Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to the prevalence of sheep scab among communal sheep farmers in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

Background and Aim: Sheep scab is one of the most contagious diseases of sheep found in rural communities worldwide and is a major health and welfare concern for sheep farming. Information on the attitudes of communal farmers to sheep scab remains speculative in the Eastern Cape Province. This study aimed to investigate knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to the prevalence of sheep scab among communal sheep farmers in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Materials and Methods: From June to August 2022, a cross-sectional survey using a semi-structured questionnaire (n = 160) was conducted in two rural communities of the Enoch Mgijima Local Municipality in Eastern Cape Province. Purpose sampling was used to obtain respondents’ knowledge, attitudes, and management practices regarding sheep scabs. Results: Among respondents, 81% were males and 19% were females. The majority of sheep farmers (59%) in both communities were aware of sheep scabs, but the majority (64%) did not receive any farming training. The majority of sheep farmers (65%) believed that sheep scab was the most serious threat to their sheep production since it increased mortality. In the past 3 years, approximately 57% of respondents reported an increase in the prevalence of sheep scab. The majority of farmers reported wool loss as the most noticeable clinical symptom (73%). More than 80% of sheep farmers do not use acaricide on a regular basis. Sixty-one percent of farmers prefer a pour-on topical application method. The frequency of annual dipping was every fortnight (40%), during summer and winter (24%). Most farmers (66%) regularly vaccinate their sheep. Conclusion: The prevalence of sheep scab is increasing in these communities; however, a better understanding of the factors that facilitate its transmission is required to allow improved management and control of this disease. The government must involve extension officers and distribute them to disseminate information to farmers. Thus, it will be easy to translate the literature into action. Keywords: communal sheep farmers, Eastern Cape Province, season, sheep scab control methods, sheep scab.
A New Public Key Cryptosystem Based on the Cubic Pell Curve

Since its invention in 1978 by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, the public key cryptosystem RSA has become a widely popular and a widely useful scheme in cryptography. Its security is related to the diﬃ-culty of factoring large integers which are the product of two large prime numbers. For various reasons, several variants of RSA have been proposed, and some have diﬀerent arithmetics such as elliptic and singular cubic curves. In 2018, Murru and Saettone proposed another variant of RSA based on the cubic Pell curve with a modulus of the form N = pq . In this paper, we present a new public key cryptosystem based on the arithmetic of the cubic Pell curve with a modulus of the form N = p r q s . Its security is based on the hardness of factoring composite integers, and on Rabin’s trapdoor one way function. In the new scheme, the arithmetic operations are performed on a cubic Pell curve which is known only to the sender and the recipient of a plaintext.
Impacts of various types of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and ENSO Modoki on the rainy season over the Huaihe River basin

Precipitation is a significant parameter in many aspects such as agriculture, water management and climate variability. To characterize rainy season variations is important to understand precipitation variability under the effect of climate change. In this study, rainy season features (i.e., onset, retreat and rainy‐season precipitation) over the Huaihe River basin (HRB) and the response to different types of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), that is, central Pacific warming (CPW), eastern Pacific warming (EPW), eastern Pacific cooling (EPC), conventional ENSO and ENSO Modoki in the developing and decaying phases are evaluated. The multi‐scale moving t test was used to capture onset and retreat of rainy season. The possible dynamic causes of ENSO‐induced precipitation over the HRB, such as monsoon and atmospheric circulation, were also explored. Results show that (a) onset (retreat) of rainy season progressed northwards (westwards), with rainy‐season precipitation increasing from north to south; (b) rainy‐season precipitation showed a strong correlation to Sea Surface Temperature (SST) in Niño regions. Dry and wet signals were identified in different regions of the HRB in the developing and decaying phases of CPW, EPC and EPW. Special attention should be paid on decaying EPW, where totally dry signals were found, which can reach down to 25% below average precipitation; (c) developing El Niño Modoki and decaying El Niño showed totally dry signals, with decaying El Niño Modoki and conventional La Niña demonstrating overall increasing precipitation; (d) different performances of ENSO‐induced precipitation during rainy season over the HRB are attributable to the combined influences of the monsoon from the India Ocean and the anticyclonic flow in the western North Pacific (WNP). Stronger anticyclone and monsoon are generally associated with increasing rainy‐season precipitation. These results can improve predictability of rainy season features and ENSO‐induced precipitation over the Huaihe River basin.
An investigation of auctions in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), as the largest cap-and-trade system in the United States, conducts quarterly auctions to distribute emissions permits to ﬁrms. This study examines the behavior of ﬁrms and the performance of RGGI auctions from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We begin by providing a theoretical model that oﬀers insights regarding the optimal bidding behavior of ﬁrms participating in RGGI auctions. We then analyze data from 58 RGGI auctions to assess the relevant parameters, employing panel random eﬀects and machine learning models. Our ﬁndings indicate that most signiﬁcant policy changes within RGGI, such as the Cost Containment Reserve, positively impacted the auction clearing price. Furthermore, we identify critical parameters, including the number of bidders and the extent of their demand in the auction, demonstrating their inﬂuence on the auction clearing price. This paper oﬀers valuable policy insights for all cap-and-trade systems that allocate permits through auctions, as it substantiates the eﬃcacy of policies and the importance of speciﬁc parameters using data from an established market.
Notus: Dynamic Proofs of Liabilities from Zero-knowledge RSA Accumulators

