Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of re-drying of onion primed seeds on seedling emergence

: The effect of re-drying of onion seeds after soaking in priming media on seeds germination and seedling emergence was observed in a pot experiment at the Teaching and Research farm of the Ekiti State University, Ado Ekiti, Nigeria. Viable red creole onion seeds were soaked in ascorbic acid, moringa leaf extract (MLE), sodium chloride (NaCl) at two concentrations (12.5 and 25 %) and water for 6 and 12 hours. The soaked onion seeds were removed, washed and re-dried for 0, 24 and 48 hours. Re-dried and non-dried onion seeds were down in pots laid out in a completely randomized design in three replicates. Data were collected on the final emergence percentage (FEP), mean emergence time (MET), emergence index (EI) and time to 50 % emergence (E50) and subjected to analysis of variance. The results showed that priming media, concentrations and soaking durations were significantly different from the control (non-primed seeds) (p < 0.05) but not significant in MET, EI and E50. Onion seeds soaked in an ascorbic acid solution without re-drying gave the highest FEP (74.25 %). Re-dried seeds resulted in lower FEP except in NaCl but were not significantly different. In hydro priming, the longer the drying period the lower the FEP and EI, and the higher the MET and E50. Primed onion seeds were to be sow immediately as re-drying reduces the germination potentials of seeds
High Bandwidth Power Amplifier with A Shunt Correction Cell

This paper proposes a dual-cell switching power amplifier with ultra-high small-signal bandwidth. A control strategy is introduced to guarantee system stability while two converter cells work together to increase the control bandwidth. Simulation results show that the proposed converter can achieve up to 33 times larger control bandwidths, compared with a conventional single-cell half-bridge converter working with the same switching frequency as the high-voltage cell.
Timing of initiation of antiretroviral therapy in AIDS-free HIV-1-infected patients : a collaborative analysis of 18 HIV cohort studies

Methods We analysed data from 18 cohort studies of patients with HIV. Antiretroviral-naive patients from 15 of these studies were eligible for inclusion if they had started combination antiretroviral therapy (while AIDS-free, with a CD4 cell count less than 550 cells per μL, and with no history of injecting drug use) on or after Jan 1, 1998. We used data from patients followed up in seven of the cohorts in the era before the introduction of combination therapy (1989–95) to estimate distributions of lead times (from the fi rst CD4 cell count measurement in an upper range to the upper threshold of a lower range) and unseen AIDS and death events (occurring before the upper threshold of a lower CD4 cell count range is reached) in the absence of treatment. These estimations were used to impute completed datasets in which lead times and unseen AIDS and death events were added to data for treated patients in deferred therapy groups. We compared the eff ect of deferred initiation of combination therapy with immediate initiation on rates of AIDS and death, and on death alone, in adjacent CD4 cell count ranges of width 100 cells per μL.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Costs of the " Hartslag Limburg " Community Heart Health Intervention

Background: Little is known about the costs of community programmes to prevent cardiovascular diseases. The present study calculated the economic costs of all interventions within a Dutch community programme called Hartslag Limburg, in such a way as to facilitate generalisation to other countries. It also calculated the difference between the economic costs and the costs incurred by the coordinating institution. Methods: Hartslag Limburg was a large-scale community programme that consisted of many interventions to prevent cardiovascular diseases. The target population consisted of all inhabitants of the region (n = 180.000). Special attention was paid to reach persons with a low socio-economic status. Costs were calculated using the guidelines for economic evaluation in health care. An overview of the material and staffing input involved was drawn up for every single intervention, and volume components were attached to each intervention component. These data were gathered during to the implementation of the intervention. Finally, the input was valued, using Dutch price levels for 2004. Results: The economic costs of the interventions that were implemented within the five-year community programme (n = 180,000) were calculated to be about €900,000. €555,000 was spent on interventions to change people's exercise patterns, €250,000 on improving nutrition, €50,000 on smoking cessation, and €45,000 on lifestyle in general. The coordinating agency contributed about 10% to the costs of the interventions. Other institutions that were part of the programme's network and external subsidy providers contributed the other 90% of the costs. Conclusion: The current study calculated the costs of a community programme in a detailed and systematic way, allowing the costs to be easily adapted to other countries and regions. The study further showed that the difference between economic costs and the costs incurred by the coordinating agency can be very large. Cost sharing was facilitated by the unique approach used in the Hartslag Limburg programme. Published: 02 March 2006 BMC Public Health2006, 6:51 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-6-51 Received: 07 July 2005 Accepted: 02 March 2006 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral. com/1471-2458/6/51 © 2006Ronckers et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The North Anatolian Fault in the Sea of Marmara, Turkey: Results of a Deep-towed Seismic and Multi-beam Bathymetric Survey

