Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Loading gantry vs. traditional chute - Effect on fresh pork loin quality attributes with challenges at loading

A major factor affecting fresh pork quality is the implementation of management technologies that improve market swine movement during the loading process for transport to the packing plant. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of loading system at the farm (traditional chute with no handling delay vs. prototype loading gantry with handling delay) on the fresh quality pork loin. Pork loins (n=95 per treatment) from the close out (CO; defined as pigs harvested from the last marketing group from a barn) were utilised. Loins from pigs loaded with the traditional chute with no handling delay had greater (P=0.01) pH upon initiation of chilling, but lower (P=0.03) 24h pH than loins from pigs loaded with the prototype with a handling delay. The Japanese colour score ( JCS) for the cut surface and for rib values were higher (P=0.02) for loins from pigs loaded with the traditional chute with no handling delay. These observations were consistent with lower L* values for loins from pigs loaded with the traditional chute with no handling delay (P=0.01) and had improved (85 to 76%) colour pass rate compared to loins from pigs loaded with the prototype loading gantry with a handling delay. This investigation demonstrates that unidirectional flow and consistent rate of movement are important in the optimisation of pork quality, even when using what most would consider an ideal loading gantry system. Disciplines Agriculture | Animal Sciences | Large or Food Animal and Equine Medicine | Meat Science Comments This article is poublished as Berry, N. , A. Johnson, S. Lonergan, T. Baas, J. Hill, C. Schultz‐Kaster, J. Matthews, L. Karriker, and K. Stalder. 2010. Loading gantry versus traditional chute: Effect on fresh pork loin quality attributes with challenges at loading. Fleischwirtschaft International. 5:69. Posted with permission. Authors Nicolas Berry, Anna Johnson, Steven Lonergan, Tom Baas, Jeff Hill, Collette Schultz Kaster, John Matthews, Locke Karriker, and Ken Stalder This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ans_pubs/398 Fleischwirtschaft International
Motivational predictors of young adolescents' participation in an outdoor adventure course: A self-determination theory approach

Abstract Outdoor education is emerging as a compulsory component of the school curriculum in Singapore. As more and more young people are involved in outdoor education programmes, the motivational factors that influence students' participation in outdoor activities is an important area of study. The purpose of this study was to use the self-determination theory framework to examine post course satisfaction level among young adolescents. A total of 314 secondary school students aged from 12 to 16 years took part in the survey. Results showed that external regulation negatively predicted self-reported satisfaction whereas intrinsic motivation positively predicted participants' satisfaction levels of the course. It is highlighted that young adolescents should not be coerced into outdoor education programmes. They should be provided with a meaningful rationale for participation, given some autonomy for decision-making and to have a positive and enjoyable experience during the programme.
Eudaimonic well‐being and tumor norepinephrine in patients with epithelial ovarian cancer

The impact of psychological well‐being on the physiologic processes involved in cancer progression remains unclear. Prior research has implicated adrenergic signaling in tumor growth and metastasis. Given that adrenergic signaling is influenced by both positive and negative factors, the authors examined how 2 different aspects of well‐being (eudaimonic and positive affect) and psychological distress were associated with tumor norepinephrine (NE) in patients with ovarian cancer.
A question-answering system over Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been around for thousands of years and it's a significant part of Chinese cultural heritage. The theoretical framework of TCM is unique and with rich of content, which contains the complex relationships between disease and medicine. Research on question-answering (QA) over TCM is significant for Chinese NLP and representative, because the resources of TCM are mostly Chinese-based. In this paper we present a QA system over TCM, which transforms user supplied questions into conjunctive query sentences (i.e. SQL) and retrieves the answer from both the built-up dataset and online encyclopedia. The contribution of this paper is threefold: Firstly, we introduce a novel approach for word segmentation over Chinese questions. We employ a TF-IDF model on the dataset to generate domain-specific dictionary with weight factor and tags, which are computed to select the best result of segmentation. Secondly, we present a novel method for constructing queries to retrieve answers. We compute the entity-attribute distance over a set of tagged words to construct incomplete ontology instances, which are used as the intermediary to generate queries. Lastly, we propose a method to integrate web data extraction with question answering, which allows us to extract answers from online encyclopedia website (i.e. Wikipedia). The results of our evaluation with 50 benchmark queries demonstrate the value of our approach.
eBDtheque: A Representative Database of Comics

We present eBDtheque, a database of various comic book images and their ground truth for panels, balloons and text lines plus semantic annotations. The database consists of a hundred pages of various comic book albums, Franco-Belgian, American comics and mangas. Additionally, we present the piece of software used to establish the ground truth and a tool to validate results against this ground truth. Everything is publicly available for scientific use on http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr.
Human-Mediated Dispersal of Seeds by the Airflow of Vehicles

