Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Life's Influence on the Sedimentary Record: The Interplay of Ocean Chemistry, Circulation, and the Biological Pump

In the modern ocean, the distributions of a variety of chemical elements are controlled by a combination of physical circulation and the metabolic activities of marine organisms. While mixing acts to homogenize ocean chemistry, chemical gradients in oxygen, phosphate, and carbon isotopes are created through a process known as "biological pumping," the transfer of elements from surface to deep waters via the production, sinking, and decomposition of organic matter. Similar processes must have been at work in ancient oceans, but chemical patterns of certain time periods preserved in the geologic record are very different than today's, prompting many authors to suggest different operation of either biological pumping or circulation during those time intervals. Accurate interpretation of ancient chemical patterns, however, requires disentangling the competing effects of biology, physics and changes in bulk ocean composition, which is difficult through intuition alone. This study utilizes observation and numerical models to explore what combination of factors best explains chemical signals preserved in the geologic record and how the biological pump has operated through earth history. For the Paleoproterozoic, the efficacy of biological pumping is evaluated through a combination of field data and numerical modeling. Samples of carbonate cements collected from the Pethei Platform, a 1.9 Ga stromatolitic reef, reveal a substantially reduced carbon isotope gradient with depth relative to the modern gradient, 0.5 versus 2‰. Such a small gradient would conventionally be interpreted as indicating a weak biological pump, but steady-state simulations using a two-box model of the Paleoproterozoic ocean suggest that the lack of a carbon isotope gradient may instead be due to high partial pressures of carbon dioxide in the Paleoproterozoic, which would increase the ocean's dissolved inorganic carbon content and damp the effects of biological pumping.
Meeting Water Quality Goals under Climate Change in Chesapeake Bay Watershed, USA

Climate change may increase precipitation, temperatures, and pollution loading and necessitate additional measures and costs to achieve water quality goals. We used two climate change models and the mean of the ensemble of seven climate models (Ensemble Mean), a yield prediction model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool‐Variable Source Area), and a farm economic model to estimate how climate change would affect yields and the costs of reducing nitrogen (N) loading in an agricultural subbasin of the Chesapeake Bay. We estimated costs of meeting water quality goals based on the reduction in farm net returns from limits on N loadings under historical and future climate scenarios. Estimated costs of meeting water quality goals increase under future climate for one of the two climate models and for the Ensemble Mean. Major reasons for increased costs are higher predicted N loading from crops and higher N loading reductions to be achieved under future climate. The farm meets N limits by eliminating wheat and reducing corn and soybean production as well as increased use of best management practices (BMPs) including Conservation Reserve Program. Researchers should analyze effects of climate change on the costs of meeting water quality goals using multiple climate change prediction models and considering possible crop substitutions as well as crop and livestock BMPs. Further research should consider how commodity market reactions to producers’ choices under climate change affect costs of meeting water quality goals.
Preliminary study of effects on paranoia ideation and jumping to conclusions in the context of group treatment of anxiety disorders in young people

People with anxiety disorders tend to focus on unpleasant and threatening stimuli. Our aims were to evaluate: (1) the presence of paranoid ideation, and the jumping to conclusions (JTC) bias in young suffering from an anxiety disorder and (2) the effectiveness of a cognitive‐behavioural intervention (CBT) to manage anxiety combined with 2 modules to reduce the JTC bias.
Protocol for the examination of specimens from patients with carcinoma of the penis.

The College of American Pathologists offers these protocols to assist pathologists in providing clinically useful and relevant information when reporting results of surgical specimen examinations. The College regards the reporting elements in the ‘‘Surgical Pathology Cancer Case Summary (Checklist)’’ portion of the protocols as essential elements of the pathology report. However, the manner in which these elements are reported is at the discretion of each specific pathologist, taking into account clinician preferences, institutional policies, and individual practice. The College developed these protocols as an educational tool to assist pathologists in the useful reporting of relevant information. It did not issue the protocols for use in litigation, reimbursement, or other contexts. Nevertheless, the College recognizes that the protocols might be used by hospitals, attorneys, payers, and others. Indeed, effective January 1, 2004, the Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons mandated the use of the checklist elements of the protocols as part of its Cancer Program Standards for Approved Cancer Programs. Therefore, it becomes even more important for pathologists to familiarize themselves with these documents. At the same time, the College cautions that use of the protocols other than for their intended educational purpose may involve additional considerations that are beyond the scope of these documents.
Endothelial Dysfunction, Oxidative Stress, and Risk of Cardiovascular Events in Patients With Coronary Artery Disease

