Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Abundance and Spatial Dispersion of Rice Stem Borer Species in Kahama, Tanzania

Species diversity, abundance, and dispersion of rice stem borers in framer’s fields were studied in four major rice growing areas of Kahama District. Stem borer larvae were extracted from the damaged tillers in 16 quadrants established in each field. Adult Moths were trapped by light traps and collected in vials for identification. Results indicated the presence of Chilo partellus, Maliarpha separatella, and Sesamia calamistis in all study areas. The most abundant species was C. partellus (48.6%) followed by M. separatella (35.4%) and S. calamistis was least abundant (16.1%). Stem borers dispersion was aggregated along the edges of rice fields in three locations (wards) namely: Bulige, Chela, and Ngaya. The dispersion in the fourth ward, Kashishi was uniform as established from two of the three dispersion indices tested. Further studies would be required to establish the available alternative hosts, the extent of economic losses and the distribution of rice stem borers in the rest of the Lake zone of Tanzania.
Dietary Intake of One-Carbon Metabolism–Related Nutrients and Pancreatic Cancer Risk: The Singapore Chinese Health Study

Background: Nutrients involved in one-carbon metabolism are hypothesized to protect against pancreatic cancer development. Methods: The Singapore Chinese Health Study database was used to prospectively examine the association between intake of one-carbon metabolism–related nutrients and pancreatic cancer risk. Between 1993 and 1998, 63,257 men and women ages 45 to 74 years were enrolled into the cohort. The daily intakes of the following one-carbon metabolism–related nutrients were assessed at enrollment using a 165-item food frequency questionnaire: betaine, choline, folate, and vitamins B2, B6, and B12. Multivariable HRs and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for pancreatic cancer risk associated with dietary intakes of one-carbon metabolism–related nutrients were calculated. Results: As of December 2013, 271 incident pancreatic cancer cases were identified during an average of 16.3 years of follow-up. Higher intakes of vitamin B6 and choline were associated with statistically significant decreases in the risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Compared with the lowest quartile, HRs (95% CIs) for the highest quartiles of vitamin B6 and choline were 0.52 (0.36–0.74; P trend = 0.001) and 0.67 (0.48–0.93; P trend = 0.04), respectively. There were no clear associations between the other one-carbon metabolism–related nutrients and pancreatic cancer risk. Conclusion: Our study suggests that higher intake of vitamin B6 and choline may lower the risk of pancreatic cancer. Impact: Our prospective findings are consistent with the in vivo evidence for protective roles of vitamin B6 and choline on pancreatic cancer development. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 25(2); 417–24. ©2015 AACR.
Csr and Developing Countries What Scope for Government Action? Corporate Social Responsibility Department of Economic and Social Affairs

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) aims both to examine the role of business in society, and to maximise the positive societal outcomes of business activity. In practice, much of the business activity that has so far been labelled 'CSR' has been driven by the concerns of investors, companies, campaign groups and consumers based in the world's richest countries. National CSR agendas in middle and low-income countries have been less visible internationally, and have often not been labelled 'CSR'. The result has been CSR practices that are largely framed in rich countries, then internationalized and transferred to other businesses and social settings through international trade, investment, and development assistance. The strategic challenge for governments at national and local levels is how best to shape an agenda that has been largely market-driven and responsive to concerns of rich country stakeholders. Over the past five years or so, governments, companies and NGOs in many middle-and-low-income countries have accelerated a process of adapta-At its broadest, CSR can be defined as the overall contribution of business to sustainable development — it is in that sense that it is used here. Defining corporate social responsibility in more detail than this remains a vexed issue. In practice views differ based on two factors. First, the extent to which importance is placed on the centrality of the 'finan-cial business case' for responsible business behaviour in defining the scope of CSR practices — i.e. the extent to which tangible benefits to companies must be demonstrable. Secondly, the extent to which government is seen to have a role in framing the agenda — and how. A minimum standard for CSR might be that businesses fulfil their legal obligations or, if laws or enforcement are lacking, that they 'do no harm'. A median approach goes beyond compliance, calling for businesses to do their best, where a 'business case' can be made, to contribute positively to sustainable development by addressing their social and environmental impacts, and potentially also through social or community investments. A maximum standard points toward the active alignment of internal business goals with externally set societal goals (those that support sustainable development). Public policy and public sector actors in middle and low-income countries are increasingly confronted with issues related to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This paper presents the range of opportunities that exist for them to mitigate negative impacts of CSR but also to harness its potential …
Successive refinement with cribbing decoders and its channel coding duals

