Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Dairy Cattle Reproductive Performance

• A calving interval of 13.5 months is an achievable goal that will produce higher daily milk yield and higher milk yield over the length of the lactation. To achieve this goal average days to first service should be <80, yearly 21-day Pregnancy Rates should average >20% and culling for reproductive failure should not exceed 10%. • Management must set standard operating procedures for all aspects of the breeding program, such as, heat detection, artificial insemination techniques, hormone injection protocol for synchronization program, and treatment of problem cows. The management team should established protocols and operating procedures to be followed by all involved. • Intensive management of the nutrition, feeding system, and environment of the periparturient dairy cow during the transition period reduces the odds of disease and increases the odds of pregnancy in a timely manner. Average loss in body condition score (BCS) should be approximately one point. Cows should calve having a BCS ranging between 3.25 and 3.75. • The goal should be to have 100% of the cows inseminated within 24 days of the voluntary waiting period. • Pregnancy rate is the benchmark that incorporates submission rate and conception rate in a timely fashion and should be the cornerstone of reproductive performance monitoring. Introduction
Service To Manage The Efficient Driving Of Combustion Vehicle Fleets To Support ISO 50001

The ISO 50001 is an international standard oriented to the energy management. In the transport sector and in companies where the equipment is mainly combustion engine means, this energy management process is principally oriented to control the vehicle fuel consumption. In this paper, we present a service capable of monitoring how and when the fuel is consumed and offering tools to the fleet responsible to analyze and manage it. The service produces the required information and tools to support the ISO 50001 certification. To evaluate its performance, the service has been deployed in several vehicles of a garbage collector company making possible a reduction in the fuel consumption by approximately 20%.
Productivity Growth in Manufacturing During Early Industrialization: Evidence from the American Northeast, 1820 to 1860

This paper reports estimates of labor and total factor productivity, for thirteen manufacturing industries in the Northeast over the period from 1820 to 1860. It finds that although the highly mechanized and capital-intensive industries, such as cotton and wool textiles, realized somewhat more rapid progress than the others did, even the latter managed major advances. The evidence appears to support the conclusion that the manufacturing sector in the Northeast was quite dynamic during this stage of industrialization, and that much of its early productivity growth can be explained by changes in production processes that did not require mechanization or substantial increases in capital intensity. This suggests, as has been argued by a number of recent studies building on an old tradition, that developments such as increases in the division and intensity of labor within firms and other relatively subtle alterations in technique, perhaps stimulated by the expansion of markets, may have played important roles in accounting for the progress achieved.
Integrating physiological and biomechanical drivers of population growth over environmental gradients on coral reefs

SUMMARY Coral reefs exhibit marked spatial and temporal variability, and coral reef organisms exhibit trade-offs in functional traits that influence demographic performance under different combinations of abiotic environmental conditions. In many systems, trait trade-offs are modelled using an energy and/or nutrient allocation framework. However, on coral reefs, differences in biomechanical vulnerability have major demographic implications, and indeed are believed to play an essential role in mediating species coexistence because highly competitive growth forms are vulnerable to physical dislodgment events that occur with high frequency (e.g. annual summer storms). Therefore, an integrated energy allocation and biomechanics framework is required to understand the effect of physical environmental gradients on species’ demographic performance. However, on coral reefs, as in most ecosystems, the effects of environmental conditions on organisms are measured in different currencies (e.g. lipid accumulation, survival and number of gametes), and thus the relative contributions of these effects to overall capacity for population growth are not readily apparent. A comprehensive assessment of links between the environment and the organism, including those mediated by biomechanical processes, must convert environmental effects on individual-level performance (e.g. survival, growth and reproduction) into a common currency that is relevant to the capacity to contribute to population growth. We outline such an approach by considering the population-level performance of scleractinian reef corals over a hydrodynamic gradient, with a focus on the integrating the biomechanical determinants of size-dependent coral colony dislodgment as a function of flow, with the effects of flow on photosynthetic energy acquisition and respiration.
Innovation, Organizational Learning and Job Creation

Product innovation is crucial for the economic performance of the whole economy as well as for the survival and growth firms. Innovation may be seen as a process of knowledge creation and the speed and direction of knowledge creation reflects the organizational set-up of the firm as well as investments in R&D and training. Establishing "a learning organization" facilitating horizontal interaction and communication inside and across the borders of the firm is a major factor promoting knowledge creation in the context of a learning economy. On the basis of a unique data set covering 2000 Danish private firms it is demonstrated that firms combining several of the organizational traits of the learning organization are much more prone to introduce new products than the others. It is also demonstrated that firms that introduce new products create more jobs than those that do not do so. These results emerge from a panel of 1,544 firms. As more sectors become exposed to the need to engage in incremental product and service innovation the economic potential of diffusing good practices in terms of organization and participation is growing and needs to be reflected in firm strategies and public policies aiming at promoting innovation and knowledge creation.
Racial discrimination and posttraumatic stress symptoms as pathways to sexual HIV risk behaviors among urban Black heterosexual men

