Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using a Grower Survey to Assess The Benefits and Challenges of Glyphosate-Resistant Cropping Systems for Weed Management in U.S. Corn, Cotton, and Soybean

Abstract Over 175 growers in each of six states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, and North Carolina) were surveyed by telephone to assess their perceptions of the benefits of utilizing the glyphosate-resistant (GR) crop trait in corn, cotton, and soybean. The survey was also used to determine the weed management challenges growers were facing after using this trait for a minimum of 4 yr. This survey allowed the development of baseline information on how weed management and crop production practices have changed since the introduction of the trait. It provided useful information on common weed management issues that should be addressed through applied research and extension efforts. The survey also allowed an assessment of the perceived levels of concern among growers about glyphosate resistance in weeds and whether they believed they had experienced glyphosate resistance on their farms. Across the six states surveyed, producers reported 38, 97, and 96% of their corn, cotton, and soybean hectarage planted in a GR cultivar. The most widely adopted GR cropping system was a GR soybean/non-GR crop rotation system; second most common was a GR soybean/GR corn crop rotation system. The non-GR crop component varied widely, with the most common crops being non-GR corn or rice. A large range in farm size for the respondents was observed, with North Carolina having the smallest farms in all three crops. A large majority of corn and soybean growers reported using some type of crop rotation system, whereas very few cotton growers rotated out of cotton. Overall, rotations were much more common in Midwestern states than in Southern states. This is important information as weed scientists assist growers in developing and using best management practices to minimize the development of glyphosate resistance. Nomenclature: Glyphosate; corn, Zea mays L. ; cotton, Gossipium hirsutum L. ; rice, Oryza sativa L. ; soybean, Glycine max (L.) Merr
A user profile definition in context of recommendation of open educational resources. An approach based on linked open vocabularies

Open Educational Resources include a diverse range of materials making it the most representative icon arisen within the Open Content movement. Users who access and use OERs could be classified into one of these three groups: instructor, student and self-learner. To provide personalized lists of OERs according to the user profile and personal preferences, the user should be characterized by an open and scalable model. In this paper, an open linked vocabulary is proposed to describe user profiles of the open educational resources, which take into account the challenges and opportunities that an open and extensible platform as the Web can provide to learn about the OER users, and from this knowledge, offer the most appropriate resources.
Titanium vs hydroxyapatite ossiculoplasty in canal wall down mastoidectomy.

OBJECTIVE To report hearing results using a titanium ossicular replacement prosthesis during canal wall down mastoidectomy with tympanoplasty to treat cholesteatoma. DESIGN Retrospective medical record review. SETTING Referral university hospital. PATIENTS Patients with cholesteatoma treated with primary or revision canal wall down mastoidectomy with tympanoplasty in a single stage. Patients with implanted hydroxyapatite prostheses composed a matched control group. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Medical records were reviewed for type of ossicular condition, type of prosthesis, and hearing threshold at 1-year follow-up. RESULTS Results are reported as the 5-frequency average air conduction gain, bone conduction gain, and air-bone gap. The malleus handle was present in 24 patients, and the stapes superstructure in 22 patients. Mean (SD) air conduction gain was 7.6 (14.7) dB (P = .001); it was 8.7 (12.0) dB in the group with titanium prostheses and 6.3 (17.4) dB in the group with hydroxyapatite prostheses (P = .54). Bone conduction gain was 1.1 (4.9) dB (P = .19). No patients experienced postoperative impairment of bone threshold greater than 5 dB. Postoperative air-bone gap was 26.5 (15.3) dB; it was 23.8 (15.7) dB in the titanium group and 29.8 (14.6) dB in the hydroxyapatite group (P = .18). Air-bone gap closure was 40%; it was 46.2% in the titanium group and 33.3% in the hydroxyapatite group (P = .35). CONCLUSION Titanium is a satisfactory material for use in ossicular reconstruction and is comparable to hydroxyapatite, although at present, no definitive conclusion about the superiority of titanium can be drawn.
The frequency of SLCO1B1*5 polymorphism genotypes among Russian and Sakha (Yakutia) patients with hypercholesterolemia