We study cooperation in multi terminal source coding models involving successive refinement. Specifically, we study the case of a single encoder and two decoders, where the encoder provides a common description to both the decoders and a private description to only one of the decoders. The decoders cooperate via cribbing, i.e., the decoder with access only to the common description is allowed to observe, in addition, a deterministic function of the reconstruction symbols produced by the other. We characterize the fundamental performance limits in the respective settings of non-causal, strictly-causal and causal cribbing. We use a new coding scheme, referred to as Forward Encoding and Block Markov Decoding, which is a variant of one recently used by Cuff and Zhao for coordination via implicit communication. Finally, we use the insight gained to introduce and solve some dual channel coding scenarios involving Multiple Access Channels with cribbing.
Rainbowfish: A Succinct Colored de Bruijn Graph Representation

The colored de Bruijn graph— a variant of the de Bruijn graph which associates each edge (i.e., k-mer) with some set of colors — is an increasingly important combinatorial structure in computational biology. Iqbal et al. demonstrated the utility of this structure for representing and assembling a collection (pop-ulation) of genomes, and showed how it can be used to accurately detect genetic variants. Muggli et al. introduced VARI, a representation of the colored de Bruijn graph that adopts the BOSS representation for the de Bruijn graph topology and achieves considerable savings in space over Cortex, albeit with some sacrifice in speed. The memory-efficient representation of VARI allows the colored de Bruijn graph to be constructed and analyzed for large datasets, beyond what is possible with Cortex. In this paper, we introduce Rainbowfish, a succinct representation of the color information of the colored de Bruijn graph that reduces the space usage even further. Our representation also uses BOSS to represent the de Bruijn graph, but decomposes the color sets based on an equivalence relation and exploits the inherent skewness in the distribution of these color sets. The Rainbowfish representation is compressed based on the 0th-order entropy of the color sets, which can lead to a significant reduction in the space required to store the relevant information for each edge. In practice, Rainbowfish achieves up to a 20 × improvement in space over VARI. Rainbowfish is written in C++11 and is available at https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/rainbowfish.
Empiric Potassium Supplementation and Increased Survival in Users of Loop Diuretics

Background The effectiveness of the clinical strategy of empiric potassium supplementation in reducing the frequency of adverse clinical outcomes in patients receiving loop diuretics is unknown. We sought to examine the association between empiric potassium supplementation and 1) all-cause death and 2) outpatient-originating sudden cardiac death (SD) and ventricular arrhythmia (VA) among new starters of loop diuretics, stratified on initial loop diuretic dose. Methods We conducted a one-to-one propensity score-matched cohort study using 1999–2007 US Medicaid claims from five states. Empiric potassium supplementation was defined as a potassium prescription on the day of or the day after the initial loop diuretic prescription. Death, the primary outcome, was ascertained from the Social Security Administration Death Master File; SD/VA, the secondary outcome, from incident, first-listed emergency department or principal inpatient SD/VA discharge diagnoses (positive predictive value = 85%). Results We identified 654,060 persons who met eligibility criteria and initiated therapy with a loop diuretic, 27% of whom received empiric potassium supplementation (N = 179,436) and 73% of whom did not (N = 474,624). The matched hazard ratio for empiric potassium supplementation was 0.93 (95% confidence interval, 0.89–0.98, p = 0.003) for all-cause death. Stratifying on initial furosemide dose, hazard ratios for empiric potassium supplementation with furosemide <40 and ≥40 milligrams/day were 0.93 (0.86–1.00, p = 0.050) and 0.84 (0.79–0.89, p<0.0001). The matched hazard ratio for empiric potassium supplementation was 1.02 (0.83–1.24, p = 0.879) for SD/VA. Conclusions Empiric potassium supplementation upon initiation of a loop diuretic appears to be associated with improved survival, with a greater apparent benefit seen with higher diuretic dose. If confirmed, these findings support the use of empiric potassium supplementation upon initiation of a loop diuretic.
Techniques for Assessing Phylogenetic Branch Support: A Performance Study

The inference of evolutionary relationships is usually aid ed by a reconstruction method which is expected to produce a reasonably accurate estimation of the true evolutionary history. However, various factors are known to impede the reconstruction process and result in inaccurate estimates of the true evolutionary relationships. Detecting and removing errors (wrong branches) from tree estimates bear great significance on the results of phylogenetic analyses. Methods have been devised for assessing the support of (or confidence in) phylogenetic tree branches, wh ich is one way of quantifying inaccuracies in trees. In this paper, we study, via simulations, the perfo rmance of the most commonly used methods for assessing branch support: bootstrap of maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony trees, consensus of maximum parsimony trees, and consensus of Bayesian inference trees. Under the conditions of our experiments, our findings indicate that the actual amo unt of change along a branch does not have strong impact on the support of that branch. Further, we find t hat bootstrap and Bayesian estimates are generally comparable to each other, and superior to a consensus of maximum parsimony trees. In our opinion, the most significant finding of all is that there is no threshold value for any of the methods that would allow for the elimination of wrong branches while maintaining all correct ones—there are always weakly supported true positive branches.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Three Conflict Resolution Models in Changing Students' Intergroup Expectancies and Attitudes in Kenyatta University (Kenya)