Background—Endothelial function is impaired in coronary artery disease and may contribute to its clinical manifestations. Increased oxidative stress has been linked to impaired endothelial function in atherosclerosis and may play a role in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular events. This study was designed to determine whether endothelial dysfunction and vascular oxidative stress have prognostic impact on cardiovascular event rates in patients with coronary artery disease. Methods and Results—Endothelium-dependent and -independent vasodilation was determined in 281 patients with documented coronary artery disease by measuring forearm blood flow responses to acetylcholine and sodium nitroprusside using venous occlusion plethysmography. The effect of the coadministration of vitamin C (24 mg/min) was assessed in a subgroup of 179 patients. Cardiovascular events, including death from cardiovascular causes, myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, coronary angioplasty, and coronary or peripheral bypass operation, were studied during a mean follow-up period of 4.5 years. Patients experiencing cardiovascular events (n=91) had lower vasodilator responses to acetylcholine (P <0.001) and sodium nitroprusside (P <0.05), but greater benefit from vitamin C (P <0.01). The Cox proportional regression analysis for conventional risk factors demonstrated that blunted acetylcholine-induced vasodilation (P =0.001), the effect of vitamin C (P =0.001), and age (P =0.016) remained independent predictors of cardiovascular events. Conclusions—Endothelial dysfunction and increased vascular oxidative stress predict the risk of cardiovascular events in patients with coronary artery disease. These data support the concept that oxidative stress may contribute not only to endothelial dysfunction but also to coronary artery disease activity.
Designing the Visualization of Information

The construction of an artifact to visually represent information is usually required by Information Visualization research projects. The end product of design science research is also an artifact and therefore it can be argued that design science research is an appropriate research paradigm for conducting Information Visualization research. Design science research requires that, during the Rigor Cycle, the design of the artifacts should be based on a scientific knowledge base. This article provides a knowledge base in the form of design guidelines that can guide the design of the view for an Information Visualization solution. The design principles and guidelines presented in this article are identified by means of a literature review.
Bacille Calmette-Guérin Vaccination is Associated with Lower Prevalence of Allergic Diseases in Indian Children

Background Immunization with bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) has been shown to augment T helper (Th) 1 biased response and hence gives protection against developing allergies. However, results across the studies have been inconclusive and there is no Indian study verifying this association. We explored the link between BCG vaccination and prevalence of allergic diseases among school children of Chandigarh, North India. Methods In a large cross-sectional study, children aged 7–14 years, with and without documentation and/or scar consistent with BCG vaccination, were examined over a period of 2 years and 5 months with the help of a questionnaire-based survey followed by skin-prick test (SPT). Results A total of 10,028 children were included. The mean age was 11.04 ± 2.8 years and M/F ratio was 1.1:1. Among them, 77.7% had documentation of BCG vaccination, 17% had a BCG-like scar but no documentation and 5.3% had no scar/documentation. SPT was performed on 1614 (16%) children. In the BCG group (vaccination and/or scar) 16.7% were atopic (positive SPT) compared with 21.3% in no BCG (no vaccination/scar). T prevalence of allergic diseases among BCG+ subjects was 10.1%. Among these, asthma was the commonest one (6.1%), followed by rhinitis (3.5%) and eczema (0.5%). There was significant negative correlation between BCG positivity, atopy (p = 0.037), and allergic diseases as a whole (p = 0.028), but on independent analysis the negative correlation was strongest with allergic rhinitis (p = 0.011). Conclusion BCG vaccination is associated with lower prevalence of allergic disorders in Indian children.
Top-Down Control of Visual Attention: A Rational Account

Theories of visual attention commonly posit that early parallel processes extract conspicuous features such as color contrast and motion from the visual field. These features are then combined into a saliency map, and attention is directed to the most salient regions first. Top-down attentional control is achieved by modulating the contribution of different feature types to the saliency map. A key source of data concerning attentional control comes from behavioral studies in which the effect of recent experience is examined as individuals repeatedly perform a perceptual discrimination task (e.g., "what shape is the odd-colored object? "). The robust finding is that repetition of features of recent trials (e.g., target color) facilitates performance. We view this facilitation as an adaptation to the statistical structure of the environment. We propose a probabilistic model of the environment that is updated after each trial. Under the assumption that attentional control operates so as to make performance more efficient for more likely environmental states, we obtain parsimonious explanations for data from four different experiments. Further, our model provides a rational explanation for why the influence of past experience on attentional control is short lived.
Lactose intolerance