Introduction Statins are the most commonly prescribed medicines for treatment of hypercholesterolemia. At the same time, up to 25% of patients cannot tolerate or have to discontinue the statin therapy due to statin-induced myopathy. In a majority of cases, statin-induced myopathy is attributed to SLCO1B1 gene polymorphism. The strongest association between statin-induced myopathy and SLCO1B1 gene polymorphism was described for simvastatin. Our research was focused on the frequency of SLCO1B1*5 genetic variant in the Russian population and in the native population of Sakha (Yakutia). Materials and methods A total of 1,071 hyperlipidemic Russian and 76 hyperlipidemic Sakha (Yakutian) patients were included in the study. Genotypes of SLCO1B1*5 (c.521T>C, rs4149056) were determined with polymerase chain reaction amplification. The results of our study were compared with data about hyperlipidemic patients in available publications. Results In the Russian population 665 (62%) patients had TT genotype of SLCO1B1*5, 346 (32%) patients had TC genotype, and in 60 patients (6%) CC variant was found (Hardy–Weinberg’s chi-square test was 3.1 P=0.21). In comparison with Brazil, France, the People’s Republic of China, Japan, and the native population of Sakha (Yakutia), C-allele, which causes an increased risk of statin-induced myopathy, was found significantly more often in the Russian population. In the native population of Sakha (Yakutia) SLCO1B1 polymorphism was TT – 62 (82%), TC – 11 (14%), CC – 3 (4%) (Hardy–Weinberg’s chi-square test was 5.13 P=0.077). In comparison with data from Brazil, France, the People’s Republic of China, and Japan, C-allele frequency in the Sakha (Yakutian) population was not significantly different. Conclusion Thus, we have studied the incidence of pathologic SLCO1B1 c.521C-allele in Russian and Sakha hyperlipidemic patients. The presence of SLCO1B1 C-allele in patients with hyperlipidemia forces us to be more careful in hypolipidemic drug prescription, especially statins, according to a higher risk of statin-induced myopathy development. The fact that SLCO1B1 C-allele is rarer among Sakha patients, could be interesting from the point of studying adverse drug effects frequency and statins’ effectiveness.
Artificial life, the second law of thermodynamics, and Kolmogorov Complexity

One of the basic features of life is replication. Indeed one of the three components of evolution is inheritance, which implies some similarity (both phenotypic and genotypic) between parents and offspring. Life is a process and not a substance (e.g. being carbon-based does not capture what life is), and this therefore justifies an algorithmic definition. Artificial life is concerned with the study of synthetic life, and is implemented on a digital computer. Tierra is a particularly prominent instance, where rudimentary life forms compete for space and time. In this system interesting eco-systems emerge, for example demonstrating parasitic behavior.
Human decidual stromal cells secrete soluble pro-apoptotic factors during decidualization in a cAMP-dependent manner.