[1] Using the detailed geometry and tectonics of the Main Marmara fault that connects the Gulf of Izmit fault with the Ganos fault established by Le Pichon et al. [2001] and the new GPS data set recently analyzed by Meade et al. [2002], we confirm the existence of a Marmara block delimited to the north by the northern branch of the North Anatolian fault (the Marmara branch) and to the south by the southern branch. The kinematics of this block indicate that the Marmara branch that crosses the Sea of Marmara is close to pure dextral strike slip at a rate of 23 mm/yr on its whole length. The short Cinarcik section is the only one where a significant extensional component is predicted. A simple kinematic model accounts for slip partitioning there, with 8–10 mm/yr of extension to the south of the basin and 23 mm/yr of dextral strike slip along the northern Cinarcik margin. The new GPS data demonstrate the existence of important asymmetric elastic loading along the Main Marmara fault that may have significant implications for the seismotectonics of the area. The expected future large earthquake may rupture the whole main Marmara fault. The partitioning in the Cinarcik basin may produce magnitude 7 normal faulting earthquakes if their repetition time is about 250 years. The 1896 earthquake may have been one of these normal fault earthquakes. The Marmara block is less than 1 Ma. Prior to its formation, it was part of the Anatolian block. At this time the Ganos fault was already a dextral strike-slip fault, but the fault system in the Sea of Marmara would have been affected by an extensional component increasing toward the east that accounts for the increasing size of the sedimentary basins eastward.
Industrialization and Development in the Third World

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. The Historical Dimensions of Third World Industrialization 3. The Level and Structure of Third World Industrialization 4. The Organization of Manufacturing in the Third World 5. The Location of Manufacturing in the Third World 6. The State and Third World Industrialization 7. Conclusion
Combinatorial Exploration of Morse–Smale Functions on the Sphere via Interactive Visualization

In this paper, we are interested in the characterization and classification of Morse-Smale functions. To that end, we present MSF Designer, an interactive visualization tool that supports the combinatorial exploration of Morse-Smale functions on the sphere. Our tool supports the design and visualization of a Morse-Smale function in a simple way using fundamental moves, which are combinatorial operations introduced by Catanzaro et al. that modify the Morse-Smale graph of the function. It also provides fine-grained control over the geometry and topology of its gradient vector field. The tool is designed to help mathematicians explore the complex configuration spaces of Morse-Smale functions, as well as their associated gradient vector fields and Morse-Smale complexes. Understanding these spaces will help mathematicians expand their applicability in topological data analysis and visualization. In particular, our tool helps topologists, geometers, and combinatorialists explore invariants in the classification of vector fields and characterize Morse functions in the persistent homology setting.
The Object of Love: Exploring Traditional Baby Carriers Used by the Miao People of the Huawu Village* By Cho Hsin-ying

The Huawu Miao Village is located in a closed canyon in the north-west region of Guizhou Province, China. The location is remote and difficult to access. Therefore, the settlement developed a closed, farming-oriented, and self-sustaining living environment. The Huawu Miao men and women often use baby carriers to carry their children on their backs while farming or doing household chores. The baby carrier culture remains universally popular in the village. These carriers reflect the traditional techniques and cultural implications of the local people. In this study, a field survey was adopted as a research approach to gain an understanding of the techniques, pattern designs and meanings of baby carriers used by the Huawu Miao people. The patterns observed in baby carriers are closely related to the historical relocation of the Miao people, local living environments and the Miao creation myth.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Empirical studies have demonstrated that when comprehenders are faced with informationally redundant utterances, they may make pragmatic inferences (Kravtchenko & Demberg, 2015). Previous work has also shown that the strength of these inferences depends on prominence of the redundant utterance – if it is stressed prosodically, marked with an exclamation mark, or introduced with a discourse marker such as “Oh yeah”, atypi-cality inferences are stronger (Kravtchenko & Demberg, 2015, 2022; Ryzhova & Demberg, 2020). The goal of the present paper is to demonstrate how both the atypicality inference and the effect of prominence can be modelled using the rational speech act (RSA) framework. We show that atypicality inferences can be captured by introducing joint reasoning about the habituality of events, following Degen, Tessler, and Goodman (2015); Goodman and Frank (2016). However, we ﬁnd that joint reasoning models principally cannot account for the effect of differences in utterance prominence. This is because prominence markers do not contribute to the truth-conditional meaning. We then proceed to demonstrate that leveraging a noisy channel model, which has previously been used to model low-level acoustic perception (Bergen & Goodman, 2015), can successfully account for the empirically observed patterns of utterance prominence.
A selective inhibitor of the sperm-specific potassium channel SLO3 impairs human sperm function

