Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk Factors for Swine Infection with Toxoplasma gondii

The objective of this study was to evaluate the association between the seroprevalence of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies in swine in commercial pork production systems in Iowa, USA and the source of water (surface water vs. well water vs. rural processed water) and method of water delivery (surface or trough vs. nipple vs. cup). Also the study evaluated the association between T. gondii seroprevalence and other selected potential farm variables.
Organizational Justice as a Mediator of the Relationships Between Leader-Member Exchange and Employees' Turnover Intentions

This article identifies the impact of interpersonal working relationships on employees' justice perceptions and the effects of those perceptions on employees' turnover intentions. LISREL results indicated that distributive justice was negatively related to turnover intentions, and procedure justice had a direct positive influence on turnover intentions. The results further showed that the quality of interpersonal working relationships between subordinates and supervisors promoted perceptions of fairness on the part of front-line employees. Both distributive and procedural justice played a vital mediating role in the relationships among Leader-member exchange (LMX) and turnover intentions.
Complete Genome Sequence of the Autographa californica Multiple Nucleopolyhedrovirus Strain E2

ABSTRACT Many vectors that are commonly used in the baculovirus/insect cell system (BICS) are derived from the Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus (AcMNPV) strain E2. To facilitate work with these vectors, we sequenced the E2 genome, compared it to that of the AcMNPV C6 strain, and found that they are very similar overall.
Force control experiments for industrial applications: a test case using an industrial deburring example

Purpose – The main objective of this paper is to report the development of an indirect force control strategy designed to operate with industrial robotic deburring applications. More specifically, the system reported here is developed to debur high‐quality knives that incorporate innovative design from well‐known authors (fashion designers). Therefore, these products are very difficult to manufacture and have quality requirements incompatible with human‐based deburring, since humans introduce too many unacceptable deviations as a consequence of their incapacity to maintain concentration for long periods of time.Design/methodology/approach – Since a good model of the environment is difficult to obtain, namely on industrial applications, a simple strategy was designed to obtain the relevant parameters leading to an acceptable performance. Consequently, the system implements an indirect force control strategy as a way to use actual robot controllers, explore the computing power of external personal computers.
A systematic review of ultrasound‐guided methods for brachial plexus blockade

We systematically reviewed 25 randomised controlled trials of ultrasound‐guided brachial plexus blockade that recruited 1948 participants: either one approach vs another (axillary, infraclavicular or supraclavicular); or one injection vs multiple injections. There were no differences in the rates of successful blockade with approach, relative risk (95% CI): axillary vs infraclavicular, 1.0 (1.0–1.1), p = 0.97; axillary vs supraclavicular, 1.0 (1.0–1.1), p = 0.68; and infraclavicular vs supraclavicular, 1.0 (1.0–1.1), p = 0.32. There was no difference in the rate of successful blockade with the number of injections, relative risk (95% CI) 1.0 (1.0–1.0), p = 0.69, for one vs multiple injections. The rate of procedural paraesthesia was less with one injection than multiple injections, relative risk (95% CI) 0.6 (0.4–0.9), p = 0.004.
Teacher Trainers and Educational Change in Britain, 1876-1996; 'a flawed and deficient history'?

This essay is designed to complement an earlier and related article which examined the ways in which schoolteachers have sought to accommodate the profound changes which have impacted upon the structure and functioning of the education service in England and Wales over the last century. On this occasion, the subjects of the discussion are teacher trainers. The article shares with the earlier piece an insistence that responses to the pressures of change in the contemporary moment are best understood under the illuminating light of a longer historical perspective. The argument also retains a similar organisational structure, seeking to analyse patterns of change against a background of three notional generations of teacher trainers between the years 1876 and 1996. The article seeks particularly to understand the construction of teacher trainer identities during this period in terms of professional responses to policy changes impinging upon the training of teachers and concludes by assessing why teacher trai.
An ethological analysis of social agonism and dominance relations among preschool children.

