Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A pre-synchronization program at early postpartum might increase the chances of Bos indicus cows cycling prior to 50 days regardless of the length of calf separation

The aim of this study was to establish if pre-synchronization would enhance the number of animals cycling prior to conventional breeding at 45 days irrespective of the length of calf separation. Multiparous Bos indicus cows were allotted in four groups (n = 10). Control group (C) dams remained with their calves; groups G24, G48 and G72, which were partially weaned for 24, 48 and 72 h, respectively, were estrus synchronized using a controlled internal drug. These procedures were performed at 25 days and again at 45 days postpartum. The number of follicles, presence of a corpus luteum and back fat thickness (BFT) were determined by ultrasound. The proportion of cows with estrus and ovulation at day 25 postpartum was statistically different between the control and treated groups, with the values being 20, 60, 50 and 70 for the control, G24, G48 and G72 groups respectively (P < 0.05). At days 45 postpartum, the proportion of cows with estrus and ovulation was different in group G48 compared with the other groups (P <0.05). The average BFT and body condition score for the four experimental groups in the two periods were similar (P >0.05). Animals with a higher proportion of follicles from 17 to 21 mm, BFT values above 3.5 mm and a regular body condition were significantly different regardless of whether the dams remained with their calves or were separated, regardless of the length of this event. It can be concluded that (1) a pre-synchronization program at day 25 could trigger the onset of ovarian activity and facilitate a breeding program at day 50 and (2) temporary weaning enhances the effect of a pre-synchronization program.
Observation of a unique pattern of bifurcated hydrogen bonds in the crystal structures of the N-glycoprotein linkage region models.

Elucidation of the intra- and intermolecular carbohydrate-protein interactions would greatly contribute toward obtaining a better understanding of the structure-function correlations of the protein-linked glycans. The weak interactions involving C-H.O have recently been attracting immense attention in the domain of biomolecular recognition. However, there has been no report so far on the occurrence of C-H.O hydrogen bonds in the crystal structures of models and analogs of N-glycoproteins. We present herein an analysis of C-H.O interactions in the crystal structures of all N-glycoprotein linkage region models and analogs. The study reveals a cooperative network of bifurcated hydrogen bonds consisting of N-H.O and C-H.O interactions seen uniquely for the models. The cooperative network consists of two antiparallel chains of bifurcated hydrogen bonds, one involving N1-H, C2'-H and O1' of the aglycon moiety and the other involving N2-H, C1-H and O1'' of the sugar. Such bifurcated hydrogen bonds between the core glycan and protein are likely to play an important role in the folding and stabilization of proteins.
Physiological profiles and sport specific fitness of Asian elite squash players.

There is a scarcity of descriptive data on the physiological characteristics of elite Asian squash players. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the physiological profile and sports specific fitness of Hong Kong elite squash players. It was conducted before the selection of the Hong Kong national squash team for the 1992 Asian Squash Championship. Ten elite squash players were selected as subjects for the study. Maximum oxygen uptake was measured using a continuous treadmill running test. A sports specific field test was performed in a squash court. The following means (s.d.) were observed: height 172.6(4.3) cm; weight 67.7(6.9) kg; body fat 7.4(3.4)%; forced vital capacity (FVC) 5.13(0.26) litres; maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) 61.7(3.4) ml.kg-1.min-1; anaerobic threshold (AT) 80.2(3.3)% of VO2max; alactic power index 15.5(1.8) W.kg-1; lactic work index 323.5(29.4) J.kg-1, peak isokinetic dominant knee extensor and flexor strengths 3.11(0.29) Nm.kg-1 and 1.87(0.18) Nm.kg-1. The results show that the Hong Kong squash players have relatively high cardiorespiratory sports specific fitness and muscle strength which may be one of the key factors that contributed to the success of the Hong Kong team in the Asian Championship.
Towards e-tutors training in on-line collaborative learning

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems not only enable group learning independently of students' location and time, but also foster the development of leadership abilities. However, given that interactions that promote learning do not occur spontaneously, the participation of tutors is needed to promote students' interactions and resolve group conflicts. Even when the tasks of a teacher in a virtual environment are not an extension of their tasks in traditional classrooms, teachers tend to use in e-learning contexts the same practices they use in traditional education. Considering that the skills of an e-tutor in CSCL belong to the category of acquired skills, we propose to develop an application aiming at training e-tutors in these skills. With this purpose in mind, we reviewed existing automatic techniques for analyzing student-teachers' interactions, as well as teachers' roles, activities and competences in the context of CSCL. We present in this article a review of the state of the arte in these areas.
Understanding the Competition-Crisis Nexus: Revisiting U.S. Capitalist Crises

