Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of ICT and the Application of E-Governance Strategies in Service Delivery by Local Councils in Cameroon: The Case of Local Councils in the Bamenda Municipality

The increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT) by Cameroonians has brought changes in citizen's needs and demands and has raised expectations on how services should be provided. Citizens need to carry out transactions (transactional services) conveniently and obtain accessible, reliable, and sustainable information (information services) from their local government. Unfortunately, this is still far from the reality in some selected local councils in Cameroon, given that they use ICT mainly for administrative and not service delivery purposes. Therefore, this paper's main objective is to establish a link between ICT usage and the empowerment of local councils in the application of e-governance strategies for information and transaction services delivery. The theoretical framework used in the paper included Technology Acceptance, Wider Dissemination, and e-governance Models. The stratified purposive and systematic random sampling techniques were employed to obtain needed data from the Bamenda I, II, and III municipalities in the North West Region. The findings of this paper revealed that a significant number of local councils are already using their ICTs to provide information services. However, none of them so far are using ICT for transactional service delivery purposes. Also, we observed a gap between citizen expectations and local council provision of information and transactional services. This paper found that the use of ICT to apply e-governance strategies would improve local council service delivery in terms of accessibility to information by citizens and sustainability of council information services, also promote transparency in transactions between the council and the citizens, and ease transactions between citizens and local councils in terms of time and cost. Thus, this paper recommends that local councils digitalize manual service delivery processes through their operational IT units. Also, for the Cameroon government to achieve the goals stated in the NDS30 Plan for a Digital Cameroon, it must consider effectively involving local councils in the national digitalization initiatives. This can be done by encouraging them to adapt their information and transactional service delivery procedures to more ICT-based strategies despite the challenges involved.
Correlates of HIV Infection Among Sexually Active Adults in Kenya: A National Population-Based Survey

Objective: To identify factors associated with prevalent HIV in a national HIV survey in Kenya. Methods: The Kenya AIDS Indicator Survey was a nationally representative population-based sero-survey that examined demographic and behavioral factors and serologic testing for HIV, HSV-2 and syphilis in adults aged 15-64 years. We analyzed questionnaire and blood testing data to identify significant correlates of HIV infection among sexually active adults. Results: Of 10,957 eligible women and 8,883 men, we interviewed 10,239 (93%) women and 7,731 (87%) men. We collected blood specimens from 9,049 women and 6,804 men of which 6,447 women and 5,112 men were sexually active during the 12 months prior to the survey. HIV prevalence among sexually active adults was 7.4%. Factors independently associated with HIV among women were region (Nyanza vs Nairobi: adjusted OR [AOR] 1.6, 95%CI 1.1-2.3), number of lifetime sex partners (6-9 vs 0-1 partners: AOR 3.0, 95%CI 1.6-5.9), HSV-2 (AOR 6.5, 95%CI 4.9-8.8), marital status (widowed vs never married: AOR 2.7, 95%CI 1.5-4.8) and consistent condom use with last sex partner (AOR 2.3, 95%CI 1.6-3.4). Among men, correlates of HIV infection were 30-to-39-year-old age group (AOR 5.2, 95%CI 2.6-10.5), number of lifetime sex partners (10+ vs 0-1 partners, AOR 3.5, 95%CI 1.4-9.0), HSV-2 (AOR 4.7, 95%CI 3.2-6.8), syphilis (AOR 2.4, 95%CI 1.4-4.0), consistent condom use with last sex partner (AOR 2.1, 95% CI 1.5-3.1) and lack of circumcision (AOR 4.0, 95%CI 2.8 - 5.5). Conclusion: Kenya’s heterogeneous epidemic will require regional and gender-specific prevention approaches.
Population and Quantitative Genetics of Regulatory Networks