Human-mediated dispersal is known as an important driver of long-distance dispersal for plants but underlying mechanisms have rarely been assessed. Road corridors function as routes of secondary dispersal for many plant species but the extent to which vehicles support this process remains unclear. In this paper we quantify dispersal distances and seed deposition of plant species moved over the ground by the slipstream of passing cars. We exposed marked seeds of four species on a section of road and drove a car along the road at a speed of 48 km/h. By tracking seeds we quantified movement parallel as well as lateral to the road, resulting dispersal kernels, and the effect of repeated vehicle passes. Median distances travelled by seeds along the road were about eight meters for species with wind dispersal morphologies and one meter for species without such adaptations. Airflow created by the car lifted seeds and resulted in longitudinal dispersal. Single seeds reached our maximum measuring distance of 45 m and for some species exceeded distances under primary dispersal. Mathematical models were fit to dispersal kernels. The incremental effect of passing vehicles on longitudinal dispersal decreased with increasing number of passes as seeds accumulated at road verges. We conclude that dispersal by vehicle airflow facilitates seed movement along roads and accumulation of seeds in roadside habitats. Dispersal by vehicle airflow can aid the spread of plant species and thus has wide implications for roadside ecology, invasion biology and nature conservation.
Anthropomorphism-Based Focus Group Protocol to Select Gamification Mechanics

In this position paper, we propose a focus group protocol based on an anthropomorphism approach that can be used with both patients and caregivers to select suitable gamification mechanics in an eHealth or well-being context. In our current project, where we will apply this protocol, we are investigating whether the combination of gamification and context-aware recommender techniques can increase the motivation of people to adhere to telemonitoring actions. This proposed focus group protocol might also be useful in other domains, for example to select gamification mechanics in a well-being and flourishing context. ACM Classification
Link Prediction across Aligned Networks with Sparse and Low Rank Matrix Estimation

Users' addiction to online social networks is discovered to be highly correlated with their social connections in the networks. Dense social connections can effectively help online social networks retain their active users and improve the social network services. Therefore, it is of great importance to make a good prediction of the social links among users. Meanwhile, to enjoy more social network services, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously. Formally, the social networks which share a number of common users are defined as the "aligned networks". With the information transferred from multiple aligned social networks, we can gain a more comprehensive knowledge about the social preferences of users in the pre-specified target network, which will benefit the social link prediction task greatly. However, when transferring the knowledge from other aligned source networks to the target network, there usually exists a shift in information distribution between different networks, namely domain difference. In this paper, we study the social link prediction problem of the target network, which is aligned with multiple social networks concurrently. To accommodate the domain difference issue, we project the features extracted for links from different aligned networks into a shared lower-dimensional feature space. Moreover, users in social networks usually tend to form communities and would only connect to a small number of users. Thus, the target network structure has both the low-rank and sparse properties. We propose a novel optimization framework, SLAMPRED, to combine both these two properties aforementioned of the target network and the information of multiple aligned networks with nice domain adaptations. Since the objective function is a linear combination of convex and concave functions involving nondifferentiable regularizers, we propose a novel optimization method to iteratively solve it. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world aligned social networks, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Pan-Tropical Analysis of Climate Effects on Seasonal Tree Growth

Climate models predict a range of changes in tropical forest regions, including increased average temperatures, decreased total precipitation, reduced soil moisture and alterations in seasonal climate variations. These changes are directly related to the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, primarily CO2. Assessing seasonal forest growth responses to climate is of utmost importance because woody tissues, produced by photosynthesis from atmospheric CO2, water and light, constitute the main component of carbon sequestration in the forest ecosystem. In this paper, we combine intra-annual tree growth measurements from published tree growth data and the corresponding monthly climate data for 25 pan-tropical forest sites. This meta-analysis is designed to find the shared climate drivers of tree growth and their relative importance across pan-tropical forests in order to improve carbon uptake models in a global change context. Tree growth reveals significant intra-annual seasonality at seasonally dry sites or in wet tropical forests. Of the overall variation in tree growth, 28.7% was explained by the site effect, i.e. the tree growth average per site. The best predictive model included four climate variables: precipitation, solar radiation (estimated with extrasolar radiation reaching the atmosphere), temperature amplitude and relative soil water content. This model explained more than 50% of the tree growth variations across tropical forests. Precipitation and solar radiation are the main seasonal drivers of tree growth, causing 19.8% and 16.3% of the tree growth variations. Both have a significant positive association with tree growth. These findings suggest that forest productivity due to tropical tree growth will be reduced in the future if climate extremes, such as droughts, become more frequent.
Individual foraging patterns of the jack jumper ant Myrmecia croslandi (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