Introduction: Lactose intolerance in children in early childhood has been increasing the level of intolerance, evidencing in the child’s growth and development phases, being vital during the consumption of milk. Presenting symptoms and food discomfort due to the consumption of milk. Lactose intolerance can be classified as primary, when there is an intrinsic defect of the enzyme; or secondary, when there is a damage to the intestinal mucosa with consequent lack of it. Objective: This research aims to describe the conduct of the nutritionist towards children with lactose intolerance in early childhood based on literary reports. Method: Study of integrative literature review, descriptive and exploratory, with the purpose of presenting issues related to nutritional conduct in the care of children in early childhood. For this, information will be selected in other articles, found on search sites: SCIELO, PubMed and Google Scholar. The sample population will be composed of articles recently published between the years 2016 to 2020, and in accordance with the pre-established inclusion and exclusion criteria. The selection will take place in the month of May 2021. Results. It was found among the investigated productions that most of them are about nutritional characteristics, including the concern with calcium deficiency and alternatives to substitute products that develop symptoms by those that have low lactose content. Among the metabolic aspects were not the main focus of the articles found, however, only one article addressed this topic. Conclusions: Therefore, nutritionists play a fundamental role in the improvement and quality of life of children in early childhood, which will collaborate for their growth and healthy development, under the conditions presented, to provide information to parents about diseases and nutritionally adequate substitutes.
Errgrams – A Way to Improving ASR for Highly Inflected Dravidian Languages

In this paper, we present results of our experiments with ASR for a highly inflected Dravidian language, Telugu. First, we propose a new metric for evaluating ASR performance for inflectional languages (Inflectional Word Error Rate IWER) which takes into account whether the incorrectly recognized word corresponds to the same lexicon lemma or not. We also present results achieved by applying a novel method – errgrams – to ASR lattice. With respect to confidence scores, the method tries to learn typical error patterns, which are then used for lattice correction, and applied just before standard lattice rescoring. Our confidence measures are based on word posteriors and were improved by applying antimodels trained on anti-examples generated by the standard N-gram language model. For Telugu language, we decreased the WER from 45.2% to 40.4% (by 4.8% absolute), and the IWER from 41.6% to 39.5% (2.1 % absolute), with respect to the baseline performance. All improvements are statistically significant using all three standard NIST significance tests for ASR.
Ammonium O,O′-diethyl dithiophosphate

In the title compound, NH4 +·(C2H5O)2PS2 −, the ammonium cation is connected by four charge-assisted N—H⋯S hydrogen bonds to four tetrahedral O,O′-diethyl dithiophosphate anions, forming layers parallel to (100). The polar and non-polar constituents of the layers are stacked alternately along [100]. Interlacing of the external ethyl groups through van der Waals interactions combines these layers into a three-dimensional structure.
Reasons for a pessimistic or optimistic message logging protocol in MPI uncoordinated failure, recovery

With the growing scale of high performance computing platforms, fault tolerance has become a major issue. Among the various approaches for providing fault tolerance to MPI applications, message logging has been proved to tolerate higher failure rate. However, this advantage comes at the expense of a higher overhead on communications, due to latency intrusive logging of events to a stable storage. Previous work proposed and evaluated several protocols relaxing the synchronicity of event logging to moderate this overhead. Recently, the model of message logging has been refined to better match the reality of high performance network cards, where message receptions are decomposed in multiple interdependent events. According to this new model, deterministic and non-deterministic events are clearly discriminated, reducing the overhead induced by message logging. In this paper we compare, experimentally, a pessimistic and an optimistic message logging protocol, using this new model and implemented in the Open MPI library. Although pessimistic and optimistic message logging are, respectively, the most and less synchronous message logging paradigms, experiments show that most of the time their performance is comparable.
Computing at Massive Scale: Scalability and Dependability Challenges

Large-scale Cloud systems and big data analytics frameworks are now widely used for practical services and applications. However, with the increase of data volume, together with the heterogeneity of workloads and resources, and the dynamic nature of massive user requests, the uncertainties and complexity of resource management and service provisioning increase dramatically, often resulting in poor resource utilization, vulnerable system dependability, and user-perceived performance degradations. In this paper we report our latest understanding of the current and future challenges in this particular area, and discuss both existing and potential solutions to the problems, especially those concerned with system efficiency, scalability and dependability. We first introduce a data-driven analysis methodology for characterizing the resource and workload patterns and tracing performance bottlenecks in a massive-scale distributed computing environment. We then examine and analyze several fundamental challenges and the solutions we are developing to tackle them, including for example incremental but decentralized resource scheduling, incremental messaging communication, rapid system failover, and request handling parallelism. We integrate these solutions with our data analysis methodology in order to establish an engineering approach that facilitates the optimization, tuning and verification of massive-scale distributed systems. We aim to develop and offer innovative methods and mechanisms for future computing platforms that will provide strong support for new big data and IoE (Internet of Everything) applications.
Quick Job Entry or Long-Term Human Capital Development? The Dynamic Effects of Alternative Training Schemes