I evolved boolean regulatory networks in a computer simulation. I varied mutation, recombination, the size of the network, and the number of connections per node. I measured the performance of networks and the heritability and epistasis of genetic effects. Networks of intermediate connectivity performed best. The distinction between metabolic and quantitative genetic additivity explained some of the variation in performance. Metabolic additivity describes the interaction between changes in a single network, whereas quantitative genetic additivity measures the consistency of phenotypic effect caused by gene substitution in randomly chosen members of the population. I analysed metabolic additivity by the distribution of epistatic effects of pairs of mutations in individual networks. I measured quantitative genetic additivity by heritability. Highly connected networks had greater metabolic additivity for perturbations to individual networks, but had lower additivity when measured by the average effect of a gene substitution (heritability). The lower heritability of highly connected nets appeared to reduce the effectiveness of recombination in searching evolutionary space. 7 1999 Academic Press
Effect of DA-9701 on Colorectal Distension-Induced Visceral Hypersensitivity in a Rat Model

Background/Aims DA-9701 is a newly developed drug made from the vegetal extracts of Pharbitidis semen and Co-rydalis tuber. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of DA-9701 on colorectal distension (CRD)-induced visceral hypersensitivity in a rat model. Methods Male Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to neonatal colon irritation (CI) using CRD at 1 week after birth (CI group). At 6 weeks after birth, CRD was applied to these rats with a pressure of 20 to 90 mm Hg, and changes in the mean arterial pressure (MAP) were measured at baseline (i.e., without any drug administration) and after the administration of different doses of DA-9701. Results In the absence of DA-9701, the MAP changes after CRD were significantly higher in the CI group than in the control group at all applied pressures. In the control group, MAP changes after CRD were not significantly affected by the administration of DA-9701. In the CI group, however, the administration of DA-9701 resulted in a significant decrease in MAP changes after CRD. The administration of DA-9701 at a dose of 1.0 mg/kg produced a more significant decrease in MAP changes than the 0.3 mg/kg dose. Conclusions The administration of DA-9701 resulted in a significant increase in pain threshold in rats with CRD-induced visceral hypersensitivity.
International Climate Change Financing: The Green Climate Fund (GCF) [June 23, 2011]

Over the past several decades, the United States has delivered financial and technical assistance for climate change activities in the developing world through a variety of bilateral and multilateral programs. The United States and other industrialized countries committed to such, wherein the higher-income countries pledged jointly up to $30 billion in " fast start " climate financing for lower-income countries for the period 2010-2012, and a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020. The Cancun Agreements also proposed that the pledged funds are to be new, additional to previous flows, adequate, predictable, and sustained, and are to come from a wide variety of sources, both public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance. One potential mechanism for mobilizing a share of the proposed international climate financing is the UNFCCC Green Climate Fund (GCF), proposed during the 2009 Conference of Parties (COP) in Copenhagen, Denmark, accepted by Parties during the 2011 COP in Durban, South Africa, and made operational in the summer of 2014. The fund aims to assist developing countries in their efforts to combat climate change through the provision of grants and other concessional financing for mitigation and adaptation projects, programs, policies, and activities. The GCF is capitalized by contributions from donor countries and other sources, potentially including innovative mechanisms and the private sector. The GCF currently complements many of the existing multilateral climate change funds (e.g., the Global Environment Facility, the Climate Investment Funds, and the Adaptation Fund); however, as the official financial mechanism of the UNFCCC, some Parties believe that it may eventually replace or subsume the other funds. The GCF was made operational in the summer of 2014. Parties have called for an immediate capitalization of between $10 billion and $15 billion over the course of the first year. Initial funding came from Germany, France, and a dozen other countries who pledged approximately $2.3 billion during the United Nations Climate Summit in September 2014. The Obama Administration announced a pledge of $3 billion over four years during the G-20 meetings in Australia on November 15, 2014. Notwithstanding these financial pledges, some operational details remain to be clarified. They include what role the GCF would play in providing sustained finance at scale, how it would fit into the existing development assistance and climate financing architecture, whether sources beyond public funding would successfully contribute to it, and how it would allocate and deliver …
Highbrow Films Gather Dust: Time-Inconsistent Preferences and Online DVD Rentals