In ants, we know most about the foraging patterns at the colony level. We know surprisingly little about the foraging behaviour of individual foragers and how they shape the behaviour of the colony. To identify spatial and temporal variation in foraging behaviour at the individual level, we studied at two nests the solitary foragers of the Australian jack jumper ant Myrmecia croslandi TAYLOR, 1991. These ants are strictly diurnal and active only between October and April. Foragers of Myrmecia croslandi have a long life span (about a year) and we took advantage of this to determine the variation in their time of activity and foraging paths over a two-year period. By tracking the outbound paths of foraging ants using a Differential GPS we discovered that: (a) individual ants use very different routes to reach the same destination; (b) distance travelled by foragers was longest (up to 15 m) when they travelled to nest-specific eucalypt trees on which they foraged either for prey or tended to sap-sucking insects; (c) and ants made short forays (< 2 m) into nontree sectors where they exclusively hunted for prey. Individual foragers exhibited temporal fidelity based on their nest departure times, and could be classified as those active (a) all day, (b) only within eight hours after sunrise and (c) only after eight hours after sunrise. By monitoring individual activity for seven consecutive days we show that individual ants carry out up to six trips per day and rarely forage on consecutive days.
Is Internet use unhealthy? A cross-sectional study of adolescent Internet overuse.

OBJECTIVE To assess whether problematic internet use is associated with somatic complaints and whether this association remains when checking for internet activity among a random sample of adolescents living in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. METHODS Cross-sectional survey of 3,067 8th graders (50.3% females) divided into average (n = 2,708) and problematic (n = 359) Internet users and compared for somatic complaints (backache, overweight, headaches, musculoskeletal pain, sleep problems and sight problems) controlling for sociodemographic and internet-related variables. Logistic regressions were performed for each complaint and for all of them simultaneously controlling variables significant at the bivariate level. RESULTS At the multivariate level, when taken separately, problematic internet users were more likely to have a chronic condition (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] with 95% CI: 1.58 [1.11:2.23]) and to report back pain (aOR: 1.46 [1.04:2.05]), overweight (aOR: 1.74 [1.03:2.93]), musculoskeletal pain (aOR: 1.36 [1.00:1.84]) and sleep problems (aOR: 2.16 [1.62:2.88]). When considered in the full model, only sleep problems remained significant (aOR: 2.03 [1.50:2.74]). CONCLUSIONS Our results confirm that problematic internet users report health problems more frequently, with lack of sleep being the most strongly associated and seeming to act as mediator regarding the other ones. Clinicians should remember to screen for excessive internet use their patients complaining of sleep-related problems, back or musculoskeletal pain or overweight. Clinicians should advise parents to limit the amount of time their adolescent children can spend online for leisure activities. Furthermore, limiting the number of devices used to connect to the internet could help warrant enough sleeping time.
Nitric Oxide and Hydrogen Peroxide Mediate Wounding-Induced Freezing Tolerance through Modifications in Photosystem and Antioxidant System in Wheat

Mechanical wounding is a common stress caused by herbivores or manual and natural manipulations, whereas its roles in acclimation response to a wide spectrum of abiotic stresses remain unclear. The present work showed that local mechanical wounding enhanced freezing tolerance in untreated systemic leaves of wheat plants (Triticum aestivum L.), and meanwhile the signal molecules hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and nitric oxide (NO) were accumulated systemically. Pharmacological study showed that wounding-induced NO synthesis was substantially arrested by pretreatment with scavengers of reactive oxygen species and an inhibitor of NADPH oxidase (respiratory burst oxidase homolog, RBOH). On the contrary, wounding-induced H2O2 accumulation was not sensitive to NO synthetic inhibitors or scavenger, indicating that H2O2 acts upstream of NO in wounding signal transduction pathways. Cytochemical and vascular tissues localizations approved that RBOH-dependent H2O2 acts as long-distance signal in wounding response. Transcriptome analysis revealed that 279 genes were up-regulated in plants treated with wounding and freezing, but not in plants treated with freezing alone. Importantly, freezing- and wounding-induced genes were significantly enriched in the categories of “photosynthesis” and “signaling. ” These results strongly supported that primary mechanical wounding can induce freezing tolerance in wheat through the systemic accumulation of NO and H2O2, and further modifications in photosystem and antioxidant system.
Total Knee Replacement and the Effect of Technology on Cocreation for Improved Outcomes and Delivery: Qualitative Multi-Stakeholder Study