In light of evidence that racial discrimination and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) are neither rare nor extraordinary for many Black urban men, we examined the relationship between everyday racial discrimination and sexual HIV risk behaviors in a predominantly low-income sample of 526 urban Black heterosexually identified men; 64% of whom were unemployed and 55% of whom reported a history of incarceration. We tested the hypothesis that PTSS would mediate the relationship between everyday racial discrimination and sexual risk. Participants in the predominantly low-income urban sample ranged in age from 18 to 45 (M = 28.80, SD = 7.57). Three multiple regression models were used to test the study's mediational model. As hypothesized, PTSS mediated the relationship between everyday racial discrimination and sexual risk behaviors. Most participants (97%) reported experiences with everyday racial discrimination. Results empirically support the notion of racial discrimination-based traumatic stress as a pathway to Black heterosexual men's increased sexual risk behaviors. Results also highlighted key demographic differences with older men reporting fewer PTSS and sexual risk behaviors compared with younger men. Incarceration was related to both PTSS and sexual risk, underscoring the role that incarceration may play in Black heterosexual men's adverse health outcomes. Our study highlights the need for more qualitative and quantitative research to understand the nature of PTSS in Black heterosexual men and mechanisms such as substance use that may link traumatic experiences and sexual risk. Future research could also assess experiences with childhood sexual abuse, violence, and incarceration to gain a more in-depth understanding of the sources of traumatic stress in Black heterosexual men's lives. We advocate for the development of community-based individual and structural-level interventions to help Black heterosexual men in urban areas develop effective strategies to cope with racial discrimination-based traumatic stress to reduce sexual HIV risk behaviors in Black communities.
Input-output relations of the feedback synapse between horizontal cells and cones in the tiger salamander retina.

1. The input-output relation of the feedback synapse between horizontal cells (HCs) and cones was studied by simultaneously recording the light responses of the HCs and of cones the outer segments of which were truncated off. 2. The postsynaptic light response of the truncated cone was depolarizing and free of direct influence of photocurrents. These postsynaptic light responses were graded and sustained; their waveform resembled that of the HC light responses. 3. Input-output relation of the HC-cone feedback synapse was obtained by plotting the simultaneous voltage points of the HC and truncated cone light responses. At the resting potential of the cone (-40 mV), the voltage gain of the feedback synapse was about -0.33 when VHC = -20 mV and it was about -0.03 when VHC = -60 mV. 4. At more hyperpolarized cone voltages, the feedback signals in cones became smaller, and they reversed at about -67 mV. The voltage gain of the feedback synapse at VHC = -20 mV was about -0.23, -0.18, -0.07, and +0.2 when Vcone = -44.5, -52.5, -65, and -77.5 mV, respectively. 5. Light hyperpolarized the HC, which resulted in a conductance change (delta Gs) in cones. The cone conductance decreased progressively as the HCs were increasingly hyperpolarized, and delta Gs reached a maximum value of 0.93 nS when the HCs were hyperpolarized from -20 to -52 mV. 6. The peak light responses of intact cones were plotted against the peak HC light responses. This gives the relationship between the pre- and postsynaptic voltages of the cone-HC (forward) and HC-cone (feedback) synapses at any given light intensity. Combining this relationship with the input-output relations obtained at various voltages of the truncated cones allows the input-output relation of the feedback synapse for light-evoked signals to be obtained. 7. The input-output relation of the feedback synapse for light-evoked signals was bell-shaped, because the feedback light responses were controlled by two opposing factors: as the light became brighter, the postsynaptic conductance change increased, but the driving force decreased. 8. For light-evoked signals, the slope gain (slope of the input-output relation) of the HC-cone feedback synapse was negative (varied from -0.33 to 0) when VHC lay between -20 and -52 mV; and it was positive (0 to +0.8) when VHC lay between -52 and -72 mV. 9. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Measurement of Service Quality from the Customer's Perspective – An Empirical Study

abstract Total Quality Management is an integrated approach to management that continuously improves the quality of products and services to achieve customer satisfaction. Even though researchers throughout the world have developed various models to measure service quality in service organizations, the instrument SERVQUAL formed the basis for all the models. After a careful analysis of SERVQUAL, it has been found that certain important aspects of service quality were not covered in it. Hence, this research work proposes a conceptual framework and an instrument for measuring the customer-perceived service quality. The instrument has been designed with specific reference to the automobile service sector. Data have been collected from the customers of various automobile service stations. The proposed instrument has been empirically tested for convergent validity, unidimensionality and reliability using a confirmatory factor analysis approach. A conceptual framework for service quality has been proposed based on the results and findings of the research work.
Cyber Civil Rights

Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. These destructive groups target individuals with defamation, threats of violence, and technology-based attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy their privacy. Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, impoverishing online dialogue and depriving victims of the social and economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence. Attackers manipulate search engines to reproduce their lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital "scarlet letters" that ruin reputations. Today's cyber attack groups update a history of anonymous mobs coming together to victimize and subjugate vulnerable people. The social science literature identifies conditions that magnify dangerous group behavior and those that tend to defuse it. Unfortunately, Web 2.0 technologies accelerate mob behavior. With little reason to expect self-correction of this intimidation of vulnerable individuals, the law must respond. General criminal statutes and tort law proscribe much of the mobs' destructive behavior, but the harm they inflict also ought to be understood and addressed as civil rights violations. Civil rights suits reach the societal harm that would otherwise go unaddressed and would play a crucial expressive role. Acting against these attacks does not offend First Amendment principles when they consist of defamation, true threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, technological sabotage, and bias-motivated abuse aimed to interfere with a victim's employment opportunities. To the contrary, it helps preserve vibrant online dialogue and promote a culture of political, social, and economic equality.
Wave evolution on a falling film

Since the pioneering experiment by the father-son team of the Kapitza family during their house arrest in the late forties (Kapitza & Kapitza 1949), wave evolution on a falling film has intrigued many researchers. One of its main attractions is its simplicity-it is an open-flow hydrodynamic instability that occurs at very low flow rates. It can hence be studied with the simplest experimental apparatus, an obviously important factor for the Kapitzas. Yet, it yields a rich spectrum of fascinating wave dynamics, including a very unique and experimentally well-characterized sequence of nonlinear secondary transitions that begins with a selected monochromatic disturbance and leads eventually to nonstationary and broad-banded (in both frequency and wave number) "turbulent" wave dynamics. (Turbu­ lence here is used interchangeably with irregular spatio-temporal fluc­ tuations.) While this transition to "interfacial turbulence" or "spatio­ temporal chaos" seems to be quite analogous to other classical instabilities at first glance, there are subtle but important differences that have recently come to light. The pertinent nonlinear mechanisms behind these secondary transitions are the focus of the present review. We shall be mostly concerned with transitions on a free-falling vertical film. Wave dynamics on an inclined plane is quite analogous to the vertical limit and most experiments and theories have focused on the latter. For the vertical film, the problem is defined by two independent dimensionless parameters and we prefer the Russian convention of using the Reynolds
Adaptive Result Inference for Collecting Quantitative Data With Crowdsourcing

In quantitative crowdsourcing, workers are asked to provide numerical answers. Different from categorical crowdsourcing, result aggregation in quantitative crowdsourcing is processed by combinatorially computing over all workers’ answers instead of by merely choosing one from a set of candidate answers. Therefore, existing result aggregation models for categorical crowdsourcing tasks cannot be used in quantitative crowdsourcing. Moreover, the worker ability often varies in the process of crowdsourcing with the changing of workers’ skill, willingness, efforts, etc. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model to characterize the quantitative crowdsourcing problem by considering the changing of worker ability so as to achieve better quality control. The dynamic worker ability is obtained with Kalman filtering and smoother. We design an expectation-maximization-based inference algorithm and a dynamic worker filtering algorithm to compute the aggregated crowdsourcing result. Finally, we conducted experiments with real data on CrowdFlower and the results showed that our approach can effectively rule out low-quality workers dynamically and obtain more accurate results with less costs.
Survey Attrition and Schooling Choices

We use data from three cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience and from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study the effect of survey attrition on estimates of statistical models of schooling choices. We estimate regressions using data on people who always respond to the surveys (stayers) and on people who miss some surveys (attritors) and test whether the same statistical model describes the behavior of stayers and attritors. In general (with a few exceptions) we find that attrition either has no effect on the regression estimates or only affects the estimates of the intercept (and sometimes the coefficients of birth year dummies) and does not affect estimates of family background slope coefficients.
An analysis of a preoperative pediatric autologous blood donation program.