STUDY QUESTION Is there a relationship between decidualization and apoptosis of decidual stromal cells (DSC)? SUMMARY ANSWER Decidualization triggers the secretion of soluble factors that induce apoptosis in DSC. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY The differentiation and apoptosis of DSC during decidualization of the receptive decidua are crucial processes for the controlled invasion of trophoblasts in normal pregnancy. Most DSC regress in a time-dependent manner, and their removal is important to provide space for the embryo to grow. However, the mechanism that controls DSC death is poorly understood. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION The apoptotic response of DSC was analyzed after exposure to different exogenous agents and during decidualization. The apoptotic potential of decidualized DSC supernatants and prolactin (PRL) was also evaluated. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS DSC lines were established from samples of decidua from first trimester pregnancies. Apoptosis was assayed by flow cytometry. PRL production, as a marker of decidualization, was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE DSCs were resistant to a variety of apoptosis-inducing substances. Nevertheless, DSC underwent apoptosis during decidualization in culture, with cAMP being essential for both apoptosis and differentiation. In addition, culture supernatants from decidualized DSC induced apoptosis in undifferentiated DSC, although paradoxically these supernatants decreased the spontaneous apoptosis of decidual lymphocytes. Exogenously added PRL did not induce apoptosis in DSC and an antibody that neutralized the PRL receptor did not decrease the apoptosis induced by supernatants. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTIONS Further studies are needed to examine the involvement of other soluble factors secreted by decidualized DSC in the induction of apoptosis. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS The present results indicate that apoptosis of DSC occurs in parallel to differentiation, in response to decidualization signals, with soluble factors secreted by decidualized DSC being responsible for triggering cell death. These studies are relevant in the understanding of how the regression of decidua, a crucial process for successful pregnancy, takes place. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTERESTS This work was supported by the Consejería de Economía, Innovación y Ciencia, Junta de Andalucía (Grant CTS-6183, Proyectos de Investigación de Excelencia 2010 to C.R.-R.) and the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (Grants PS09/00339 and PI12/01085 to E.G.O.). E.L. -D. was supported by fellowships from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain and the University of Granada. The authors have no conflict of interest.
Flexible debugging with controllable overhead

This thesis is concerned with the problem of discovering bugs in a program. This crucial part of debugging is becoming ever more relevant as the complexity of software systems increases. Symbolic debuggers retain their relevance for bug diagnosis once a bug has been isolated in a development environment; however, instrumentation continues to grow in relevance because it allows the programmer to specify execution points of interest in advance and let the program run normally. Instrumentation’s has a strong appeal if the nature of the bug is uncertain: the programmer can add checks or logging for a variety of interesting events and let the program run, automating what would otherwise be a painstaking manual process. Instrumentation is widely-used in development environments; nearly every large software project has benefited from verbose logging or some kind of execution profiling. In fact, recently DTrace has brought instrumentation to system administrators as well, allowing them to diagnose performance problems and errors on production servers. However, particularly with the proliferation of consumer devices running full Unix software stacks, it is becoming more and more useful to be able to apply the same techniques that were available in development and system-administration environments remotely, in end-user environments with minimal user impact. In this thesis, we present a body of work that addresses this desire. We have developed a GCC-based instrumentation system called adb that leverages the compiler’s intermediate representation, which includes type, control-flow, and dominator information, to enable instrumentation at a variety of locations, called probes, in a program. A developer can ship a program with deactivated probes, and later develop small consumers that use the data at these probes and insert them into deployed copies of the program dynamically, with no end-user intervention required. We have also developed a novel overhead-management policy called SMCO that ensures that instrumentation incurs fixed overhead. In addition to presenting adb and evaluating its performance guarantees, we also discuss a GCC plug-in system that we developed and that is being adopted by the GCC community for inclusion in release 4.5. Finally, we also describe overhead-control approaches we developed before SMCO, which put the design decisions made for adb in context.
Microbial diversity in chronic open wounds

Chronic wounds expose the dermal matrix and underlying tissue to a diversity of microbes from the body and surrounding environment. We determined the microbial diversity of 19 chronic wounds using both molecular methods (sequence analysis of rRNA genes) and routine clinical culturing methods using swab samples. We identified 93 phylotypes in 2,653 rRNA clone sequences and found that compared with other environments, the microbial diversity of chronic wounds is relatively well characterized, i.e., 95% of sequences have ≥97% identity with known human commensals. In total, 75% of sequences belonged to four well‐known wound‐associated phylotypes: Staphylococcus (25%), Corynebacterium (20%), Clostridiales (18%), and Pseudomonas (12%). Approximately 0.5% of sequences (seven phylotypes) belonged to potentially new species. Individual wound samples contained four to 22 phylotypes, but in all wounds only a few (one to three) phylotypes were dominant. In more than half the wound specimens, polymerase chain reaction and culturing methods gave different diversity and dominance information about the microbes present. This exploratory study suggests that combining molecular and culturing methods provides a more complete characterization of the microbial diversity of chronic wounds, and can thereby expand our understanding of how microbiology impacts chronic wound pathology and healing.
Cryptic female exaggeration: The asymmetric female internal genitalia of Kaliana yuruani (Araneae: Pholcidae)

