Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Vertical Integration Benefit Cotton Farmers? Encouraging Evidence from an Experiment in Andhra Pradesh

Cotton production in India needs to be reorganized in order to increase productivity, reduce cost of production, and secure stable returns to the farmers. Cotton is produced in India under varied conditions and entails certain heterogeneity in terms of yield, cost and return. The common cause of concern is how to reduce the ever rising costs of production and increase value addition to the farmer. Industry needs extra long staple and clean cotton for value-added production. In the presence of anonymous agents working through spot markets, production decisions suffer from inefficiencies owing to information asymmetry and bounded rationality. There is a need for an informed coordinating agent between farmer and other input providers on the one side, and to supply managerial technology and link up final buyer, on the other. Such vertical integration strategies are capable of avoiding the intermediate channels of middlemen, raising direct benefits by enhancing yield and quality and producing internal economies. This paper sets out to analyze the e-safal experiment in six villages of Andhra Pradesh in the light of such context of vertical integration.
The severe combined immunodeficient (SCID) mouse as a model for the study of autoimmune diseases

There are no readily available in vivo models to study immune cells from humans with autoimmune diseases. SCID mice, which virtually lack both T and B lymphocytes and accept xenogeneic cells, have been used during the last 5 years to provide a milieu for lymphocytes isolated from individuals with various autoimmune diseases, or for lymphocytes from mice that have a systemic lupus erythematosus‐like syndrome. Whilst human autoantibodies to organ antigens have been demonstrated in most SCID mice engrafted with human lymphocytes from the peripheral blood or the target organ, inflammation of the mouse target organ has not generally been observed. This review critically analyses experiments in this area reported so far. Some pitfalls of the SCID mouse model of human autoimmune diseases are mentioned, and future experiments to study mouse and human autoimmunity with this model are proposed.
Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education 2013 Educational Outcomes

An initiative of the Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education (formerly the Center for the Advancement of Pharmaceutical Education) (CAPE), the CAPE Educational Outcomes are intended to be the target toward which the evolving pharmacy curriculum should be aimed. Their development was guided by an advisory panel composed of educators and practitioners nominated for participation by practitioner organizations. CAPE 2013 represents the fourth iteration of the Educational Outcomes, preceded by CAPE 1992, CAPE 1998 and CAPE 2004 respectively. The CAPE 2013 Educational Outcomes were released at the AACP July 2013 Annual meeting and have been revised to include 4 broad domains, 15 subdomains, and example learning objectives.
Radionucleide tests for the assessment of intestinal permeability

Abstract. 14C labelled‐D‐mannitol and aquo (ethylenediaminetriacetoacetic acid)51 chromium (III) (51Cr EDTA) have been evaluated as markers of intestinal permeability in twenty‐four healthy control subjects, sixteen patients with recently diagnosed coeliac disease and twenty subjects with coeliac disease in remission on a gluten‐free diet. The percentage excretion of 14C mannitol in urine collected for 6 h was significantly less in patients with coeliac disease (mean 6·7%) than controls (mean 13·5%). Conversely the excretion of 51Cr EDTA was significantly greater in patients with coeliac disease (mean 1·23%) compared with controls (mean 0·28%). The mean ratio of the percentage excretion of 51Cr to the percentage excretion of 14C was 0·29 in patients with untreated coeliac disease compared with 0023 for healthy control subjects (P < 0001). Patients with untreated coeliac disease were clearly separated from control subjects by use of the 51Cr EDTA: 14C mannitol ratio but not by the excretion of independent markers.
MEASURING RELIABILITY (OR RISK) COHERENTLY