STRAYER, F. F. , and STRAYER, JANET. An Ethological Analysis of Social Agonism and Dominance Relations among Preschool Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 980-989. Agonism and dyadic dominance are basic concepts in the ethological analysis of social conflict and group power relations. The present research extends the application of these concepts to the analysis of children's social behavior. A social agonism inventory, including specific initiation and response patterns, was developed from videotaped records of free play among 17 preschool children. Systematic comparison of dyadic agonistic interactions revealed relatively rigid and stable dominance relations. These relations conformed to a linear model of social dominance. Although there were sex differences in the frequency of initiated conflict, position in the dominance hierarchy was not directly related to gender. Possible developmental changes in both agonism and dominance were discussed. In addition, findings were related to comparative research . on social ecology of nonhuman primates.
Optimal power flow with worst-case scenarios considering uncertainties of loads and renewables

The growing interest on RES gives traditional power systems an opportunity to evolve towards more sustainable and environmental entities, however the viability of RES would induce stability and reliability issues in power systems. In this paper, a DC optimal power flow (OPF) algorithm considering the worst-case scenario is proposed. It accounts for uncertainties brought by loads and renewable energy sources (RES), while in the meantime the highest reliability level of the system can be achieved. By assigning selected values with largest probabilities to random variables, the probabilistic OPF formulation is converted into a set of deterministic OPF problems in which the additional auxiliary constraints are implemented to represent the uncertain influences. The proposed OPF with the worst-case scenario is applied into an IEEE 14-bus and 57-bus benchmark power system. The results in the simulation along with other OPF techniques shows the validity and robustness of the algorithm.
A Novel Router-based Scheme to Mitigate SYN Flooding DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack remains a serious problem on the Internet today, as it takes advantage of the lack of authenticity in the IP protocol, destination oriented routing, and stateless nature of the Internet. Among various DDoS attacks, the TCP SYN flooding [1] is the most commonly-used one. It exploits TCP’s three-way handshake mechanism and TCP’s limitation in maintaining half-open connections. When a server receives a SYN packet, it returns a SYN/ACK packet and allocates resources (typically backlog queue in the system memory) to track the TCP state. Then the server would wait until either the half-open connection completes or the TCP connection times out. In the SYN flooding attack, the server will receive a large number of SYN packets but never receive the final ACK packets to complete the three-way handshake. Then the victim server’s backlog queue can be easily exhausted, causing all the new incoming SYN requests to be dropped. Furthermore, many other system resources, such as CPU and network bandwidth used to retransmit the SYN/ACK packets, are occupied. The most viable techniques [2] up-to-date to defend SYN floods include SYN cache [3] and SYN cookies [4]. SYN cache is to allocate minimal state when the initial request is received, and only allocate all the resources when the connection is completed. If the backlog queue is full, the oldest entry is removed. SYN cookies allocate no state for half-open connections. Instead, they encode most of the states and encrypt them into the sequence number transmitted in the SYN/ACK packet. The ACK packet that completes the handshake can be used to reconstruct the state to be put into the backlog queue. One problem with SYN cookies is not able to encode all the TCP options, and the other is that TCP protocol with SYN cookies would never retransmit the unacknowledged SYN/ACK packet. In addition, both of them do not handle application data piggybacked on the SYN segment, i.e., incompatible with Transactional TCP (T/TCP)
There's Something about AI Exercises

Problems and methods encountered in artificial intelligence hold great promise for inspiring interest in computer science in general and AI in particular. The challenge faced in using such problems in introductory computer science courses is three-fold: to prune the complexity that is beyond beginning students, but to preserve the engaging nature of the problems, and still exercise the topics or skills from the beginning courses. In this paper, I present a number of extended exercises that attempt to balance those three challenges. These projects have been used multiple times in CS1 and CS2 courses; the projects include: animated swarming of multiple critter types, cellular automata, neural networks, searching game trees, and a simple genetic algorithm. Lessons learned from employing these projects, drawn from personal reflection and anecdotal reports from students, suggests using AI problems benefits both the students and the instructor.
Stories of the “medicine cow”: representations of future promises in media discourse

This paper studies the changing media representations and public perceptions of biotechnology through a case study of the generation of transgenic cattle in Finland. The particular focus is on rhetoric of the future: the narrative shaping of future promises, the politics of naming, visual images, and the role of the news media in producing and circulating images of new genetics. It is suggested that scientists can play a dominant role in popularizing scientific and technological innovations by using positive metaphors and visual imagery of genetics.
Calibration Free Image Point Path Planning Simultaneously Ensuring Visibility and Controlling Camera Path

This paper proposes a novel planning algorithm for image based visual servoing (IBVS). IBVS is conceptually simple but prone to fail in case of large displacements. Hence, the objective is to provide paths for reference points in the image plane, such that the camera is steered from initial position to desired position. The novel scheme guarantees that the camera is always oriented such that the object of interest is in the field of view and that any reference point set corresponds indeed to a feasible camera pose. No camera calibration is necessary. As a novelty, this work is planning a camera motion, hence yielding compact paths in robot work space. The proposed planner is compared to others by experiments.
Venous Thromboembolism Prophylaxis for the Medical Patient: Where Do We Stand?