Males of the Venezuelan pholcid spider Kaliana yuruani have unique genitalia, with the procursi about six times as long as usual in the family. The present article describes the previously unknown female, searching for a morphological correlate in the female genitalia to the male's exaggeration. Reconstruction of histological serial sections reveals an internal female complexity that is unequalled in pholcid spiders. An intricate system of ducts and folds is arranged in an asymmetric way, making this the third known case of genital asymmetry in spiders. The term “cryptic female exaggeration” is used in analogy to cryptic female choice, pointing to the fact that from the outside, the female genitalia do not appear unusual. I propose that cryptic female exaggeration may be relatively common in copulatory structures if male exaggerations need to be evaluated according to the female choice by mechanical fit model. Finally, the evolution of genital asymmetry in spiders is contrasted with that in insects. J. Morphol. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Robust algorithm for early detection of Alzheimer's disease using multiple feature extractions

An algorithm is proposed for early detection of Alzheimer's disease and is focused on detecting the condition that would lead to Alzheimer's disease in future. Alzheimer's disease is a prevalent case now and it mostly affects the elderly people. The disease condition makes a person lose his memory and have trouble in doing his day-to-day activities, and progressively the condition leads to death. No treatment is available to completely cure the disease but it would be beneficial if the disease is detected earlier as the necessary aid can be provided. The proposed algorithm uses Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Cognitively Normal (CN), Mild Cognitive Impairment non-convertible (MCInc) and Mild Cognitive Impairment convertible (MCIc) data from the ADNI (Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative) and it involves the process of pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. MCIc leads to Alzheimer's disease at a later stage. A combination of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used for the feature extraction and further subjected to classification using the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The multiple feature extractions with both the DWT and the PCA together give a better accuracy during classification compared to other algorithms.
IRECS: A new algorithm for the selection of most probable ensembles of side‐chain conformations in protein models

We introduce a new algorithm, IRECS (Iterative REduction of Conformational Space), for identifying ensembles of most probable side‐chain conformations for homology modeling. On the basis of a given rotamer library, IRECS ranks all side‐chain rotamers of a protein according to the probability with which each side chain adopts the respective rotamer conformation. This ranking enables the user to select small rotamer sets that are most likely to contain a near‐native rotamer for each side chain. IRECS can therefore act as a fast heuristic alternative to the Dead‐End‐Elimination algorithm (DEE). In contrast to DEE, IRECS allows for the selection of rotamer subsets of arbitrary size, thus being able to define structure ensembles for a protein. We show that the selection of more than one rotamer per side chain is generally meaningful, since the selected rotamers represent the conformational space of flexible side chains. A knowledge‐based statistical potential ROTA was constructed for the IRECS algorithm. The potential was optimized to discriminate between side‐chain conformations of native and rotameric decoys of protein structures. By restricting the number of rotamers per side chain to one, IRECS can optimize side chains for a single conformation model. The average accuracy of IRECS for the χ1 and χ1 + 2 dihedral angles amounts to 84.7% and 71.6%, respectively, using a 40° cutoff. When we compared IRECS with SCWRL and SCAP, the performance of IRECS was comparable to that of both methods. IRECS and the ROTA potential are available for download from the URL http://irecs.bioinf. mpi‐inf.mpg. de.
Competitive Analysis of Dynamic Multiprocessor Allocation Strategies