This paper investigates how precisely short-term, job-search oriented training programs as opposed to long-term, human capital intensive training programs work. We evaluate and compare their effects on time until job entry, stability of employment, and earnings. Further, we examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects according to the timing of training during unemployment as well as across different subgroups of participants. We find that participating in short-term training reduces the remaining time in unemployment and moderately increases job stability. Long-term training programs initially prolong the remaining time in unemployment, but once the scheduled program end is reached participants exit to employment at a much faster rate than without training. In addition, they benefit from substantially more stable employment spells and higher earnings. Overall, long-term training programs are well effective in supporting the occupational advancement of very heterogeneous groups of participants, including those with generally weak labor market prospects. However, from a fiscal perspective only the low-cost short-term training schemes are cost efficient in the short run.
Soil structure interaction for shallow foundations in 2D and 3D: A semi-analytic linear approach

Soil structure interaction is a phenomena often neglected or under estimated in earthquake engineering. From the point of few of many engineers, neglecting soil structure interaction is seen as a conservative and save way to calculate. However, soil structure interaction can have great effects on the dynamic behaviour of the superstructure. Especially for large and heavy superstructures, e.g. liquid storage tanks and power plants, soil structure interaction is of great importance. Modelling techniques to capture this phenomena are often over simplified or need a lot of computational effort. Therefore, it is proposed to develop a semi-analytical linear elastic model, which describes the soil structure interaction based on fundamental physics. The thesis outline is as follows: Chapter 1 states the problem definition and objectives of this thesis. The research questions are mentioned and the research approach to answer these questions and fulfil the objective are described here. Chapter 2 gives an introduction about the fundamental knowledge needed for this thesis. An introduction about earthquakes is given, including the different waves that are generated by earthquakes. It gives insight in the principles of dynamics. Furthermore, other modelling techniques are explained, including their pros and cons. In chapter 3, the soil behaviour is described for a 2D plane strain case. This is done based on Green’s functions. The soil behaviour is described for a single layer on bedrock. Flexibility function of the soil are derived in the frequency-wavenumber domain and transformed back by making use of contour integration and the residue theorem. The convergence of the solution is verified and the soil behavior is evaluated. In chapter 4, a inextensible bending strip is combined with the soil model. This chapter gives insight in how both are combined. The model is validated by literature. A case study is proceeded including different loads at different frequencies. Furthermore, the influence of the flexibility of the strip on the stiffness and damping of the system is evaluated. Chapter 5 and 6 follow the same procedure as chapter 3 and 4. Instead of the 2D plane strain case, a 3D model is developed for the soil. The model is coupled to a inextensible bending plate. The behaviour of the coupled model is evaluated and validated in these chapters. Chapter 7 summarizes the conclusions made during this thesis. It discusses the choices made and give recommendation about further research.
Stable isotopes (δD, δ18O and δ13CDIC) characteristics of karstic groundwater in Qori Meydan plain, NE of Iran

Due to the scarcity of surface water in many regions around the world and the rapid increase in the population, there has been sharp increase in the potable water demand. Groundwater is becoming an important source of drinking water supply. In this study, for the first time, the isotopic composition (δ18O or δD) of precipitation and the karstic water resources and also the carbon isotope composition (δCDIC) of springs in Qori Meydan Plain (QMP northeastern of Iran) were investigated. In QMP with semi-arid climate, springs have a key role in meeting water needs. Stable isotopic composition (δCDIC, δ18O & δD) of water resources were employed to trace their origin(s). The δ18O composition of these water bodies range from –9.6‰ to −7.5 ‰VSMOW with corresponding variation in δD varies from −69.0‰ to – 53.6 ‰ VSMOW. The water samples were plotted close to Global Meteoric Water Line (GMWL) which means that local precipitation is the main factor in recharging the water resources. Samples more exposed to sunlight (Qorte spring and Atrak river) have least d-excess values. DOC values in water resources predominantly originate from plants and green algae. The δCDIC ratios of water samples vary from −10.0 ‰ to -4.1 ‰VPDB, which points that the main source of DIC in groundwater is limestone beds.