Acutely ill medical patients are at moderate to high risk of venous thromboembolism: ~10 to 30% of general medical patients may develop deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism, and the latter is a leading contributor to deaths in hospital. Medical conditions associated with a high risk of venous thromboembolism include cardiac disease, cancer, respiratory disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and infectious diseases. Predisposing risk factors in medical patients include a history of venous thromboembolism, history of malignancy, complicating infections, increasing age, thrombophilia, prolonged immobility, and obesity. Heparins, including unfractionated and low molecular weight, as well as fondaparinux have been shown to be effective agents in prevention of VTE in this setting. However, it has not yet been possible to demonstrate a significant effect on mortality rates in this population. In medical patients, unfractionated heparin has a higher rate of bleeding complications than low molecular weight heparin. There is no evidence for the use of aspirin, warfarin, or mechanical methods. We recommend either low molecular weight heparin or fondaparinux as safe and effective agents in the thromboprophylaxis of medical patients.
Frontier-Based Probabilistic Strategies for Sensor-Based Exploration

We present a frontier-based modification of the SRT (Sensor-based Random Tree) method, a previously proposed probabilistic strategy for sensor-based exploration of unknown environments by a mobile robot. The idea is to improve the efficiency of the method by biasing the randomized generation of configurations towards unexplored areas. Effective implementations of this strategy are proposed for SRT-Ball and SRT-Star, two instances of the general SRT method corresponding to different perception attitudes and sensing equipments. Comparative simulations are presented to show the benefits of the proposed technique.
Alignment Influences Wear in the Knee after Medial Unicompartmental Arthroplasty

Failure of a medial unicompartmental arthroplasty may be related to wear of the cartilage in the opposite compartment or to wear in the polyethylene tibial implant. Limb alignment influences both of these factors in the long term. Fifty-eight knees with medial unicompartmental arthroplasties in patients alive at least 10 years postoperatively were evaluated for radiographic changes at their most recent followup. The average duration of clinical and radiographic followups for these patients was 15 years (range, 10–20 years). Alignment was measured preoperatively and postoperatively as the hip-knee-ankle angle on radiographs of the entire limb. An overcorrection in valgus of the preoperative deformity (hip-knee-ankle angle > 180°) was associated with an increased risk of degenerative changes in the opposite compartment. Severe undercorrection in varus of the deformity (hip-knee-ankle angle < 170°) was associated with increased wear in the tibial component and recurrence of the deformity which was indicative of polyethylene wear. For medial implants that were implanted in moderate varus (hip-knee-ankle angle of 171° to 179°) the rate of wear of the polyethylene was less than in knees with severe undercorrection and the risk of degenerative changes in the opposite compartment was low.
Lipotoxicity in obese pregnancy and its potential role in adverse pregnancy outcome and obesity in the offspring

Increasing maternal obesity is a challenge that has an impact on all aspects of female reproduction. Lean and obese pregnant women gain similar fat mass, but lean women store fat in the lower-body compartment and obese women in central compartments. In the non-pregnant, central storage of fat is associated with adipocyte hypertrophy and represents a failure to adequately store excess fatty acids, resulting in metabolic dysregulation and ectopic fat accumulation (lipotoxicity). Obese pregnancy is associated with exaggerated metabolic adaptation, endothelial dysfunction and increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcome. We hypothesize that the preferential storage of fat in central rather than ‘safer’ lower-body depots in obese pregnancy leads to lipotoxicity. The combination of excess fatty acids and oxidative stress leads to the production of oxidized lipids, which can be cytotoxic and influence gene expression by acting as ligands for nuclear receptors. Lipid excess and oxidative stress provoke endothelial dysfunction. Oxidized lipids can inhibit trophoblast invasion and influence placental development, lipid metabolism and transport and can also affect fetal developmental pathways. As lipotoxicity has the capability of influencing both maternal endothelial function and placental function, it may link maternal obesity and placentally related adverse pregnancy outcomes such as miscarriage and pre-eclampsia. The combination of excess/altered lipid nutrient supply, suboptimal in utero metabolic environment and alterations in placental gene expression, inflammation and metabolism may also induce obesity in the offspring.
Supporting Drivers in Keeping Safe Speed in Adverse Weather Conditions by Mitigating the Risk Level