Power system reliability is concerned with possibility of not having enough generation capacity to meet load demand, or loss of load, whereas financial risk assessment is concerned with possibility of losing invest- ment. Power system reliability has been measured in terms of percentage of reserve, largest contingency, loss of load probability (LOLP), loss of load expectation (LOLE), expected unserved energy (EUE), etc. and financial risk has been measured in terms of variance, probability of loss (PoL), Value-at-Risk (VaR), Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), etc. Recently in finance, mathematical properties of measures of risk have been scrutinized and coherency is established as the fundamental requirement for a desirable measure of risk. CVaR is a coherent measure. We propose to introduce a corresponding measure of reliability, called Conditional Reserve-at-Risk, as a coherent measure of reliability.
nformation integration in chemical process engineering based on emantic technologies

During the design phase of a chemical plant, information is created by various software tools and stored in heterogeneous formats, such as technical documents, CAE databases, or simulation files. Eventually, these scattered information items need to be merged and consolidated. However, there is no efficient computer support for this task available today. While existing technologies like XML are capable of handling the structural and syntactic differences between the heterogeneous formats, these technologies
Isolation And Characterization Of EndophyticBacteria Of Coffee Plants And Their Potential InCaffeine Degradation

The plant kingdom is colonized by a diverse array of endophytic bacteria, which form a non-pathogenic relationship with their hosts. Endophytic bacteria may confer benefits to the plant, and the benefits may be reciprocal, resulting in an enhanced symbiotic system for specific plant characteristics. The objective of this study was to isolate endophytic bacteria from coffee (Coffea arabica and C. robusta) and evaluate their potential in degrading caffeine. The isolates were identified by partial 16S rDNA sequence analysis and by FAME and the analysis of biodegradation of caffeine was carried out by HPLC. As a result, 252 bacterial strains were isolated, with most of them belonging to the species Bacillus lentimorbus, B. megaterium, B. subtilis, B. cereus, Pseudomonas putida, P. chlororaphis, Pantoea ananatis, P. agglomerans, Stenotrophomonas malthophilia, Kluyvera cryocrescens, Kocuria kristinae etc. Approximately 20% of the bacterial strains showed the ability to grow in the presence of high concentrations (5.000 mg.L) of caffeine and two Pseudomonas putida strains completely degraded the alkaloid, showing the potential of endophytic bacteria in decaffeination processes.
Cysteine Supplementation Prevents Unweighting-Induced Ubiquitination in Association with Redox Regulation in Rat Skeletal Muscle

Abstract We have previously reported that spaceflight and tail suspension enhanced degradation of rat myosin heavy chain (MHC) in association with activation of a ubiquitindependent proteolytic pathway [Ikemoto et al., FASEB J. 15 (2001), 1279 1281]. To elucidate whether the ubiquitination is accompanied by oxidative stress, we measured markers for oxidative stress, such as thiobarbituric acidreactive substance (TBARS) and glutathione disulfide (GSSG), in gastrocnemius muscle of tailsuspended rats. Glutathione (GSH) concentration in the muscle significantly decreased from day 5 and reached a minimum value on day 10. Tail suspension reciprocally increased concentrations of TBARS and GSSG in parallel with enhancement of protein ubiquitination, suggesting that oxidative stress may play an important role in protein ubiquitination caused by tail suspension. To prevent ubiquitination associated with oxidative stress, we also administered an antioxidative nutrient, cysteine, to tailsuspended rats. Intragastric supplementation of 140 mg/rat of cysteine for 2 weeks or longer normalized the ratio of GSH to GSSG in the muscle and suppressed protein ubiquitination and MHC fragmentation, compared with supplementation of the equimolar amount of alanine. The cysteine supplementation significantly suppressed the loss of hindlimb muscle mass. Our results suggest that supplementation of antioxidative nutrients, such as cysteine, may be beneficial for preventing ubiquitination of muscle proteins caused by unweighting.
Imbalance production between interleukin-1beta (IL-1beta) and IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra) in bronchial asthma.

