Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Levels of Selenium in Vegetables, Medicinal Plants and Soils from Selected Sites within the Lower Benue River Basin Development Authority Catchment, Nigeria

The levels of Selenium (Se) in vegetables, medicinal plants and soils from selected sites within the Lower Benue River Basin Development Authority catchment (spanning latitudes 6o 15’ and 9o 10’N and longitudes 6o 22’ and 10o 25’E) were determined as part of investigations of the element’s biogeochemistry in the area. Seventy eight (78) plant and forty (40) agricultural soil samples were obtained from eight sites in the study area and their levels of Se determined using the simple, sensitive and selective 2, 4-DNPH-NEDA spectrophotometric method. Results obtained showed soil Se in the whole area was in the range 1.0 x 10 -4 – 97.0 x 10 -4 mg/kg, with an average of 44.0 x 10 -4 ±0.0020 mg/kg, while the mean Se levels in vegetables and medicinal plants were 217.0 x 10 -4 ±0.0105 mg/kg and 206.0 x 10 -4 ±0.01 mg/kg respectively. These results show that Se in the soils and vegetation in the area is lower compared to literature reports. The Lower Benue Valley (LBV; coordinates of longitudes 7°00'E and 8°30'E and latitudes 5°00'N and 6°30'N) in Nigeria where HIV/AIDS prevalence is historically fairly high and considering the role of Se in the progression of this disease we embarked on studies of the phytopedochemical distribution of the element in the areas including LBV.
Crystal Structure of the Platelet Glycoprotein Ibα N-terminal Domain Reveals an Unmasking Mechanism for Receptor Activation*

Glycoprotein Ib (GPIb) is a platelet receptor with a critical role in mediating the arrest of platelets at sites of vascular damage. GPIb binds to the A1 domain of von Willebrand factor (vWF-A1) at high blood shear, initiating platelet adhesion and contributing to the formation of a thrombus. To investigate the molecular basis of GPIb regulation and ligand binding, we have determined the structure of the N-terminal domain of the GPIbα chain (residues 1–279). This structure is the first determined from the cell adhesion/signaling class of leucine-rich repeat (LRR) proteins and reveals the topology of the characteristic disulfide-bonded flanking regions. The fold consists of an N-terminal β-hairpin, eight leucine-rich repeats, a disulfide-bonded loop, and a C-terminal anionic region. The structure also demonstrates a novel LRR motif in the form of an M-shaped arrangement of three tandem β-turns. Negatively charged binding surfaces on the LRR concave face and anionic region indicate two-step binding kinetics to vWF-A1, which can be regulated by an unmasking mechanism involving conformational change of a key loop. Using molecular docking of the GPIb and vWF-A1 crystal structures, we were also able to model the GPIb·vWF-A1 complex.
Associations between Trait Anger and Aggression Used in the Commission of Sexual Offenses

Archival data on 110 incarcerated adult sexual offenders were used to examine associations between trait anger and type and level of aggression used in the commission of their sexual offenses. Intrafamilial child molesters (n = 43), extrafamilial child molesters (n = 35), and rapists (n = 32) did not differ in trait anger. In the combined group, significant associations were found between trait anger and verbal aggression, but not between trait anger and physical aggression. Offenders who used threats of death had higher levels of trait anger temperament, anger reaction, and anger directed outward, and lower levels of anger control than those who had used no verbal aggression. The absence of association between trait anger and physical aggression suggests that physical aggression employed in the commission of sexual offenses may be largely instrumental. Implications for engaging sexual offenders in anger management intervention, and for victim resistance to sexual assaults, are considered.
Anti-Biofilm Activities from Marine Cold Adapted Bacteria Against Staphylococci and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Microbial biofilms have great negative impacts on the world’s economy and pose serious problems to industry, public health and medicine. The interest in the development of new approaches for the prevention and treatment of bacterial adhesion and biofilm formation has increased. Since, bacterial pathogens living in biofilm induce persistent chronic infections due to the resistance to antibiotics and host immune system. A viable approach should target adhesive properties without affecting bacterial vitality in order to avoid the appearance of resistant mutants. Many bacteria secrete anti-biofilm molecules that function in regulating biofilm architecture or mediating the release of cells from it during the dispersal stage of biofilm life cycle. Cold-adapted marine bacteria represent an untapped reservoir of biodiversity able to synthesize a broad range of bioactive compounds, including anti-biofilm molecules. The anti-biofilm activity of cell-free supernatants derived from sessile and planktonic cultures of cold-adapted bacteria belonging to Pseudoalteromonas, Psychrobacter, and Psychromonas species were tested against Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains. Reported results demonstrate that we have selected supernatants, from cold-adapted marine bacteria, containing non-biocidal agents able to destabilize biofilm matrix of all tested pathogens without killing cells. A preliminary physico-chemical characterization of supernatants was also performed, and these analyses highlighted the presence of molecules of different nature that act by inhibiting biofilm formation. Some of them are also able to impair the initial attachment of the bacterial cells to the surface, thus likely containing molecules acting as anti-biofilm surfactant molecules. The described ability of cold-adapted bacteria to produce effective anti-biofilm molecules paves the way to further characterization of the most promising molecules and to test their use in combination with conventional antibiotics.
Thermal adaptation and phenotypic plasticity in a warming world: Insights from common garden experiments on Alaskan sockeye salmon