The role of competition is a frequently overlooked yet important feature for understanding the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism. One of the approaches that has consistently highlighted the nature and impact of capitalist competition in different historical periods is that of the social structure of accumulation (or SSA). Building on the understanding that intensified capitalist competition can indeed co-constitute capitalist crises, this essay further theorizes the competition-crisis nexus by linking capitalist competition to the structural problem of overaccumulation. It then reconstructs the role of intensified capitalist competition during the decline of the monopoly and post–World War II SSAs and in the current phase of neoliberal capitalism in the United States while focusing on antitrust and financial-market rules as part of the wider institutional settings that inhibit or facilitate the process of capital accumulation in each period.
Distributed average tracking for multiple signals with linear dynamics: An edge-based framework

This paper studies the distributed average tracking problem for multiple time-varying signals with general linear dynamics, whose reference inputs are nonzero and not available to any agents in networks. In distributed fashion, a pair of discontinuous algorithms with, respectively, static and adaptive coupling strengths are designed. Based on the relative information among the neighboring agents, the states of each agent will converge to the average of the multiple reference signals if the communication topology is undirected and connected. Furthermore, sufficient conditions for the existence of the distributed algorithms are given if each agent is stabilizable. The value of consensus manifold in multi-agent systems can also be obtained in this paper. Finally, simulation examples are presented to show the validity of the theoretical results.
Coordinate Descent Algorithms With Coupling Constraints : Lessons Learned

Coordinate descent methods are enjoying renewed interest due to their simplicity and success in many machine learning applications. Given recent theoretical results on random coordinate descent with linear coupling constraints, we develop a software architecture for this class of algorithms. A software architecture has to (1) maintain solution feasibility, (2) be applicable to different execution environments, whether local or distributed and (3) decouple problem-specific logic from the execution environment. We demonstrate that due to the nature of these algorithms, these requirements raise some issues that are not present in many other classes of machine learning algorithms and thus can be overlooked when designing a generic machine learning system.
Inönü-Wigner contraction of Kac-Moody algebras

Inonu–Wigner contractions of affine Kac–Moody algebras are discussed here. The Sugawara construction for the contracted affine algebra exists only for a fixed value of the level k, which is determined in terms of the dimension of the uncontracted part of the starting Lie algebra, and the quadratic Casimir in the adjoint representation. Further, contractions of the G/H coset spaces are discussed, and an affine translation algebra is obtained, which yields a Virasoro algebra [via a Goddard–Kent–Olive (GKO) construction] with a central charge given by dim(G/H).
Impact of Travel Information Search Behavior on the Image of Tanzania as a Tourist Destination

Information has been noted to be the key to the formation of destination image. Destination marketers are aware of this fact and they aggressively try to influence the tourist’s decisions by altering the image of their destinations through information provision. During their trip planning, tourists usually engage themselves with active information search. Despite motives being the crux of travel information search, it has only been conceptually linked to the travel information sources. In this research we focus on investigating the impact of information search behavior on the destination image. A questionnaire based survey was conducted to collect data from 625 tourists in Tanzania. The data were analyzed by employing factor analysis and relevant hypotheses were derived and tested by multiple regression analysis. The results suggested that the information search behaviors have a significant influence on the destination image Differential uses of different sources of information have different impact on the destination images and the longer the travel planning horizon the stronger the destination images. These findings offer a valuable empirical insights to the marketers as to where (sources) to put travel information to cater for different tourists having different motivations with the aim of influencing the destination image in a most favorable way.
An Analysis of Engaged Learning in Low Stakes and High-Stakes Assessment Contexts in Distance Education: A Case of English for Specific Purposes Tests

So far, much research has been conducted on the students’ motivation in the low-stakes situations but there has been very limited research that has focused exclusively on the impact of students’ perception of the stakes of the tests on different components of engagement especially in distance education system. The purpose of this causal-comparative study is to compare student engagement levels between low-stakes and high-stakes assessment contexts in Payame Noor University in Iran. The results showed that the difference between the two groups was significant only in behavioral engagement but at emotional and cognitive components, students showed a relatively similar level of engagement under both low- stakes and high- stakes assessment conditions.
Robustly stabilizing MPC for perturbed PWL systems: Extended report