Genes of the IL-1 family encode three different peptides, IL-1alpha, IL-1beta, and IL-1Ra, respectively. IL-1 operates through IL-1RI, and is involved in airway inflammation in asthmatic subjects, whereas IL-1Ra appears to be a specific competitive inhibitor of IL-1. All genes are on chromosome 2q12-21 where genomewide searches have identified linkage for asthma. To test whether variants of IL-1 relate to asthma, we conducted a genetic association study in a Japanese population. We show that the A2 allele of IL1RN (encoding IL-1Ra) associates with nonatopic asthma [OR = 5.71, 95% CI: 1.63-19. 8, Pc = 0.007]. Both atopic and nonatopic asthmatics with the A2 allele had significantly lower serum IL-1Ra levels in both types of asthmatics. Peripheral blood cells from asthmatics with A2 alleles, however, produced as much IL-1 as did those with A1 homozygotes. Since Th1 and Th2 cytokines differentially regulate the ratio between IL-1beta and IL-1Ra, these findings suggest that dysregulation of IL-1beta/IL-1Ra, probably due to interaction between epithelium and immuno-competent cells in the airway, is important in asthma inflammation.
Attitudes to genetically modified food over time: How trust in organizations and the media cycle predict support

This research examined public opinion toward genetically modified plants and animals for food, and how trust in organizations and media coverage explained attitudes toward these organisms. Nationally representative samples (N = 8821) over 10 years showed Australians were less positive toward genetically modified animals compared to genetically modified plants for food, especially in years where media coverage was high. Structural equation modeling found that positive attitudes toward different genetically modified organisms for food were significantly associated with higher trust in scientists and regulators (e.g. governments), and with lower trust in watchdogs (e.g. environmental movement). Public trust in scientists and watchdogs was a stronger predictor of attitudes toward the use of genetically modified plants for food than animals, but only when media coverage was low. Results are discussed regarding the moral acceptability of genetically modified organisms for food, the media’s role in shaping public opinion, and the role public trust in organizations has on attitudes toward genetically modified organisms.
Intraindustry Volatility Spillovers in the MENA Region

ABSTRACT The 2007 global financial crisis had repercussions not only in mature capital markets but also in emerging markets, including that of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. An accurate characterization of volatility spillover in the MENA region will have direct implications for financial hedging, portfolio management, and asset allocation, and, most important, in designing policies to mitigate the effects of possible contagion. In this article, we examine inter-MENA and from-the-world-to-MENA return volatility spillovers, at both the market and sectoral levels, for the period January 2008–December 2012.
Specified critical period of different congenital abnormalities: A new approach for human teratological studies

ABSTRACT The first trimester has been evaluated at different exposures as the critical period of congenital abnormalities. However, the first trimester concept has no scientific basis because environmental agents (teratogens) cannot induce congenital abnormalities during the first gestational month calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period. In addition, the critical period of some congenital abnormalities, for example, hypospadias occurs after the first trimester). Different congenital abnormalities have different critical periods and computer‐based evaluation programs help to evaluate different specified congenital abnormalities according to their specific critical periods separately. Thus, this new and feasible approach is recommended for epidemiological and clinical studies in the future after an international consensus in the specified critical periods of different congenital abnormalities. The author of this Commentary proposes a detailed database for this approach for discussion because a consensus may be achieved only after the confirmation or modification of these critical periods.
Combining 3D Convolutional Neural Networks with Transfer Learning by Supervised Pre-Training for Facial Micro-Expression Recognition

SUMMARY Facial micro-expression is momentary and subtle facial reactions, and it is still challenging to automatically recognize facial micro-expression with high accuracy in practical applications. Extracting spatiotemporal features from facial image sequences is essential for facial micro-expression recognition. In this paper, we employed 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D-CNNs) for self-learning feature extraction to represent facial micro-expression e ﬀ ectively, since the 3D-CNNs could well extract the spatiotemporal features from facial image sequences. Moreover, transfer learning was utilized to deal with the problem of insuf-ﬁcient samples in the facial micro-expression database. We primarily pre-trained the 3D-CNNs on normal facial expression database Oulu-CASIA by supervised learning, then the pre-trained model was e ﬀ ectively transferred to the target domain, which was the facial micro-expression recognition task. The proposed method was evaluated on two available facial micro-expression datasets, i.e. CASME II and SMIC-HS. We obtained the overall accuracy of 97.6% on CASME II, and 97.4% on SMIC, which were 3.4% and 1.6% higher than the 3D-CNNs model without transfer learning, respectively. And the experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
The BBN Byblos Japanese OCR system