An important unresolved question is how populations of coldwater‐dependent fishes will respond to rapidly warming water temperatures. For example, the culturally and economically important group, Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.), experience site‐specific thermal regimes during early development that could be disrupted by warming. To test for thermal local adaptation and heritable phenotypic plasticity in Pacific salmon embryos, we measured the developmental rate, survival, and body size at hatching in two populations of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) that overlap in timing of spawning but incubate in contrasting natural thermal regimes. Using a split half‐sibling design, we exposed embryos of 10 families from each of two populations to variable and constant thermal regimes. These represented both experienced temperatures by each population, and predicted temperatures under plausible future conditions based on a warming scenario from the downscaled global climate model (MIROC A1B scenario). We did not find evidence of thermal local adaptation during the embryonic stage for developmental rate or survival. Within treatments, populations hatched within 1 day of each other, on average, and among treatments, did not differ in survival in response to temperature. We did detect plasticity to temperature; embryos developed 2.5 times longer (189 days) in the coolest regime compared to the warmest regime (74 days). We also detected variation in developmental rates among families within and among temperature regimes, indicating heritable plasticity. Families exhibited a strong positive relationship between thermal variability and phenotypic variability in developmental rate but body length and mass at hatching were largely insensitive to temperature. Overall, our results indicated a lack of thermal local adaptation, but a presence of plasticity in populations experiencing contrasting conditions, as well as family‐specific heritable plasticity that could facilitate adaptive change.
9 Error Concealment

In distributed and network speech recognition the actual recognition task is not carried out on the user's terminal but rather on a remote server in the network. While there are good reasons for doing so, a disadvantage of this client-server architecture is clearly that the communication medium may introduce errors, which then impairs speech recognition accuracy. Even sophisticated channel coding cannot completely prevent the occurrence of residual bit errors in the case of temporarily adverse channel conditions, and in packet-oriented transmission packets of data may arrive too late for the given real-time constraints and have to be declared lost. The goal of error concealment is to reduce the detrimental effect that such errors may induce on the recipient of the transmitted speech signal by exploiting residual redundancy in the bit stream at the source coder output. In classical speech transmission a human is the recipient, and erroneous data are reconstructed so as to reduce the subjectively annoying effect of corrupted bits or lost packets. Here, however, a statistical classifier is at the receiving end, which can benefit from knowledge about the quality of the reconstruction. In this book chapter we show how the classical Bayesian decision rule needs to be modified to account for uncertain features, and illustrate how the required feature posterior density can be estimated in the case of distributed speech recognition. Some other techniques for error concealment can be related to this approach. Experimental results are given for both a small and a medium vocabulary recognition task and both for a channel exhibiting bit errors and a packet erasure channel. In a client-server speech recognition system the client, e.g. a cellular phone, captures the speech signal, codes it and sends it via a digital communication link to the remote recognition server. At the server side, the received signal is decoded and forwarded to the speech recognition engine, which outputs the decoded word string. Depending on the type of data transmitted, one distinguishes between distributed (DSR) and network speech recognition (NSR). In DSR speech recognition features, such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), are computed, coded and transmitted
Reliabilität und Validität des MoMo-Aktivitätsfragebogens für Jugendliche (MoMo-AFB)