Rapid changes in university structure and mission present various conflicts that require effective management. This study evaluated the effectiveness of distributive bargaining, integrative bargaining, and interactive problem solving models of conflict resolution in facilitating positive change in student's intergroup expectancies and attitudes. 120 undergraduate students of Kenyatta University took part in the study. Data were collected using questionnaires and oral interviews. The findings revealed that conflict resolution approaches that increase optimistic expectancies and perceptions of greater compatib ility between the positions, interests, and needs of disputants may be more useful for a wide range of conflicts. Recommendations for practice and further research are g iven.
Divide and Conquer Spot Noise

The design and implementation of an interactive spot noise algorithm is presented. Spot noise is a technique that uses texture for the visualization of flow fields. Various design tradeoffs are discussed that allow an optimal implementation on a range of high-end graphical workstations. Two applications are given: the steering of a smog prediction simulation and browsing a very large data set resulting from a direct numerical simulation of turbulence. These applications provide the motivation for the need of interactive visualization techniques.
Green advertising revisited

In green advertising research, images of pleasant nature scenery have been classified as vague, unspecific and possibly ineffective green claims, as opposed to substantive, informational claims. In this study, the concept of virtual nature experiences is introduced to point out a perceptual mechanism through which the association of a brand with nature imagery may indeed lead to significant advertising effects. Consumers’ exposure to specific nature imagery in green brand communications may lead to pleasant feelings analogous to those experienced in ‘real’ nature. If adequately conditioned, these ‘virtual nature experiences’ may enhance the consumer’s attitude towards a given brand. The perceptual and attitudinal effects of substantive green claims and nature imagery are analysed in the scope of an experimental study. The field study consisted of a national survey, allowing for the relative statistical representativeness of the sample. Results of the study confirm significant perceptual and attitudinal effects of both informational claims and virtual nature experiences. The latter are identified as a distinct perceptual dimension of green brand associations, and turn out to wield additional positive influences on the consumer’s attitude towards the brand.
ARPPM: Administration in the RPPM Model

The RPPM model of access control uses relationships, paths and principal-matching in order to make access control decisions for general computing systems. Recently Stoller introduced a variant of an early RPPM model supporting administrative actions. Stoller's RPPM^2 model is able to make authorization decisions in respect of actions which affect the system graph and some policy elements. We also see utility in the RPPM model and believe that providing effective administration of the access control model is key to increasing the model's usefulness to real-world implementations. However, whilst we find inspiration in some aspects of Stoller's work, we believe that an alternative approach making use of the latest RPPM model as its basis will offer a wider range of operational and administrative capabilities. We motivate this work with specific requirements for an administrative model and then propose a decentralised discretionary access control approach to administration, whereby users are able to manage model components in the system graph through the addition and deletion of edges. The resulting Administrative RPPM (ARPPM) model supports administration of all of the model's components: the system model, the system graph, the authorization policies and all of their elements.
Association between Inflammation and Malnutrition as Risk Factors of Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among dialysis patients. The relative risk of mortality increases as serum albumin concentration and body mass index decline. While these are generally associated with nutritional status, inflammation causes sarcopenia and decreased albumin concentration by reducing synthesis of proteins and increasing their catabolic rate. While inflammation can arise from atherosclerotic blood vessels, systemic inflammation from any source can alter the vascular endothelium and plasma protein composition in ways that promotes vascular injury. High-density lipoprotein synthesis is decreased and the high-density lipoprotein present is less capable of reducing inflammation. Activation of neutrophils favors lipoprotein oxidation. Surprisingly, while obesity is associated with cytokine production in patients without renal failure, as well as among dialysis patients, increased body mass index, whether reflecting muscle mass or adipose tissue, is associated with a decline in mortality rates.
Effects of Web- and computer-based smoking cessation programs: meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

BACKGROUND The effects of Web- and computer-based smoking cessation programs are inconsistent in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We evaluated those effects using a meta-analysis. METHODS We searched MEDLINE (PubMed), EMBASE, and the Cochrane Review in August 2008. Two evaluators independently selected and reviewed eligible studies. RESULTS Of 287 articles searched, 22 RCTs, which included 29 549 participants with 16 050 enrolled in Web- or computer-based smoking cessation program groups and 13 499 enrolled in control groups, were included in the final analyses. In a random-effects meta-analysis of all 22 trials, the intervention group had a significant effect on smoking cessation (relative risk [RR], 1.44; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.27-1.64). Similar findings were observed in 9 trials using a Web-based intervention (RR, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.13-1.72) and in 13 trials using a computer-based intervention (RR, 1.48; 95% CI, 1.25-1.76). Subgroup analyses revealed similar findings for different levels of methodological rigor, stand-alone vs supplemental interventions, type of abstinence rates employed, and duration of follow-up period, but not for adolescent populations (RR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.59-1.98). CONCLUSION The meta-analysis of RCTs indicates that there is sufficient clinical evidence to support the use of Web- and computer-based smoking cessation programs for adult smokers.
Africa–EU Relations and Normative Power Europe: A Decolonial Pan‐African Critique