The BBN Byblos OCR system implements a script-independent methodology for OCR using hidden Markov models (HMMs). We have successfully ported the system to Arabic, Pashto, English, and Chinese. We discuss our effort in configuring the system to perform recognition of noisy machine printed Japanese documents. The data for our experimentation was taken from the University of Washington (UW-II) Japanese OCR corpus and the LDC Japanese Business News Supplement corpus. We evaluated the performance of a whole-character configuration in which each character was modeled using a separate HMM. As in the case of our Chinese OCR system [P. Natarajan et al., 2001], we also used a sub-character modeling approach [P. Natarajan et al., 2003] in which each Japanese character was spelled using a shared set of automatically generated sub-characters. We experimentally evaluated the performance of different sub-character clusters as well as different HMM topologies to identify the best overall system configuration. On a fair test using noisy/degraded images from the UW-II corpus, the best sub-character configuration resulted in a character error rate of 20.13%, On relatively cleaner data, consisting of scanned newspaper images, the system delivered an error rate of 7.85%. Using a whole-character configuration the corresponding error rates were 11.94% and 4.55% respectively.
Preadipocyte Conversion to Macrophage

Preadipocytes are present throughout adult life in adipose tissues and can proliferate and differentiate into mature adipocytes according to the energy balance. An increasing number of reports demonstrate that cells from adipose lineages (preadipocytes and adipocytes) and macrophages share numerous functional or antigenic properties. No large scale comparison reflecting the phenotype complexity has been performed between these different cell types until now. We used profiling analysis to define the common features shared by preadipocyte, adipocyte, and macrophage populations. Our analysis showed that the preadipocyte profile is surprisingly closer to the macrophage than to the adipocyte profile. From these data, we hypothesized that in a macrophage environment preadipocytes could effectively be converted into macrophages. We injected labeled stroma-vascular cells isolated from mouse white adipose tissue or 3T3-L1 preadipocyte cell line into the peritoneal cavity of nude mice and investigated changes in their phenotype. Preadipocytes rapidly and massively acquired high phagocytic activity and index. 60–70% of preadipocytes also expressed five macrophage-specific antigens: F4/80, Mac-1, CD80, CD86, and CD45. These values were similar to those observed for peritoneal macrophages.In vitro experiments showed that cell-to-cell contact between preadipocytes and peritoneal macrophages partially induced this preadipocyte phenotype conversion. Overall, these results suggest that preadipocyte and macrophage phenotypes are very similar and that preadipocytes have the potential to be very efficiently and rapidly converted into macrophages. This work emphasizes the great cellular plasticity of adipose precursors and reinforces the link between adipose tissue and innate immunity processes.
Fingolimod for relapsing multiple sclerosis: an update

Importance of the field: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common inflammatory demyelinating disease of the CNS. There is a large unmet need for new disease-modifying therapies with improved convenience, safety and efficacy. Fingolimod is an oral sphingosine-1-phosphase (S1P) receptor modulator under clinical investigation for the treatment of relapsing-remitting and primary progressive MS. Areas covered in this review: This review provides an update on the mechanism of action, pharmacological properties and efficacy and safety of fingolimod in patients with relapsing MS, with a particular emphasis on clinical trials. What the reader will gain: The reader will gain a comprehensive overview of the mechanism of action of fingolimod, particularly how the drug inhibits lymphocyte egress from secondary lymphoid organs by modulation of S1P receptors, and its pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties. Results from Phase II studies and pivotal Phase III trials of fingolimod for relapsing MS are discussed in depth. Take home message: Randomized clinical trials have demonstrated the superior efficacy of fingolimod in reducing relapse rates and MRI measures of disease activity, as compared with placebo and intramuscular IFN-β-1a. Fingolimod also lowered the risk of disability progression compared with placebo. Adverse events included bradycardia and atrioventricular block, respiratory and herpesvirus infections, increased liver enzyme levels, hypertension and macular edema. Fingolimod 0.5 mg seems to provide the best risk–benefit ratio.
Brachyury‐downstream notochord genes and convergent extension in Ciona intestinalis embryos

