPPs

In community-based question answering (CQA) platforms, it takes time for a user to get useful information from among many answers. Although one solution is an answer ranking method, the user still needs to read through the top-ranked answers carefully. This paper proposes a new task of selecting a diverse and non-redundant answer set rather than ranking the answers. Our method is based on determinantal point processes (DPPs), and it calculates the answer importance and similarity between answers by using BERT. We built a dataset focusing on a Japanese CQA site, and the experiments on this dataset demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed several baseline methods.
Hyperbolic generalized triangle groups, property (T) and finite simple quotients

We construct several series of explicit presentations of infinite hyperbolic groups enjoying Kazhdan's property (T). Some of them are significantly shorter than the previously known shortest examples. Moreover, we show that some of those hyperbolic Kazhdan groups possess finite simple quotient groups of arbitrarily large rank; they constitute the first‐known specimens combining those properties. All the hyperbolic groups we consider are non‐positively curved k$k$ ‐fold generalized triangle groups, that is, groups that possess a simplicial action on a CAT(0) triangle complex, which is sharply transitive on the set of triangles, and such that edge‐stabilizers are cyclic of order k$k$ .