Recommended Citation Lyon, Maximilian; Li, Ping; Ferreira, Juan J; Borrego Alvarez, Aluet; Puga Molina, Lis C; Lybaert, Pascale; Khambekar, Saayli; Liu, Alicia; Santi, Celia M; and et al., "A selective inhibitor of the sperm-specific potassium channel SLO3 impairs human sperm function. " Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 120, 4. e2212338120 (2023). https://digitalcommons.wustl. edu/oa_4/1210
NGO policy change in relation to donor discourse

The Vi Tree Planting Foundation in Sweden, generally known as Vi Skogen (ViS), is a well-documented case of an NGO that started from idealistic efforts developed from two contemporary narratives, ‘desertification’ and the ‘fuel wood crisis’ merged into the concept ‘planting trees to halt the spread of the desert’. ViS was initiated by an article in the Vi Magazine (ViM) in February 1983. Today, ViS is an efficient and widely appreciated NGO implementing a comprehensive rural development programme in four countries, reaching more than 175 000 farmers within the Lake Victoria basin. ViS’s development since 1983 has not been without problems and struggle. The main objective of this paper was to describe ViS’s development with a focus on policy change in relation to general discourse on development cooperation and Sida’s policy change from 1983 to 2001. From the beginning, ViS managed to sense the perception of ViM readers and individual donors in relation to important contemporary narratives. Despite, the growing importance of local ownership, ViS initiated its own local NGO instead of building partnerships and capacity of indigenous NGOs in the recipient countries. ViS gradually developed an approach with a top-down organisation based on paid labour and the issuing of free seedlings that was increasingly counter to the growing concern of the dependency syndrome in the 1990s. In 1996, the SPM-study seriously criticized this development and Forum Syd proposed phasing-out Sidasupport for ViS. From 1996 onwards, ViS started to reform its policy and organisation decisively. In 2000 the fourth ViS assessment team was convinced of ViS potential to successfully contribute to the alleviation of poverty in the Lake Victoria Basin.
Seasonal hydrological prediction in Great Britain – an assessment

This thesis assesses seasonal hydrological prediction in Great Britain. Firstly, the study evaluates river flow prediction using climate model output to drive a rainfall-runoff model in the Dyfi basin, Wales. Results show that climate model precipitation can not skilfully simulate Dyfi discharge. When a downscaling process is employed to generate precipitation time series, river flow forecast skill improves, but historical river flows still provide superior forecasts. Secondly, large-scale climatic control on British precipitation/discharge and European precipitation is investigated by correlation analysis. Results show spatiotemporal hydroclimatological variation, with western regions generally having stronger empirical relationships. River flow has weaker associations because of basin controls and evapotranspiration. The dynamic nature of precipitation/discharge generating mechanisms is not captured by the North Atlantic Oscillation Index. Thirdly, seasonal climate model forecast skill is evaluated. Limited skill exists over land and over all extratropical regions for forecasts beyond month-1; precipitation has lower skill than 2-metre air temperature and mean sea level pressure. Seasonal climate models exhibit higher idealised predictive skill indicating potential for future increases in actual predictive skill. In conclusion, seasonal hydrological prediction using a climate-to-river modelling chain could be improved through consideration of the uncovered spatiotemporal hydroclimatological variability and through seasonal climate modelling improvements.
SEF-Net: Speaker Embedding Free Target Spekaer Extraction Network

Most target speaker extraction methods use the target speaker embedding as reference information. However, the speaker embedding extracted by a speaker recognition module may not be optimal for the target speaker extraction tasks. In this paper, we proposes Speaker Embedding Free target speaker extraction Network (SEF-Net), a novel target speaker extraction model without relying on speaker embedding. SEF-Net uses cross multi-head attention in the transformer decoder to implicitly utilize the speaker information in the reference speech’s conformer encoding outputs. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves comparable performance to other target speaker extraction models. SEF-Net provides a feasible new solution to perform target speaker extraction without using a speaker embedding extractor or speaker recognition loss function.
Stability Analysis of Delay-Driven Coupled Cantilevers Using the Lambert W-Function

A coupled delay-feedback system of two cantilevers can yield greater sensitivity than that of a single cantilever system, with potential applications in atomic force microscopy. The Lambert W-function analysis concept for delay differential equations is used to more accurately model the behavior of specific configurations of these cantilever systems. We also use this analysis concept to find parameters which yield stability for greater parameter ranges, of the delay differential equations. The Q factor, or quality factor, is the ratio of energy stored in the system, to the energy lost per fixed oscillation/movement cycle. Having stability of the cantilevers corresponds to the physical system having a better Q factor and better sensitivity.
A theoretical prediction of the effects of electrostatic forces on saltating snow particles