The debate on NPE (Normative Power Europe) has flourished for more than a decade. NPE has shaped Africa-EU relations considerably, especially since the founding of the AU (African Union). Yet while the EU aspires to be a post-imperial, normative power, this postcolonial critique suggests NPE is a neo-Kantian, Eurocentric discourse that reinvigorates an outdated European moral paternalism. The article explores the role of NPE in Africa-EU relations through a Foucauldian conceptualization of knowledge in EU foreign policy, and insists particularly on how pan-African regionalization and NPE led to unwarranted optimism about deploying European norms in Africa. To the contrary, a decolonial perspective reveals that AU-EU inter-regional structural and organizational convergence enchains only frail normative convergence, which will diminish as the pan-African project unfolds further.
GENERALIZED LEAST SQUARES ESTIMATION OF PANEL WITH COMMON SHOCKS

This paper considers GLS estimation of linear panel models when the innovation and the regressors can both contain a factor structure. A novel feature of this approach is that preliminary estimation of the latent factor structure is not necessary. Under a set of regularity conditions here provided, we establish consistency and asymptotic normality of the feasible GLS estimator as both the cross-section and time series dimensions diverge to infinity. Dependence, both temporally and cross-sectionally, of the idiosyncratic innovation is permitted. Our results are presented separately for time regressions with unit-specific coefficients as well as for cross-section regressions with time-specific coefficients. As particular cases of our set up, we establish primitive conditions of our assumptions for Andrews (2005) and Pesaran (2006) regression models. A set of Monte Carlo experiments corroborate our results.
A Survey on Cluster-Based Group Key Agreement Protocols for WSNs

The scope of this survey is to examine and thoroughly evaluate the cluster-based Group Key Agreement (GKA) protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Towards this goal, we have grouped the WSNs application environments into two major categories (i.e., infrastructure-based and infrastructureless) and have examined: a) which of the cluster-based Group Key Agreement (GKA) protocols that appear in the literature are applicable to each category, and b) to which degree these protocols will impact the systems' performance and energy consumption. In order to answer these questions we have calculated the complexity of each protocol and the energy cost it will add to the system. The evaluation of all discussed protocols is presented in a generalized way and can therefore serve as a reference point for future evaluations and for the design of new, improved GKA protocols.
Is Anyone Listening? The Dichotomous Perspective of School Administrator Listening Skills

Listening is a critical element in leadership with previous research suggesting that communication may impact the success of an organization. Seeking to add to the literature on listening skills and leadership in the educational setting, this study investigated self-perceptions and teachers’ perceptions of administrators’ listening skills. Several hypotheses were examined using the following independent variables: school level (elementary school, middle school, or high school), years of experience, and gender. The sample consisted of 115 administrators and 552 teachers from a large school district in south central Texas. A listening skills instrument used in business was modified and tested in a pilot study. Based on the pilot study, a new instrument was developed based on four factors (respect, response, empathy, and trustworthiness) of listening as compared to the original six factors (respect, response, open-mind, empathy, memory, and attention). Factor analysis of the results confirmed the reliability and structure of the instrument. The results of the study supported the hypothesis that school administrators felt they had better listening skills than perceived by their teachers. In addition, elementary school teachers had significantly better perceptions of their school administrator’s listening skills than secondary school teachers did. There were no statistically significant differences found involving gender, years of experience, and what teachers and administrators felt were the most important characteristics of a good listener.
On the Existence of Nash Equilibria in Discontinuous and Qualitative Games

We show that compact games have pure strategy Nash equilibria if conditions C and Q are satisfied. Condition C states that, whenever a profile of strategies x is not an equilibrium, there exists an open neighborhood V of x and well behaved maps φi, one for each player i, mapping V to each player’s strategies, and satisfying the following property: for any profile of strategies y in the neighborhood V , there exists one player i such that φi(y) belongs to player i’s strict upper contour set, while φj(y) is unrestricted for players j other than i. For other profiles ŷ in V , the chosen player need not be player i. Condition Q is a weakening of own-strategy quasiconcavity. This result unifies and generalizes results establishing existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria in the literatures on discontinuous quasiconcave games and on qualitative convex games.