The subject of this thesis is to study the problem of dynamic processor allocation in parallel application scheduling. Processor allocation involves determining the number of processors to allocate to each of several simultaneously executing parallel applications and possibly dynamically adjusting the allocations during execution to improve overall system performance. We devise and analytically evaluate dynamic allocation policies that operate in environments in which full information about the jobs being executed is not known when making scheduling decisions. We use competitive analysis to compare the performance of algorithms which do not know the arrival or execution time of jobs with the performance of the optimal algorithm which uses complete information about jobs. The result of such a comparison is called a competitive ratio. The competitive ratio is indicative of the utility of different allocation policies. Our study is carried out under two performance objectives: minimizing the makespan and minimizing the mean response time respectively. Our results for minimizing the makespan consist of three parts. First we use competitive analysis to devise an allocation policy, OptComp, which yields the optimal competitive ratio for scheduling two parallel jobs. As well, we compare the dynamic equipartition (DEQ) policy with OptComp and find that the relative ratio of DEQ to OptComp is 1. 175729. This implies that the competitive ratio of DEQ is very close to optimal. Secondly we extend the results of sequential job scheduling to parallel job scheduling. Our results cover the situations when the application parallelism varies during execution as well as when applications do not arrive at the system simultaneously. Lastly we consider the case when some applications may execute infinitely because of programming errors which lead to an infinite loop. Our results show that DEQ yields the optimal competitive ratio. Our results for the problem of minimizing the mean response time assume that all applications arrive at the system simultaneously and that application parallelism does not change during execution. We show that in this case DEQ yields an optimal competitive ratio of   2 − 2 N + 1   .
Inclusive education: romantic, subversive or realistic?

This paper seeks to identify some of the key issues involved in the question of inclusive education. This includes conceptual, ideological and practical difficulties. Part of a realistic approach to the topic necessitates an understanding of the context in which the struggle for inclusion takes place. Particular consideration is given to the marketization of education and the challenges it presents to those seeking to remove exclusionary practices. The paper argues for an understanding that can contribute to change and thus advocates the urgent need for a theory of political agency.
A study on systemic arterial hypertension in Campo Grande, MS, Brazil.

OBJECTIVES To detect the actual prevalence of systemic hypertension in the city of Campo Grande, MS, Brazil, and frequent factors. METHODS Cross-sectional study with a randomized sample of the adult population of the city of Campo Grande, MS, in a total of 892 individuals. A questionnaire on age, gender, level of education, smoking, alcohol consumption, and aspects of the treatment was applied. Anthropometric data (weight and height) were collected. According to the WHO, a BMI<25 kg/m2 was considered normal weight; 25>BMI<30 overweight; and BMI> 30 obesity. Criteria for hypertension were based on the JNC VII report, with blood pressure cut-off values of 140 x 90 mmHg. RESULTS The prevalence of hypertension was 41.4%, varying with age (up to 29 years: 11.8%; 30-39: 24.8%; 40-49: 43.3%; 50-59: 42.4%; 60-69: 48.6% and > 70: 62.3%). A higher prevalence was observed among men (51.8%), whereas among women the prevalence was 33.1%. Individuals with basic level of education tended to present higher rates. Among overweight and obese individuals, a higher prevalence of hypertension was observed: normal BMI (27.9%), overweight (45.6%) and obesity (58.6%). Above 60 years of age, a higher percentage of isolated systolic hypertension was observed, with 16.4% (60-69 years) and 24.6% (>70 years). Daily or weekly alcohol consumption was also related to a higher incidence, of 63.2% and 47.2%, respectively. Only 59.7% were known to be hypertensive. Of the hypertensive individuals, 57.3% were undergoing some type of treatment. Of those undergoing regular treatment, 60.5% presented hypertension. CONCLUSION The prevalence of hypertension was 41.4%, therefore higher than the average verified in some studies. This calls the attention for worsened epidemiologic conditions and cardiovascular repercussions, thus showing the need for higher public investment on education and orientation of these population groups as regards prevention.