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt die psychometrischen Eigenschaften des Aktivitatsfragebogens des Motorikmoduls (MoMo-AFB; Bos, Worth, Opper, Oberger & Woll, 2009), einer Skala zur Messung korperlicher Aktivitat bei Kindern und Jugendlichen. Der Fragebogen besteht aus 28 Items, die Alltagsaktivitat, Sport in und auserhalb von organisierten Vereinen, Schulsport und die Erfullung von Aktivitatsguidelines erfassen. Untersucht wurden 109 Schuler und 87 Schulerinnen im Alter zwischen 9 und 17 Jahren. Zur Uberprufung der Reliabilitat wurde der Fragebogen zweimal in einem Abstand von sieben Tagen ausgefullt. Zur Untersuchung der kriteriumsbezogenen Validitat wurden die Fragebogendaten mit Accelerometerdaten (ActiGraph GT1X) verglichen. Der durchschnittliche (gewichtete) Kappa-Koeffizient und die Intraklassenkorrelation (ICC) fur den Gesamtindex betrugen . 66 bzw . 68. Der mittels MoMo-AFB und Accelerometer ermittelte Gesamtumfang der Zeit mit moderater bis hoher Intensitat der KA zeigte eine signifikante Spearma.
Searching for Fast Radio Transients with SKA Phase 1

Abstract The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) provides an excellent opportunity for low-cost searches for fast radio transients. The increased sensitivity and field of view of the SKA compared with other radio telescopes will make it an ideal instrument to search for impulsive emission from high–energy density events. We present a high-level search ‘use case’ and propose event rate per unit cost as a figure of merit to compare transient survey strategies for radio telescope arrays; we use event rate per beam formed and searched as a first-order approximation of this measure. Key results are that incoherent (phase-insensitive) combination of antenna signals achieves the highest event rate per beam, and that 50–100 MHz processed bandwidth is sufficient for extragalactic searches with SKA Phase 1; the gain in event rate from using the full available bandwidth is small. Greater system flexibility will enable more effective searches, but need not drive the top-level system requirements beyond those already proposed for the SKA. The most appropriate search strategy depends on the observed sky direction and the source population; for SKA Phase 1, low-frequency aperture arrays tend to be more effective for extragalactic searches, and dishes more effective for directions of increased scatter broadening, such as near the Galactic plane.
Cortical dynamics of visual feature and object-level processing in the human occipitotemporal cortex : MEG source analysis and evaluation of conductivity models

The computer simulations carried out in this thesis demonstrated that a spherically symmetric conductor model is in most cases an adequate model for the conductivity geometry of the human head and the use of more sophisticated head models does not contribute considerably to the source estimation accuracy of magnetoencephalography. The main reason for this is the noise that is typically present in the measured signals and masks effectively the differences between different head conductor models. The brain activation studies carried out in this thesis concentrated on the early cortical processing of two special cases of behaviourally highly relevant and frequently encountered visual stimuli: letter-strings and faces. The results show that the early visual processing of both image types consists of at least two separable processes taking place in the occipital and occipitotemporal cortices within 200 ms after the stimulus presentation. The first process, associated with low-level visual feature analysis, occurred in the midline occipital cortex at about 100 ms after image onset. This processing stage was common to the analysis of both letter-strings and faces. From the occipital cortex the activity advanced to the inferior occipitotemporal areas bilaterally, reaching the maximum at about 150 ms after stimulus onset. Although both letter-strings and faces activated largely overlapping areas in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex, the hemispheric distribution of these areas was different. Letter-string processing concentrated to the left hemisphere, whereas face processing occurred more bilaterally, apparently with slight righthemisphere dominance. This processing stage is likely to represent a more general object-level analysis phase that takes place after the common low-level analysis and acts as a gateway to higher processing areas. When these analysis stages were evaluated in dyslexic subjects a significant underactivation in the occipitotemporal cortex was found to letter-strings but not to faces. This result suggests that the dysfunction of occipitotemporal cortex previously reported in dyslexia is likely to be limited to the processing of letters or at least letter-like objects.
Um modelo para medir os efeitos da cobertura da imprensa no voto: teste nas eleições de 2002 e 2006

This article presents the construction and test of a model developed to measure the effects of the press coverage in voting. The period of analysis are the presidential elections of 2002 and 2006. The dependent variable are the historical voting intentions series of the main candidates. The main independent variable was constructed from the content analysis focusing on the electoral coverage by the following Brazilian newspapers: Folha de S. Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, O Globo and Jornal do Brasil. The test results showed that the model worked well, and that the press coverage was indeed an important factor in the electoral disputes of 2002 and 2006. In both elections the voting intentions of six among the eight main presidential candidates were affected by the information flows coming from the press coverage.
Chinese Herbal Medicine Classification Based on BP Neural Network

A neural network model for classifying the Chinese herbal medicine based on image feature has been developed. The key process of the approach is to extract medicinal target region (region of interest, ROI). Two different auto-segmentation methods were adopted according to whether there were hollow in the medicinal materials. Subsequently, color, texture and shape feature of ROI was computed. Feature vector composed of forgoing features was input to back propagation neural network (BPN), with the class label as the output of neural network. BPN was trained mutually to classify the medicinal materials. The results of the experiment on 8 kinds of herbal medicine show the algorithms are valid with 98 high precision, with the structure of a 39-12-1 back propagation net.
Plasma fluctuation in estradiol-17β and bone resorption markers around parturition in dairy cows