Formation of the chordate body is accomplished by a complex set of morphogenetic movements including convergent extension of notochord cells. In the ascidian Ciona intestinalis, Brachyury plays a key role in the formation of the notochord, and more than 30 Bra‐downstream notochord genes have been identified. In the present study, we examined the effects of functional suppression of nine Bra‐downstream notochord genes, which include Ci‐PTP, Ci‐ACL, Ci‐prickle, Ci‐netrin, Ci‐trop, Ci‐Noto3, Ci‐ASAK, Ci‐ERM and Ci‐pellino. When the function of the first two genes (Ci‐PTP and Ci‐ACL) was suppressed with specific morpholinos, the notochord cells failed to converge, while functional suppression of Ci‐prickle resulted in a failure of intercalation, and therefore the cells in these three types of embryo remained in the mid‐dorsal region of the embryo. Functional suppression of the next four genes (Ci‐netrin, Ci‐trop, Ci‐Noto3 and Ci‐ASAK) resulted in the partial defect of intercalation, and the notochord did not consist of a single row. In addition, when the function of the last two genes (Ci‐ERM and Ci‐pellino) was suppressed, notochord cells failed to elongate in the embryo, even though convergence/extension took place normally. These results indicate that many Bra‐downstream notochord genes are involved in convergence/extension of the embryo.
Progesterone receptor Localization and Isoforms in Myometrium, Decidua, and Fetal Membranes From Rhesus Macaques: Evidence for Function Progresterone Withdrawal at Parturtion

Objective: It is not known whether withdrawal of progesterone (P) action is a prerequisite for parturition in women or in nonhuman primates because concentrations of circulating progesterone or progesterone receptors (PR) in myometrium and decidua do not decrease before delivery. To examine this potentially important regulatory mechanism, we determined PR isoforms, PR localization, and mRNA in myometrium, decidua, and fetal membranes from rhesus monkeys during pregnancy and in spontaneous labor at term. Methods: Gestational tissues were obtained midpregnancy (day 80-100), late pregnancy (day 130-145), and during spontaneous labor at term (day 161-167). Samples of rhesus monkey myometrium, decidua, chorion-decidua, and amnion were collected and analyzed for total nuclear and cytosolic PR by competitive binding assay. Progesterone receptor isoforms were identified and quantified by Western blot analysis, and PR mRNA was determined by a specific ribonuclease protection assay. Nuclear PR was localized by immunohistochemistry with monoclonal anti-PR (JZB39) after microwave stabilization. Results: Myometrium and decidua showed no change in total PR during pregnancy and labor. Nuclear PR was not detected in fetal membranes by binding assay but was localized in amnion epithelial and mesenchymal cells and in chorion laeve cytotrophoblasts by immunohistochemistry. Staining for PR was substantially less by serial antibody dilution in fetal membranes than in decidua. Message for PR was confirmed in all tissues analyzed. A significant (P < .05) shift in the ratio of PR isoforms (from PR-B dominance at midpregnancy to PR-A dominance in labor) was observed in myometrium but not in decidua. Both PR-A and PR-B isoforms and PR nuclear staining were nearly undetectable in amnion obtained during labor. Conclusion: A shift to PR-A dominance in myometrium at term together with a loss of PR in fetal membranes provides evidence for a functional progesterone withdrawal mechanism, which may facilitate the initiation of parturition in primates.