Electrification of snow particles during blizzards creates forces that may strongly effect their trajectories in saltation along a charged surface. This paper shows the results of adding such forces to the equations of motion for saltation. Evaluating these equations requires knowledge of the electric-field strength very near the surface, and a review shows that such measurements are lacking. However, extrapolation of reported measurements from greater heights agrees with the electric field computed for a bed of spherical particles. In this hypothetical field, the equations of motion predict large changes in saltation length that might occur as particles pass over surfaces with positive and negative sign. Such changes apparently coincide with surface erosion and deposition.
Department of Veterans Affairs: Support of Capacity Building in Rehabilitation Research

The Healthcare Research and Quality Act of Dec. 6, 1999 (PL 106-129), reauthorized the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and changed its name (from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research). AHRQ sponsored research provides the scientific foundation for the nation’s efforts to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and efficiency of health care. In addition to an intramural research program, AHRQ supports the work of health services research through extramural contracts and grants, including research training grants. AHRQ emphasizes partnerships and cofunding opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of it resources and works collaboratively with other government agencies and outside organizations to both share and gain expertise. AHRQ findings are being translated into improvements in clinical care and in the structure and delivery of healthcare services. As part of the AHRQ agenda there is a concerted effort to track “knowledge transfer,” or the impact of research on patient outcomes. The reauthorization established the following areas and populations as priorities for AHRQ research, evaluation, and demonstration projects: the delivery of health care in inner-city and rural areas (including frontier areas); low-income groups; minority groups; women; children; the elderly; and individuals with special healthcare needs, including individuals with disabilities and individuals who need chronic care or end-of-life health care. The AHRQ Website, www.ahrq. gov, has extensive detail on many of the activities described below and additional rehabilitation related information. The “Grants On-Line Database” (GOLD system) can be searched for recently funded “rehabilitation” grants. The site provides abstracts for all grants listed. The Web “Funding Opportunities” section provides information on contract solicitations, research and training grant announcements, and policy notices. AHRQ has included and continues to include “medical rehabilitation research” directly and indirectly within its broad mission and program activities.
Alzheimer’s Disease Classification Using Brain MRI Based on Combination of Convolutional Neural Network and Random Forest Model

Worldwide, someone develops dementia every 3 seconds. Dementia is mostly brought on by Alzheimer's disease (AD). Research has concentrated on diagnosing AD and dementia over the past centuries, and brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been proved an effective biomarker of AD and other dementias. Throughout the years, many methods, including various forms of Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, and other machine learning algorithms, have been innovated and applied to the classification of brain MRI scans. This paper aims to propose a model framework that has been rarely used in this field. This novel architecture utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the feature extracting task and a Random Forest (RF) model for classifying different stages of dementias. The model was evaluated on each label's performance and overall performance. The performance metrics include accuracy, f-1 score, precision, and recall. The comparisons between the proposed model and the other two sodels, a CNN and a combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and RF, were also provided. The implementation of the proposed model resulted in the highest overall accuracy, weighted precision, weighted recall, and weighted f-1 score. It also guaranteed stable and excellent performance across every label.
Pediatric and adult patients with ME/CFS following COVID-19: A structured approach to diagnosis using the Munich Berlin Symptom Questionnaire (MBSQ)

Purpose: A subset of patients with post-COVID-19 condition (PCC) fulfill the clinical criteria of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). To establish the diagnosis of ME/CFS for clinical and research purposes, comprehensive scores have to be evaluated. Methods: We developed the Munich Berlin Symptom Questionnaires (MBSQs) and supplementary scoring sheets (SSSs) to allow for a rapid evaluation of common ME/CFS case definitions. The MBSQs were applied to young patients with chronic fatigue and post-exertional malaise (PEM) who presented to the MRI Chronic Fatigue Center for Young People (MCFC). Trials were retrospectively registered (NCT05778006, NCT05638724). Results: Using the MBSQs and SSSs, we report on ten patients aged 11 to 25 years diagnosed with ME/CFS after asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection or mild to moderate COVID-19. Results from their MBSQs and from well-established patient-reported outcome measures indicated severe impairments of daily activities and health-related quality of life. Conclusions: ME/CFS can follow SARS-CoV-2 infection in patients younger than 18 years, rendering structured diagnostic approaches most relevant for pediatric PCC clinics. The MBSQs and SSSs represent novel diagnostic tools that can facilitate the diagnosis of ME/CFS in children, adolescents, and adults with PCC and other post-viral syndromes.