We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the film rental and return patterns of a sample of online DVD rental customers over a period of four months. We predict and find that should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are held significantly longer than want DVDs (e.g., action films) within customer. Similarly, we also predict and find that people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs are rented before want DVDs. Specifically, a 1.3% increase in the probability of a reversal in preferences (from a baseline rate of 12%) ensues if the first of two sequentially rented movies has more should and fewer want characteristics than the second film. Finally, we find that as the same customers gain more experience with online DVD rentals, the extent to which they hold should films longer than want films decreases. Our results suggest that present bias has a meaningful impact on choice in the field, and that people may learn about their present bias with experience and, as a result, gain the capacity to curb its influence.
Transgenerational induction of defences in animals and plants

60 NATURE | VOL 401 | 2 SEPTEMBER 1999 | www.nature. com reduces the already slim likelihood that the non-occurrence of therians before ,110 Myr is due to a preservational/sampling artefact. Finally, in offering the ®rst well-preserved holotherian dental remains known from the Middle to Late Jurassic of Gondwana, A. mahabo has important paleobiogeographic implications. Mesozoic mammal faunas of Laurasia and Gondwana were long considered to have remained isolated during much of the late Mesozoic; tribosphenidans (regarded as Laurasian in origin) were thought to have been excluded from the southern continents until latest Cretaceous or early Paleocene time, because Mesozoic tribosphenidans remained undiscovered in Gondwana. To the contrary, recent ®nds in Morocco and Australia indicate the occurrence of tribosphenidans on the southern continents as early as the earliest Cretaceous (that is, as early in Gondwana as in Laurasia). The discovery of A. mahabo inverts this biogeographic scenario even further, showing tribosphenidans to have appeared in Gondwana by the Middle Jurassic. They may have remained isolated there until earliest Cretaceous time, when they appear in North Africa, Europe and Asia. M
Co-occurrence Contexts for Noun Compound Interpretation

Contextual information extracted from corpora is frequently used to model semantic similarity. We discuss distinct classes of context types and compare their effectiveness for compound noun interpretation. Contexts corresponding to word-word similarity perform better than contexts corresponding to relation similarity, even when relational co-occurrences are extracted from a much larger corpus. Combining word-similarity and relation-similarity kernels further improves SVM classification performance.
Aalborg Universitet DNA methylation analysis of BRD 1 promoter regions and the schizophrenia rs 138880 risk allele

The bromodomain containing 1 gene, BRD1 is essential for embryogenesis and CNS development. It encodes a protein that participates in histone modifying complexes and thereby regulates the expression of a large number of genes. Genetic variants in the BRD1 locus show association with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and risk alleles in the promoter region correlate with reduced BRD1 expression. Insights into the transcriptional regulation of BRD1 and the pathogenic mechanisms associated with BRD1 risk variants, however, remain sparse. By studying transcripts in human HeLa and SH-SY5Y cells we provide evidence for differences in relative expression of BRD1 transcripts with three alternative 5’ UTRs (exon 1C, 1B, and 1A). We further show that expression of these transcript variants covaries negatively with DNA methylation proportions in their upstream promoter regions suggesting that promoter usage might be regulated by DNA methylation. In line with findings that the risk allele of the rs138880 SNP in the BRD1 promoter region correlates with reduced BRD1 expression, we find that it is also associated with moderate regional BRD1 promoter hypermethylation in both adipose tissue and blood. Importantly, we demonstrate by inspecting available DNA methylation and expression data that these regions undergo changes in methylation during fetal brain development and that differences in their methylation proportions in fetal compared to postnatal frontal cortex correlate significantly with BRD1 expression. These findings suggest that BRD1 may be dysregulated in both the developing and mature brain of risk allele carriers. Finally, we demonstrate that commonly used mood stabilizers Lithium, Valproate, and Carbamazepine affect the expression of BRD1 in SH-SY5Y cells. Altogether this study indicates a link between genetic risk and epigenetic dysregulation of BRD1 which raises interesting perspectives for targeting the mechanisms
Effects of Limestone and Irrigation Level on Salt Levels and pH in Potting Media