Overspeeding is both a cause and an aggravation factor of traffic accidents. Consequently, much effort is devoted to limiting overspeeding and, consequently, to increasing the safety of road networks. In this paper, a novel approach to computing a safe speed profile to be used in an adaptive intelligent speed adaptation (ISA) system is proposed. The method presents two main novelties. First, the 85th percentile of observed speeds (V85), estimated along a road section, is used as a reference speed, which is practiced and practicable in ideal conditions. Second, this reference speed is modulated in adverse weather conditions to account for reduced friction and reduced visibility distance. The risk is thus mitigated by modulating the potential severity of crashes by means of a generic scenario of accidents. Within this scenario, the difference in speed that should be applied in adverse conditions is estimated so that the highway risk is the same as in ideal conditions. The system has been tested on actual data collected on a French secondary road and implemented on a test track and a fleet of vehicles. The performed tests and the experiments of acceptability show a great interest for the deployment of such a system.
The Mission of the University: Medieval to Postmodern Transformations

Mission transformation, multiplicity, and complexity are analyzed. The medieval university emphasizes teaching. Thereafter, the early modern university adopts nationalization (service to the nation-state). The formative U.S. college advances democratization. Simultaneously, the German university promotes research. The modern American university elevates public service. Today's rapid globalization suggests a new mission: internationalization.
Experience and Perpetration of Violent Behaviours among Secondary School Students in Ibadan, Nigeria

Worldwide, adolescents are disproportionately affected by violent behaviours. The nature and extent to which Nigerian adolescents have perpetrated and experienced violence has not been fully investigated. This cross-sectional survey assessed experience and perpetration of physical, sexual and psychological violent behaviours among school-based adolescents. A total of 1366 students (50.4% females and 49.6% males) randomly selected from six public secondary schools in Ibadan, Nigeria were interviewed using a 36-item questionnaire. Respondents answered questions regarding demographic profile, sexual behaviour, and the extent to which they had experienced or perpetrated physical, sexual and psychological violent behaviours. The lifetime experience of at least one of the three forms of violence was 97.9%: physical violence ranked first (94.4%), followed by psychological (77.6%) and sexual violence (34.9%). The most common types of these forms of violent behaviours experienced were slaps (84.5%), unwanted touch of breast and backside (22.7%) and being belittled (63.2%). Approximately 8% of the study group haave had sex and 25% of sexually active respondents claimed that their first sexual encounter occurred in coercive circumstances. The predictors of experience of violence among males were use of alcohol, witnessing domestic violence, involving in work and parental use of alcohol. Among females parental use of alcohol and being young were predictors of violence. Reports of perpetration of physical, sexual and psychological violence among males were 75.3%, 44.9% and 13.3% respectively. Comprehensive interventions targeting students, teachers and parents are recommended to address this problem. Keywords: Adolescents, Nigeria, Sexual behaviours, Violence
Towards a More Holistic Stakeholder Analysis Approach. Mapping Known and Undiscovered Stakeholders from Social Media

This paper proposes a conceptual direction for organizations of how they could map their stakeholders in a more holistic way. Study suggests, that stakeholder theory is useful in identifying and prioritizing stakeholders that organization is aware of. However, theory is argued being ineffective in finding stakeholders on new environments (social media), where connectivity and relationships play a key role. The argument stems from the need to assess stakeholder presence beyond the dyadic ties. Consequently, the combination of the Stakeholder Salience Model (SSM) and social network analysis (SNA) is proposed as a more holistic solution for stakeholder identification including those from social media. A process of finding “unknown” but important stakeholders from social media was identified incorporating the content search and the principles of SNA. Consequently, stakeholders from social media are identified based on the dimensions of connectivity and the content shared. Accordingly, the study introduces four groups of important actors from social media: unconcerned lurkers, unconcerned influencers, concerned lurkers and concerned influencers and integrates them into the existing Stakeholder Salience Model (SSM).
RE-AODV: Improved AODV Routing Protocol for Repairing Efficiency

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organized, quickly configurable network, which does not have fixed infrastructure. Mobility is one of the most characteristic in MANET, but it may cause the failure of a valid link. There are two repair mechanisms—local repair and source repair in Ad hoc on demand distance vector protocol (AODV). The source repair mechanisms will bring higher overhead and packet loss ratio. Local Repair is an effective way to rebuild a route to destination, but its performance decline when the destination is unreachable from local repair node. This paper proposes an improved repair mechanism (RE-AODV) based on the local repair scheme, which distinguishes different route request messages and route reply messages with Local_Repair and Dst_Answer flags, and process them with different priorities. The simulation results demonstrate that the network delivery ratio can be significantly improved by using the proposed repair scheme.