Blood samples were obtained sequentially from 10 dairy cows around the time of parturition to assess plasma fluctuations in estradiol-17β (E2) levels in association with those of several bone resorption markers. Plasma E2 concentration increased sharply a few days prepartum and decreased quickly after parturition. In terms of bone resorption markers, the plasma level of tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase isoform 5b (TRAP5b) rose significantly, commencing 1 week prepartum, and was maintained at this level to a few days postpartum. The plasma concentration of carboxyterminal collagen cross-links of type-I collagen (CTx) increased significantly after parturition. These observations suggest that osteoclast-mediated bone resorption was activated after parturition when plasma E2 concentrations decreased.
Reflections on Building and Teaching an Undergraduate Strategic Management Course in a Blended Format

This article is a personal reflection on the challenges, frustrations, and rewards of transforming a traditional face-to-face strategic management course into a blended format. The article describes both the discovery process that leads to a significantly redesigned course and the distillation of that experience into six core questions that can guide other faculty members interested in developing their own blended course. The article stresses the importance of fully integrating face-to-face learning with online activities—and vice versa— so that the entire course forms a seamless, integrated learning environment. Examples of how to completely integrate classroom and online learning are provided. The article also uses Mezirow’s transformative learning framework to better understand the changes occurring within the authors during the course redesign process.
Leading Multiple Ad Hoc Teammates in Joint Action Settings

The growing use of autonomous agents in practice may require agents to cooperate as a team in situations where they have limited prior knowledge about one another, cannot communicate directly, or do not share the same world models. These situations raise the need to design ad hoc team members, i.e., agents that will be able to cooperate without coordination in order to reach an optimal team behavior. This paper considers problem of leading N-agent teams by a single agent toward their optimal joint utility, where the agents compute their next actions based only on their most recent observations of their teammates' actions. We show that compared to previous results in two-agent teams, in larger teams the agent might not be able to lead the team to the action with maximal joint utility. In these cases, the agent's optimal strategy leads the team to the best possible reachable cycle of joint actions. We describe a graphical model of the problem and a polynomial time algorithm for solving it. We then consider the problem of leading teams where the agents' base their actions on a longer history of past observations, showing that the an upper bound computation time exponential in the memory size is very likely to be tight.
Access to higher education: an exploration of realities and possibilities

In this article the author describes and evaluates the development of a learning support service for dyslexic students at the Chichester Institute of Higher Education. She refers to both student and staff experience of the service in order to appraise its success and in so doing she raises significant issues relating to the creation of an inclusive educational experience for all students in higher education.
Foldable Printed Circuit Boards on Paper Substrates

This paper describes several low‐cost methods for fabricating flexible electronic circuits on paper. The circuits comprise i) metallic wires (e.g., tin or zinc) that are deposited on the substrate by evaporation, sputtering, or airbrushing, and ii) discrete surface‐mountable electronic components that are fastened with conductive adhesive directly to the wires. These electronic circuits—like conventional printed circuit boards—can be produced with electronic components that connect on both sides of the substrate. Unlike printed circuit boards made from fiberglass, ceramics, or polyimides, however, paper can be folded and creased (repeatedly), shaped to form three‐dimensional structures, trimmed using scissors, used to wick fluids (e.g., for microfluidic applications) and disposed of by incineration. Paper‐based electronic circuits are thin and lightweight; they should be useful for applications in consumer electronics and packaging, for disposable systems for uses in the military and homeland security, for applications in medical sensing or low‐cost portable diagnostics, for paper‐based microelectromechanical systems, and for applications involving textiles.
On the scalability of feedback-based two-stage switch

The feedback-based two-stage switch does not require a central scheduler and can provide close to 100% throughput [3]. But the number of crosspoints required for the two stages of switch fabric is 2N2, and the average packet delay performance (even under light traffic load) is on the order of O(N) slots, where N is the switch size. To improve the performance of feedback-based two-stage switch when N is large, we adopt the Clos network for constructing a large switch from a set of smaller feedback-based switch modules. We call it a Clos-feedback switch. The potential problem of packet mis-sequencing is solved by using application-flow based load balancing. With recursive decomposition, a Clos network can degenerate into a Benes network. We show that for a Clos-feedback switch, the number of crosspoints required is reduced to 4N(2 log2N-1) and the average packet delay is cut down to O(log2 N) slots.