Ground limestone (CaCO3) was applied at 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100 g/9.5-liter pot using a 1 peat : 1 perlite : 1 vermiculite (by volume) medium having an initial pH of 4.52 and an electrical conductivity (EC) of 0.2 dS·m–1. Muskmelon (Cucumis melo var. reticulatus) were grown for 56 days in the medium that had been fertilized. Irrigations were applied as the crop grew, with the levels used consisting of 0%, 20%, 40%, or 60% in excess of the amount required to bring all pots to saturation. The water had a pH of 7.44 to 7.95 and an EC from 1.5 to 1.8 dS·m–1. Measurements were taken at each irrigation. Leachate pH increased with increasing rate of limestone application, but the rate of increase with increasing limestone rate declined, with maximum benefit occurring at 75 g/pot. Irrigtation level did not affect leachate pH, which indicates a buffering capacity of the medium that was not readily diluted. Increasing limestone application decreased leachate EC, which suggests retention of the salts from the irrigation water. This retention resulted in a net accumulation of salts in the medium that could not be completely offset by the increased leaching produced as irrigation levels increased.
Holonomy Quantization of Moduli Spaces & Grothendieck Groups

Gelfand's charecterization of a topological space M by the duality relationship of M and $\mathcal{A} = \mathcal{F}(M)$, the commutative algebra of functions on this space has deep implications including the development of spectral calculas by Connes . We investigate this scheme in this paper in the context of Monopole Moduli Space $\mathcal{M}$ using Seiberg-Witten Equations. A observation has been made here that the methods of holonomy quantization using graphs can be construed to construct a C* algebra corresponding to the loop space of the Moduli. A map is thereby conjectured with the corresponding projectors of the algebra with the moduli space.
On Indexing Multidimensional Data In A P 2 P Context

Based on their remarkable properties (fault tolerance, scalability, decentralization), P2P systems tend to be largely accepted as a common support for deploying massively distributed data management applications. Some of the existing P2P systems are built over hybrid networks where certain peers are specialized in indexing. Others make use of DHTs as common support for data indexing. However, only a few solutions have been proposed to solve the problem of multidimensional data indexing. Many of these suffer from severe limitations regarding load balancing and scalability of the data indexed (data pieces with many dimensions are not well indexed). In this paper we propose a new approach for indexing multidimensional data using a P2P architecture. It is based on a fault tolerant and query optimal overlay network built from a skip-graph. We index data pieces of many dimensions as vectors and we adopt the polyhedral algebra to cluster values with similar properties. For a continuous distribution of values to peers, we use a hierarchical overlay network (that we call routing layer). At the end of the paper, we offer an exhaustive evaluation that compares the main properties of our architecture against similar systems.
A New Up Bound of Spacing Between Pilot Symbols over Fading Channels in PSAM Systems

This paper gives a new way to employ the second order characteristics of fading channels, i.e., the level crossing rate and average fading duration. The purpose of the paper is to define a new up bound of the spacing between pilot symbols by using level crossing rate and average fading duration to improve the spectral efficiency in pilot symbol assisted modulation systems. And find an up bound to make the system has both efficiency and reliability. It has also been proved that the new definition can be used as an adaptive adjustment of pilot symbols when the transmitter knows the channel state information in an adaptive system.
Local Utilization of Metacresolsulfonic Acid Combined with Streptomycin in the Treatment of Actinomycosis

Abstract: The effectiveness of combining metacresolsufonic acid with streptomycin in the treatment of actinomycosis, diagnosed either clinically or in the laboratory, was evaluated in 12 bovines and 2 equines. Eighty‐seven percent of treated animals were considered clinically cured and did not show any signs of relapse after a six‐month follow‐up period. Therapeutic diagnosis by clinical observation was the procedure of choice when it was not possible to obtain laboratory diagnosis.
Group tracking on dynamic networks