Proofs of Liabilities (PoL) allow an untrusted prover to commit to its liabilities towards a set of users and then prove independent users’ amounts or the total sum of liabilities, upon queries by users or third-party auditors. This application setting is highly dynamic. User liabilities may increase/decrease arbitrarily and the prover needs to update proofs in epoch increments (e.g., once a day for a crypto-asset exchange platform). However, prior works mostly focus on the static case and trivial extensions to the dynamic setting open the system to windows of opportunity for the prover to under-report its liabilities and rectify its books in time for the next check, unless all users check their liabilities at all epochs . In this work, we develop Notus , the first dynamic PoL system for general liability updates that avoids this issue. Moreover, it achieves O ( 1 ) query proof size, verification time, and auditor overhead-per-epoch. The core building blocks underlying Notus are a novel zero-knowledge (and SNARK-friendly) RSA accumulator and a corresponding zero-knowledge MultiSwap protocol, which may be of independent interest. We then propose optimizations to reduce the prover’s update overhead and make Notus scale to large numbers of users (10 6 in our experiments). Our results are very encouraging, e.g., it takes less than 2ms to verify a user’s liability and the proof size is 256 Bytes. On the prover side, deploying Notus on a cloud-based testbed with eight 32-core machines and exploiting parallelism, it takes ∼ 3 minutes to perform the complete epoch update, after which all proofs have already been computed.
Identiﬁcation of Fusarium oxysporum Causing Leaf Blight on Dendrobium chrysotoxum in Yunnan Province, China

: Leaf-blight disease caused by the Fusarium oxysporum is an emerging problem in Den-drobium chrysotoxum production in China. Symptoms of leaf blight were observed on seedlings of D. chrysotoxum cultivated in a nursery in Ruili City, Yunnan Province, China. In this study, we isolated the Fusarium sp. associated with leaf-blight disease of D. chrysotoxum from the diseased seedlings. A pathogenicity test was performed to fulﬁll Koch ’ s postulates to conﬁrm the pathogenicity of isolated strains and identiﬁed using morphological and molecular techniques. The results revealed that all four isolated Fusarium sp. isolates (DHRL-01~04) produced typical blight symptoms followed by marginal necrosis of leaves on the D. chrysotoxum plants. On the PDA medium, the fungal colony appeared as a white to purplish color with cottony mycelium growth. Microconidia are oval -shaped, whereas macroconidia are sickle-shaped, tapering at both ends with 2–4 septations. The phylogenetic trees were construed based on internal transcribed spacer ( ITS ), translation elongation factor ( EF-1 α ), and RNA polymerase subunit genes RPB1 and RPB2 genes, respectively, and blasted against the NCBI database for species conﬁrmation. Based on the NCBI database ’s blast results, the isolates showed that more than 99% identify with Fusarium oxysporum . To our knowledge, this is the ﬁrst comprehensive report on the identiﬁcation of Fusarium oxysporum as the causal agent of Dendrobium chrysotoxum leaf blight in Yunnan Province, China, based on morphological and molecular characteristics.
Well deﬁned quantum key distribution using calibration, synchronization, and a programmable quantum channel

Well deﬁned quantum key distribution between two users requires both calibration to ensure quantum eﬀects and synchronization to stabilize the bit parity of the results. Here we present two quantum eﬀects regarding two entangled photons in a single ﬁber that can be used for both calibration and synchronization. In particular, we show how the synchronization problem can be transformed from a maximization of the bit parity between two photons sent to two users to ﬁnding an average 50/50 bit parity for two photons sent to a single user; the end result being ﬁrst order feedback rather than second order feedback. Once we show how to calibrate and synchronize a quantum channel for two users, we then show how to introduce multiple users through a programmable quantum channel that can change its con-ﬁguration depending on who needs to exchange quantum information. The programmable quantum channel is created by using a programmable classical channel to control the quantum devices as well as introducing new metadata on the classical channel speciﬁc to quantum applications.
ANNALES DE L’INSTITUT FOURIER