In this paper we derive two robustly stable model predictive control (MPC) schemes for the class of piecewise linear (PWL) and hybrid systems. We assume that the plant model is subject to unknown but bounded disturbances and the states of the system can be measured or estimated. We derive a piecewise feedback controller based on linear matrix inequalities (LMI) that stabilizes the nominal system. Further we develop an algorithm for constructing a convex robustly positively invariant (RPI) set for the system. Using this convex RPI set as a terminal set we propose first a minmax feedback MPC scheme with known mode based on a dualmode approach that stabilizes the system. The second robustly stable MPC scheme is based on a semi-feedback controller, but this time the mode of the system is unknown. Extension of the results from this paper to hybrid systems is also discussed.
DIDA: Distributed Indexing Dispatched Alignment

One essential application in bioinformatics that is affected by the high-throughput sequencing data deluge is the sequence alignment problem, where nucleotide or amino acid sequences are queried against targets to find regions of close similarity. When queries are too many and/or targets are too large, the alignment process becomes computationally challenging. This is usually addressed by preprocessing techniques, where the queries and/or targets are indexed for easy access while searching for matches. When the target is static, such as in an established reference genome, the cost of indexing is amortized by reusing the generated index. However, when the targets are non-static, such as contigs in the intermediate steps of a de novo assembly process, a new index must be computed for each run. To address such scalability problems, we present DIDA, a novel framework that distributes the indexing and alignment tasks into smaller subtasks over a cluster of compute nodes. It provides a workflow beyond the common practice of embarrassingly parallel implementations. DIDA is a cost-effective, scalable and modular framework for the sequence alignment problem in terms of memory usage and runtime. It can be employed in large-scale alignments to draft genomes and intermediate stages of de novo assembly runs. The DIDA source code, sample files and user manual are available through http://www.bcgsc. ca/platform/bioinfo/software/dida. The software is released under the British Columbia Cancer Agency License (BCCA), and is free for academic use.
Continued Fractions, Statistics, And Generalized Patterns

Recently, Babson and Steingŕimsson (see [BS]) introduced generalized permutations patterns that allow the requirement that two adjacent letters in a pattern must be adjacent in the permutation. Following [BCS], let ekπ (respectively; fkπ) be the number of the occurrences of the generalized pattern 12-3. -k (respectively; 21-3. . . -k) in π. In the present note, we study the distribution of the statistics ekπ and fkπ in a permutation avoiding the classical pattern 1-3-2. We also present some applications of our results which relate the enumeration of permutations avoiding the classical pattern 1-3-2 according to the statistics ek and fk to Narayana numbers and Catalan numbers.
The Role of Personality in Financial Decisions and Financial Crises

In this chapter, we consider the role of personality traits in shaping the behavior of financial actors. We consider the promise of using personality to predict financial behavior. Personality is perhaps the ultimate “exogenous” predictive variable—stable throughout the lifetime of individuals and substantially heritable. At the same time, personality traits have demonstrated predictive power for agent actions. However, there are a number of inherent obstacles to incorporating personality into the standard economic model of financial decision making. We suggest some approaches to overcoming these obstacles.
Minimal length encoding methods in molecular biology

Minimal encoding length (Kolmogorov complexity) is a measure of information content (randomness) the observed data. Algorithmic information theory studies this quantity in great detail (Chaitin 1987; Li & Vit~nyi 1993; Cover & Thomas 1991) and provides a framework for a most general formulation of the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor). The principle of parsimony has been widely and explicitly used in taxonomy (Sober 1988). Applications have expanded with the appearance of macromolecular sequence data. The minimal edit distance criterion, a special case of the parsimony criterion, has been used for pairwise sequence alignment (e.g., (Waterman 1989)). The eral principle was often falsely identified with narrow formulations (e.g., the parsimony principle in taxonomy) and then criticized; the possibility of changing the specific formulation while still applying the general principle was often ignored. In addition to providing a formal framework for a unified theory of inductive inference, the concepts from algorithmic information theory have been employed to obtain a mathematical definition of life (Chaitin 1979). The definition highlights a fundamental difference in the structure of knowledge about the living and nonliving worlds, and has enabled a statistical test for discriminating observations that come from a living world from those that come form the non-living world (Milosavljevi6). In the following we provide a brief outline of the theory of minimal length encoding and then sketch a few recent applications.
Evaluation of video summaries

In this paper we present a demonstration tool to illustrate the VERT measure for evaluating video summaries. An interface allows the user to conveniently watch the videos, and select the keyframes for his summary. Then a panel of colored grids shows the comparison of his selection with the reference, and another panel shows the VERT weights for the user selection and the reference. Finally, curves of the VERT scores are displayed in the last panel. In this paper, we review the basic principles of the VERT measure and then describe the demo tool in more details.
γ-Zeins are essential for endosperm modification in quality protein maize