Background The growth in patient-centered care delivery combined with the rising costs of health care have perhaps not unsurprisingly been matched by a proliferation of patient-centered technology. This paper takes a multistakeholder approach to explore how digital technology can support the cocreation of value between patients and their care teams in the delivery of total knee replacement (TKR) surgery, an increasingly common procedure to return mobility and relieve pain for people suffering from osteoarthritis. Objective The aim of this study was to investigate communications and interactions between patients and care teams in the delivery of TKR to identify opportunities for digital technology to add value to TKR health care service by enhancing the cocreation of value. Methods A multistakeholder qualitative study of user needs was conducted with Australian stakeholders (N=34): surgeons (n=12), physiotherapists (n=3), patients (n=11), and general practitioners (n=8). Data from focus groups and interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results Encounters between patients and their care teams are information-rich but time-poor. Results showed seven different stages of the TKR journey that starts with referral to a surgeon and ends with a postoperative review at 12 months. Each stage of the journey has different information and communication challenges that can be enhanced by digital technology. Opportunities for digital technology include improved waiting list management, supporting and reinforcing patient retention and recall of information, motivating and supporting rehabilitation, improving patient preparation for hospital stay, and reducing risks and anxiety associated with postoperative wound care. Conclusions Digital technology can add value to patients’ care team communications by enhancing information flow, assisting patient recall and retention of information, improving accessibility and portability of information, tailoring information to individual needs, and by providing patients with tools to engage in their own health care management. For care teams, digital technology can add value through early detection of postoperative complications, proactive surveillance of health data for postoperative patients and patients on waiting lists, higher compliance with rehabilitation programs, and reduced length of stay. Digital technology has the potential to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes, as well as potentially reduce hospital length of stay and the burden of disease associated with postoperative morbidity.
The Relationship Between Code Smells and Traceable Patterns - Are They Measuring the Same Thing?

It is important to maintain software quality as a software system evolves. Managing code smells in source code contributes towards quality software. While metrics have been used to pinpoint code smells in source code, we present an empirical study on the correlation of code smells with class-level (micro pattern) and method-level (nano-pattern) traceable code patterns. This study explores the relationship between code smells and class-level and method-level structural code constructs. We extracted micro patterns at the class level and nano-patterns at the method level from three versions of Apache Tomcat, three versions of Apache CXF and two J2EE web applications namely PersonalBlog and Roller from Stanford SecuriBench and then compared their distributions in code smell versus noncode smell classes and methods. We found that Immutable and Sink micro patterns are more frequent in classes having code smells compared to the noncode smell classes in the applications we analyzed. On the other hand, LocalReader.
Harmony: Holistic messaging middleware for event-driven systems

In this paper, we present Harmony, a holistic messaging middleware for distributed, event-driven systems. Harmony supports various communication paradigms and heterogeneous networks. The key novelty of Harmony is the unified provision of end-to-end quality of service, security, and resiliency, which shields the applications from the underlying network dynamics, failures, and security configurations. We describe the Harmony architecture in the context of cyber-physical business applications and elaborate on the design of its critical system components, including routing, security, and mobility support.
Physical-chemical Characterization of Lignocellulosic Materials of Interest to Bioethanol Production

The knowledge of the chemical composition of biomass feedstocks is very important in order to decide what lignocellulosic material to be used in the industrial process and the associated pretreatment to bioethanol production. In this context, the present work applied an analytical methodology of chemical characterization, developed for sugarcane bagasse, to other biomasses, namely, sugarcane straw, bamboo, bean stalk, residue from the extraction of castor oil, sape grass, wheat straw, African palm rachis, elephant grass and Agave tequilana. Chemical composition (cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin) of the raw materials was determined by the acid hydrolysis (H2SO4 72%) of theses extractives-free materials. Carbohydrates, organic acids and degradation products were determined by HPLC. Lignin and phenolics were analyzed by gravimetry and spectroscopy procedures, respectively. Results showed that, among the materials studied, the sugarcane bagasse had the higher amount of cellulose (43.8%) and the sugarcane straw had the higher amount of hemicellulose (32.4%) justifying the interest of apply these biomasses as raw materials for the production of cellulosic ethanol. Other biomasses presented cellulose composition varying between 31.8 and 41.7 %, hemicellulose between 21.2 and 28.6 %, and lignin from 20.6 to 33.6 %. Extractives showed more abundant in sape grass (18.7 %) and were removed before the composition analysis to avoid interferences in lignin quantification.