This paper develops a Bayesian method for inferring the evolution of hidden groups from the signatures they leave in dynamic network data. Such methods are well established for detecting groups in static networks. The dynamic generalization is based on a Markov process model for joint group-graph evolution, which is used to produce a sequential Bayesian filter for the probabilities of the group membership hypotheses. This filter is demonstrated in a simple scenario to show how both positive information (changes in network structure) and negative information (periods of no change) may be combined to track group membership optimally.
Training Recurrent Neural Networks by Diffusion

This work presents a new algorithm for training recurrent neural networks (although ideas are applicable to feedforward networks as well). The algorithm is derived from a theory in nonconvex optimization related to the diffusion equation. The contributions made in this work are two fold. First, we show how some seemingly disconnected mechanisms used in deep learning such as smart initialization, annealed learning rate, layerwise pretraining, and noise injection (as done in dropout and SGD) arise naturally and automatically from this framework, without manually crafting them into the algorithms. Second, we present some preliminary results on comparing the proposed method against SGD. It turns out that the new algorithm can achieve similar level of generalization accuracy of SGD in much fewer number of epochs.
Superior Inhibitory Control and Resistance to Mental Fatigue in Professional Road Cyclists

Purpose Given the important role of the brain in regulating endurance performance, this comparative study sought to determine whether professional road cyclists have superior inhibitory control and resistance to mental fatigue compared to recreational road cyclists. Methods After preliminary testing and familiarization, eleven professional and nine recreational road cyclists visited the lab on two occasions to complete a modified incongruent colour-word Stroop task (a cognitive task requiring inhibitory control) for 30 min (mental exertion condition), or an easy cognitive task for 10 min (control condition) in a randomized, counterbalanced cross-over order. After each cognitive task, participants completed a 20-min time trial on a cycle ergometer. During the time trial, heart rate, blood lactate concentration, and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded. Results The professional cyclists completed more correct responses during the Stroop task than the recreational cyclists (705±68 vs 576±74, p = 0.001). During the time trial, the recreational cyclists produced a lower mean power output in the mental exertion condition compared to the control condition (216±33 vs 226±25 W, p = 0.014). There was no difference between conditions for the professional cyclists (323±42 vs 326±35 W, p = 0.502). Heart rate, blood lactate concentration, and RPE were not significantly different between the mental exertion and control conditions in both groups. Conclusion The professional cyclists exhibited superior performance during the Stroop task which is indicative of stronger inhibitory control than the recreational cyclists. The professional cyclists also displayed a greater resistance to the negative effects of mental fatigue as demonstrated by no significant differences in perception of effort and time trial performance between the mental exertion and control conditions. These findings suggest that inhibitory control and resistance to mental fatigue may contribute to successful road cycling performance. These psychobiological characteristics may be either genetic and/or developed through the training and lifestyle of professional road cyclists.
Cloning and characterization of microRNAs from moss

Tzahi Arazi, Mali Talmor-Neiman, Ran Stav, Maike Riese, Peter Huijser and David C. Baulcombe Department of Ornamental Horticulture, Agricultural Research Organization, The Volcani Center, PO Box 6, Bet Dagan 50250, Israel, Department of Molecular Plant Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Carl-von-Linné-Weg 10, D-50829 Cologne, Germany, and The Sainsbury Laboratory, Colney Lane, Norwich NR4 7UH, UK
Decomposition rank and Z-stability

We show that separable, simple, unital C*-algebras with finite decomposition rank absorb the Jiang-Su algebra Z tensorially. This has a number of consequences for Elliott's program to classify nuclear C*-algebras by their K-theory data. In particular, it completes the classification of C*-algebras associated to uniquely ergodic, smooth, minimal dynamical systems by their ordered K-groups.