Essential amino acids like lysine and tryptophan are deficient in corn meal because of the abundance of zein storage proteins that lack these amino acids. A natural mutant, opaque 2 (o2) causes reduction of zeins, an increase of nonzein proteins, and as a consequence, a doubling of lysine levels. However, o2’s soft inferior kernels precluded its commercial use. Breeders subsequently overcame kernel softness, selecting several quantitative loci (QTLs), called o2 modifiers, without losing the high-lysine trait. These maize lines are known as “quality protein maize” (QPM). One of the QTLs is linked to the 27-kDa γ-zein locus on chromosome 7S. Moreover, QPM lines have 2- to 3-fold higher levels of the 27-kDa γ-zein, but the physiological significance of this increase is not known. Because the 27- and 16-kDa γ-zein genes are highly conserved in DNA sequence, we introduced a dominant RNAi transgene into a QPM line (CM105Mo2) to eliminate expression of them both. Elimination of γ-zeins disrupts endosperm modification by o2 modifiers, indicating their hypostatic action to γ-zeins. Abnormalities in protein body structure and their interaction with starch granules in the F1 with Mo2/+; o2/o2; γRNAi/+ genotype suggests that γ-zeins are essential for restoring protein body density and starch grain interaction in QPM. To eliminate pleiotropic effects caused by o2, the 22-kDa α-zein, γ-zein, and β-zein RNAis were stacked, resulting in protein bodies forming as honeycomb-like structures. We are unique in presenting clear demonstration that γ-zeins play a mechanistic role in QPM, providing a previously unexplored rationale for molecular breeding.
Highly Dynamic Four-Quadrant AC Motor Drive with Improved Power Factor and On-Line Optimized Pulse Pattern with PROMC

The power factor and the waveforms of the currents of voltage source inverters can be improved essentially when two-pulse inverters are used¿one at the line side and the other at the machine side. Both inverters are controlled by similar current vector controllers. The reference value of the stator current can be calculated by field-oriented control or by decoupling, for example. The reference value of the line current is derived from the actual state of the mains and the machine. Furthermore, on-line optimization of the pulse pattern by programmable read-only memory control (PROMC) is used.
Interference alignment over asynchronous X networks

A symbol-asynchronous X network with time-invariant channel coefficients and single antenna nodes is considered. By employing the asynchronism in the design of the interference alignment, we achieve the upper bound for the total number of degrees of freedom of this network which is argued to be the same as that of the synchronous case. The asynchronism, which exists among the received signals at each receiver, results in inter-symbol-interference (ISI) among the transmitted symbols from different transmitters. This can provide the channel variation required for the vector alignment over the constant network with single antenna nodes.
Customizing Linux operating system for implementing various services in cloud environment

A cloud operating system or cloud OS provides an operating system(OS), which can be accessed from anywhere, that has objects and all sorts of resources for normal computing purposes that are deployed in the resource providers, that is the cloud OS provider data center. The cloud operating system provides the environment and feels like normal operating system which can be accessed by either of the two types. One is a simple client system to be installed at the client side as a stand-alone or work alongside another OS, using which the cloud applications can be run at the providers server from the client system. The second method is the need of internet enabled browser, which is just enough to access the operating system located at the server using internet. The model to be implemented is a location free access operating system under Linux platform that can be accessed by a web browser. It is enabled by handling the operating system procedures as html or xml requests and responses. As the workload increases, the performance issue needs to be considered. Performance analysis needs to be associated in parallel along with implementing the components SaaS services like File Splitter, Image Editor and Office Suite, PaaS services like compiler(UTF), Kernel for Scheduling and Kernel for Mutual Exclusion and IaaS services like File Storage, Shared Memory and Shared bandwidth.
Cell Switching vs. Packet Switching

In current switching systems, all packets are divided into equal-sized cells before being scheduled. This is because of the fact that cell-based scheduling is easier to be implemented in hardware. In this paper, we consider the case in which the switch does not split packets and the scheduling is done over the whole packets. In this paper, we classify packet-based scheduling algorithms into waiting and non-waiting and show that any algorithm in the second class is not generally stable. Then we show that for a given packet-based scheduling algorithm, which we call PB-MWM, the switch is stable under i.i. d. traffic assumption. Finally, we compare cell-based Maximum Weighted Matching and our PB-MWM algorithm. We show that even though these two seem to be very different in structure, they perform similarly.