— We consider the wave equation with a compactly supported, real-valued bounded potential, and show that the relative trace of the associated evolution group admits an asymptotic expansion to order m + 2 if and only if the potential belongs to the Sobolev space of order m . Résumé. — Nous considérons l’équation des ondes avec un potentiel borné, à support compact et à valeurs réelles, et montrons que la trace régularisée de l’opé-rateur d’évolution associé admet un développement asymptotique à l’ordre m + 2 si et seulement si le potentiel appartient
Edinburgh Research Explorer Pre-40S ribosome biogenesis factor Tsr1 is an inactive structural mimic of translational GTPases

Budding yeast Tsr1 is a ribosome biogenesis factor with sequence similarity to GTPases, which is essential for cytoplasmic steps in 40S subunit maturation. Here we present the crystal structure of Tsr1 at 3.6 Å. Tsr1 has a similar domain architecture to translational GTPases such as EF-Tu and the selenocysteine incorporation factor SelB. However, active site residues required for GTP binding and hydrolysis are absent, explaining the lack of enzymatic activity in previous analyses. Modelling of Tsr1 into cryo-electron microscopy maps of pre-40S particles shows that a highly acidic surface of Tsr1 is presented on the outside of pre-40S particles, potentially preventing premature binding to 60S subunits. Late pre-40S maturation also requires the GTPase eIF5B and the ATPase Rio1. The location of Tsr1 is predicted to block binding by both factors, strongly indicating that removal of Tsr1 is an essential step during cytoplasmic maturation of 40S ribosomal subunits.
Buckling Load and Performance Assessment of Train Roof Stiffened Panels: A Numerical Study

In recent years, there have been significant advancements in the development of new regulations aimed at ensuring the structural integrity of passenger rail car interiors, specifically their ability to withstand compression. These regulations have been adapting to accommodate the inclusion of rail equipment that conforms to alternative standards, with the ultimate goal of achieving safety levels. A crucial change in these regulations involves the shift from using traditional draft lines to applying proof loads along the collision load path. This adjustment requires passenger equipment designed with alternative methods to demonstrate their ability to withstand specific loading scenarios, particularly those designed to resist buckling loads. This article provides a comprehensive examination of this shift in regulations, focusing on the use of various innovative design enhancements of stiffened panel used in train roof us-ing finite element method. These enhancements come in different configurations, including T-shaped and Hat Stiffeners, as well as a novel hybrid design combining elements of both T-shaped and Hat Stiffeners. Through a thorough analysis, the performance of these new stiffener designs is carefully evaluated, with the primary aim of determining how well they meet the strength criteria set by traditional equipment. The results of this study revealed distinct differences among various panel types. Notably, the T-Hat panel outperformed the others, demonstrating the highest resistance to buckling forces. This is highlighted by a substantial difference of approximately 67.5% when compared to the T-type panel and a significant 34.0% difference when compared to the Hat-type panel.
Organic–Inorganic Hybrid Synaptic Transistors: Methyl-Silsesquioxanes-Based Electric Double Layer for Enhanced Synaptic Functionality and CMOS Compatibility

Electrical double-layer (EDL) synaptic transistors based on organic materials exhibit low thermal and chemical stability and are thus incompatible with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes involving high-temperature operations. This paper proposes organic–inorganic hybrid synaptic transistors using methyl silsesquioxane (MSQ) as the electrolyte. MSQ, derived from the combination of inorganic silsesquioxanes and the organic methyl (−CH3) group, exhibits exceptional thermal and chemical stability, thus ensuring compatibility with CMOS processes. We fabricated Al/MSQ electrolyte/Pt capacitors, exhibiting a substantial capacitance of 1.89 µF/cm2 at 10 Hz. MSQ-based EDL synaptic transistors demonstrated various synaptic behaviors, such as excitatory post-synaptic current, paired-pulse facilitation, signal pass filtering, and spike-number-dependent plasticity. Additionally, we validated synaptic functions such as information storage and synapse weight adjustment, simulating brain synaptic operations through potentiation and depression. Notably, these synaptic operations demonstrated stability over five continuous operation cycles. Lastly, we trained a multi-layer artificial deep neural network (DNN) using a handwritten Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology image dataset. The DNN achieved an impressive recognition rate of 92.28%. The prepared MSQ-based EDL synaptic transistors, with excellent thermal/chemical stability, synaptic functionality, and compatibility with CMOS processes, harbor tremendous potential as materials for next-generation artificial synapse components.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Knowledge Governance in Universities: A Case Study of a University Merger