OBJECTIVE To determine the efficacy of a pediatric autologous blood donation program. DESIGN A retrospective study of patient charts and blood-bank records. SETTING The Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, a tertiary care, pediatric centre. PATIENTS One hundred and seventy-three children who received blood transfusions for a total of 182 procedures between June 1987 and June 1997. INTERVENTIONS Autologous and homologous blood transfusion required for major surgical intervention, primarily spinal fusion. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Surgeons' accuracy in predicting the number of autologous blood units required for a given procedure, compliance rate (children's ability to donate the requested volume of blood), utilization rate of autologous units and rate of allogeneic transfusion. RESULTS The surgeons' accuracy in predicting the number of autologous units required for a given procedure was 53.8%. The compliance rate of children to donate the requested amount of blood was 80.3%. In children below the standard age and weight criteria for blood donation the compliance rate was 75.5%. The utilization rate of autologous units obtained was 84.4% and the incidence of allogeneic transfusion was 26.6%. CONCLUSIONS There was a high rate of compliance and utilization of predonated autologous blood in the children in the study. Preoperative blood donation programs are safe and effective in children, even in those below the standard age and weight criteria of 10 years and 40 kg.
Clinicopathological and prognostic significance of MUC-2, MUC-4 and MUC-5AC expression in japanese gastric carcinomas.

BACKGROUND The mucin components of the gastric gel layer function as a protective and lubricating factor against luminal acid and proteolytic enzymes. Alteration of mucin expression in gastric preneoplastic and neoplastic lesions has suggested potential roles in neoplastic processes. This study aimed to assess the clinicopathological and prognostic significance of MUC-2, MUC-4 and MUC-5AC in Japanese gastric cancer. METHODS Expression of MUC-2, -4 and -5AC was evaluated on tissue microarrays of gastric carcinomas and adjacent non-cancerous mucosa specimens by immunohistochemistry and compared with clinicopathological parameters and survival time of the patients. RESULTS The three mucins were found to be expressed to a lesser extent in gastric carcinomas in comparison with non-cancerous mucosa (p<0.05). MUC-2 expression was negatively correlated with tumor size, depth of invasion, and TNM staging of gastric cancer (p<0.05), while that of MUC-5AC was negatively associated with the depth of invasion, venous invasion, lymph node metastasis and TNM staging (p<0.05), but positively with MUC-4 and MUC-2 expression (p<0.05). There was higher MUC-2 expression in intestinal- than diffuse-type carcinomas (p<0.05). Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated no relationship between expression of the three mucins and the cumulative survival rate of patients, even stratified according to the depth of invasion (p>0.05). CONCLUSION Down-regulated expression of MUC-2, -4 and -5AC may be involved in pathogenesis, invasion, metastasis or differentiation of gastric carcinoma. Their altered expression might therefore be employed as an indicator of pathobiological behavior.
Is the European Central Bank (and the United States Federal Reserve) Predictable?

The objective of this paper is to examine the predictability of the monetary policy decisions of the Governing Council of the ECB and the transmission of the unexpected component of the monetary policy decisions to the yield curve. We find, using new methodologies, that markets do not fully predict the ECB decisions but the lack of perfect predictability is comparable with the results found for the United States Federal Reserve. We also find that the impact of monetary policy shocks on bond yields declines with the maturity of the bonds, and that this impact is significantly lower when the shock stems from a monetary policy meeting of the ECB. Using implicit rates instead of bond yields, we find evidence that the market views the ECB as credible.
Competency-based medical education: implications for undergraduate programs

Changes in educational thinking and in medical program accreditation provide an opportunity to reconsider approaches to undergraduate medical education. Current developments in competency-based medical education (CBME), in particular, present both possibilities and challenges for undergraduate programs. CBME does not specify particular learning strategies or formats, but rather provides a clear description of intended outcomes. This approach has the potential to yield authentic curricula for medical practice and to provide a seamless linkage between all stages of lifelong learning. At the same time, the implementation of CBME in undergraduate education poses challenges for curriculum design, student assessment practices, teacher preparation, and systemic institutional change, all of which have implications for student learning. Some of the challenges of CBME are similar to those that can arise in the implementation of any integrated program, while others are specific to the adoption of outcome frameworks as an organizing principle for curriculum design. This article reviews a number of issues raised by CBME in the context of undergraduate programs and provides examples of best practices that might help to address these issues.
Equity Markets, Block Realignments and the UK Exchange Rate

In recent weeks, equity markets have been very weak and the euro exchange rate has risen by more than 10 per cent against the dollar. The UK's effective exchange rate has also depreciated, removing some, but not all, of the overvaluation we identified in the April Review. We report on recent movements in table 1, and their implications are discussed in the UK and World forecast chapters in this Review. To an extent the movements in the US stock markets and the exchange rate are linked, but there does seem to be some ‘excess strength’ in the euro, which will in turn contribute to the weakness of Euro Area equity prices.