Drawing on advances in knowledge-based theory and empirical research on merger of business firms, this article is aimed at exploring how governance systems in universities affect the characteristics of the knowledge processes undertaken within them and how these affect the organizational challenges associated with post-merger integration in the realm of higher education. As the present study confirms, under the institutional conditions currently shaping academic incentive structures, universities appear clearly inferior to firms in providing governance structures promoting inter-disciplinary combinations of knowledge. The low prestige and impact factors of the few inter-disciplinary journals available, the difficulty of finding reviewers capable of appreciating inter-disciplinary research and the personal investments necessary to acquire sufficient mastery of another field make such endeavours extremely unattractive. This institutional framework is in stark contrast to that of firms, in which the yardsticks applied in performance evaluations of employees tend to be largely internal, aimed to measure the individual’s contributions to agreed-upon organizational goals. Universities major relative advantage vis-à-vis firms seems to be in the governance of knowledge processes involving the transfer of tacit knowledge in master-apprentice type of relationships, and knowledge creation through articulation, often too time consuming and expensive for profit oriented firms in competitive environments.
Holocene cultural and climate shifts in NW Africa as inferred from stable isotopes of archeological land snail shells

Cultural transitions or even societal collapses have often been associated with long-term drought events. Linkages between humans and the environment are best documented in well-constrained archeological records that offer multi-centennial to multi-millennial cultural and paleoclimate data. Two Holocene Capsian sites, Kef Zoura D and Aïn Misteheyia, from NE Algeria document a marked change in subsistence strategies near 8200 cal. yr BP. Radiocarbon dated archeological shells (from 10,300 to 6700 cal. yr BP) of the terrestrial gastropod Helix melanostoma were studied to examine the role of climate change on cultural shifts. Oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) stable isotopes were measured from whole shells and time-series profiles along shell ontogeny to assess average annual paleoclimate and degree of seasonality, respectively. Shell δ18O values illustrate that conditions were wetter between 10,300 and 9000 cal. yr BP, coinciding with the ‘African Humid Period’, whereas the environment turned drier at 8000–7600 cal. yr BP, immediately after the 8.2-ka climate event, feasibly comparable in magnitude to the drought episode initiated in 1968 in the Sahel and N Africa. A snail evaporative steady-state flux balance-mixing model suggests that snails at around 8000 years ago precipitated shells under notably lower relative humidity conditions than previous wetter scenarios of the earlier Holocene. The well-known 8.2 ka cold event of the Northern Hemisphere was detected as a drought event that seems to have lasted several centuries in Algeria. The δ13C values indicate that snails only consumed and assimilated C3 plants without noticeable shifts. This study points to multi-millennial humidity fluctuations in NE Algeria, which likely affected the economy and subsistence strategies of prehistoric human groups in the area.
Are terrestrial biosphere models ﬁt for simulating the 1 global land carbon sink? 2

43 The Global Carbon Project estimates that the terrestrial biosphere has absorbed about 44 one-third of anthropogenic CO 2 emissions during the 1959-2019 period. This sink-estimate 45 is produced by an ensemble of terrestrial biosphere models collectively referred to as the 46 TRENDY ensemble and is consistent with the land uptake inferred from the residual of 47 emissions and ocean uptake. The purpose of our study is to understand how well TRENDY 48 models reproduce the processes that drive the terrestrial carbon sink. One challenge is 49 to decide what level of agreement between model output and observation-based refer-50 ence data is adequate considering that reference data are prone to uncertainties. To de-51 ﬁne such a level of agreement, we compute benchmark scores that quantify the similar-52 ity between independently derived reference datasets using multiple statistical metrics. 53 Models are considered to perform well if their model scores reach benchmark scores. Our 54 results show that reference data can diﬀer considerably, causing benchmark scores to be 55 low. Model scores are often of similar magnitude as benchmark scores, implying that model 56 performance is reasonable given how diﬀerent reference data are. While model perfor-57 mance is encouraging, ample potential for improvements remains, including a reduction 58 in a positive leaf area index bias, improved representations of processes that govern soil 59 organic carbon in high latitudes, and an assessment of causes that drive the inter-model 60 spread of gross primary productivity in boreal regions and humid tropics. The success 61 of future model development will increasingly depend on our capacity to reduce and ac-62 count for observational uncertainties. 63
Explicating the Effects of In-Versus Out-Group Membership and Collective Action Framing on Social Media Activism Messages

Social media activism is a relatively recent phenomenon that has taken off worldwide, where many have taken to social media platforms to relay messages on sociopolitical issues such as racism. However, factors that influence the effects of such activism messages are yet to be studied. This research seeks to address this gap. Informed by self-categorization theory (SCT) and collective action framing, we conducted an online experiment to test how group membership (in-group vs. out-group) and message framing (diagnostic vs. motivational) affect individuals’ responses to social media activism messages. We found that activism messages promoted by out-group members with a motivational frame (vs. a diagnostic frame) led to greater perceived persuasiveness of the message, whereas activism messages promoted by in-group members revealed no such difference, regardless of the use of frames. The findings promise theoretical contributions to SCT and framing literature and provide insights on using social media to effectively deliver activism messages.