Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of Gongronema latifolium in Attenuation of chloroquine induced nephrotoxicity and hepatoxicity

Objective: The attenuated effect of Gongronema latifolium against chloroquine induced nephrotoxicity and hepatoxicity was investigated in wistar rats. Methods: Twenty wistar rats were divided into 4 groups of 5 rats per group. Animal in group one served as control while animal in group 2, 3 and 4 received single oral administration of chloroquine (970mg/kg body weight). However experimental group 3 and 4 were additionally treated with 250mg /kg and 500mg/kg body weight of leaf extract of Gongronema latifolium respectively. The treatment lasted for 14days. RESULTS: The results obtained showed that the serum urea and creatinine significantly increased in group 2 than in group 1, but significantly reduced in group 3 and 4 when compared with group 2 (P<0.05). On the other hand, serum bilirubin, AST, ALT, and ALP levels were significantly increased in group 2, when compared with the control. However, the level of serum bilirubin, AST, ALT, and ALP levels dropped marginally in group 3 and 4. Conclusion: This observation probably implies that the leaf extract of Gongronema latifolium attenuated the nephrotoxicity and hepatoxicity induced by chloroquine. Hence the use Gongronema latifolium could be helpful to patients with liver and kidney derangement.
Gemstone Enhancement and Its Detection in the 1980s

The impact that enhancen~ents had on the gem market i n the 1980s m a y be unparalleled in the history o f the industry. Heat treatment brought hundreds o f thousands of carats of blue and fancy-color sapphires and rubies t o the trade, irradiation turned literally millions of carats of white topaz into attractive blue stones, and the filling of surface-reaching separations introduced an entirely n e w variable t o the evaluation of color and clarity i n diamonds. One of the k e y challenges to the gemologist during this decade was the identification o f these and other enhancements. This article reviews the enhancements that were introduced or played a major role during the 1980s, focusing on their detection b y standard gemological techiqnes.
Workplace Bullying: What We Know, Who Is to Blame and What Can We Do?

Workplace bullying is an area that has attracted significant press attention throughout the last decade. A variety of well publicized surveys have revealed that this is an issue endemic in working life in Britain; and, at a conservative estimate, over half the working population can expect to experience bullying at work (either directly by being bullied, or through witnessing it) at some stage in their careers. This is now seen to be a disturbing event, with something like a fifth of witnesses and a quarter of direct targets leaving their organizations.This serious damage to individuals has been accorded little direct research in Britain, although it has resulted in court cases brought under health and safety and equal opportunities legislation. The recognition of the problem and the emergence of court cases, have both served to focus employers on the need to deal with the issue. The recent strike vote at Ford in Dagenham, asking the employer to enforce existing anti-harassment policies, highlights the fact that having paper policies is not enough. Workplace Bullying is derived from the largest survey ever carried out on workplace bullying, supported by the CBI, TUC, Federation of Small Businesses, IPD, and the HSE among others. This study covered 5,500 people, but the book goes beyond it to explore all the issues associated with what is becoming a major issue in organizations.
M L ] 2 3 Ja n 20 16 Minimax Lower Bounds for Linear Independence Testing

Linear independence testing is a fundamental information-theoretic and statistical problem that can be posed as follows: given n points {(Xi, Yi)}i=1 from a p + q dimensional multivariate distribution where Xi ∈ R and Yi ∈ R, determine whether aX and bY are uncorrelated for every a ∈ R, b ∈ R or not. We give minimax lower bound for this problem (when p+ q, n → ∞, (p + q)/n ≤ κ < ∞, without sparsity assumptions). In summary, our results imply that n must be at least as large as √ pq/‖ΣXY ‖F for any procedure (test) to have non-trivial power, where ΣXY is the cross-covariance matrix of X,Y . We also provide some evidence that the lower bound is tight, by connections to two-sample testing and regression in specific settings.
The Use of Native Prairie Grasses to Degrade Atrazine and Metolachlor in Soil

The ability of native prairie grasses, big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii Vitman), Yellow indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans L.), and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.), to degrade atrazine and metolachlor was evaluated in two soils denoted as Alpha and Bravo soils. Vegetation significantly decreased the amount of remaining atrazine in Alpha soil when the concentration of atrazine before vegetation was 93 μg g-1, but had no effect on the degradation of atrazine when it was 4.9 μg g-1. The significant effect of the plants on atrazine degradation in Alpha soil occurred at 57 days after the transplanting of vegetation, but not at 28 days after the transplanting of vegetation. The grasses did not enhance the degradation of atrazine in Bravo soil due to the population of atrazine-degrading microorganisms in that soil. The native prairie grasses had a significant positive effect on the enhanced degradation of metolachlor in both soils, and the significant effect was observed at 28 and 57 days after the transplanting of vegetation in Alpha and Bravo soil, respectively. NH4NO3 had no effect on the degradation of atrazine and metolachlor in either soil. Our results indicate that it is feasible to use the native prairie grasses to help remediate the soils contaminated with high concentrations of atrazine and metolachlor, especially in the absence of the indigenous atrazine or metolachlor degraders. Disciplines Agricultural Science | Entomology | Other Plant Sciences | Plant Breeding and Genetics Comments Reprinted (adapted) with permission from Environmental Fate and Effects of Pesticides, 853(9); 157-166. Doi: 10.1021/bk-2003-0853.ch009. 2003 American Chemical Society. This book chapter is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ent_pubs/358
I NVESTMENT ABROAD AND ADJUSTMENT AT HOME : EVIDENCE FROM UK MULTINATIONAL FIRMS

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of overseas FDI on the skill-mix of multinational firms’ home-country operations. The analysis exploits China’s WTO accession to identify the impact of outward investment into a low-wage economy, and uses plant-level data to investigate changes in industrial structure within firms driven by plant closures. As predicted by models of vertical FDI the paper demonstrates that overseas investment in low-wage economies is associated with asymmetric effects on workers in low and high-skill industries in the home economy, and in particular with firms closing down plants in low-skill industries.
Primary health care quality in Iran: a systematic review and meta-analysis

1 Department of Health Services Management, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2 Health Management And Economics Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3 Tabriz Health Services Management Research Center, Health Management and Safety Promotion Research Institute, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran 4 Department of Health and Community Medicine, Dezful University of Medical Sciences, Dezful, Iran 5 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dezful University of Medical Sciences, Dezful, Iran
Domesticating technology for shared success: collective enactments of World of Warcraft

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players – guilds – develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have mainly focused on single-actor strategies and relatively little attention have been given to the impact of concerns for particular domestication outcomes, for example in competitive situations or with goals related to efficiency. This paper contributes to domestication theory by analysing what we call collective domestication in a performance-oriented setting, to see how domestication may produce compatible outcomes for individuals that need to act together. The paper is based on a one-year participant observation and qualitative interviews with players. Three types of players were identified – hardcore, casual and moderate – representing three rationales of play: a high level of performance, social benefits, or a combination of the first two. In the analysis, we compare how these three types of player groups’ domesticated the game. A main finding is that collective enactments of technology need extensive managerial efforts unless the group share a coherent and uncontested rationale for playing, thus being a moral community.
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs

We report the detection of a Neptune-mass exoplanet around the M4.0 dwarf GJ 4276 (G 232-070) based on radial velocity (RV) observations obtained with the CARMENES spectrograph. The RV variations of GJ 4276 are best explained by the presence of a planetary companion that has a minimum mass of mb sin i ≈ 16 M⊕ on a Pb = 13.35 day orbit. The analysis of the activity indicators and spectral diagnostics exclude stellar induced RV perturbations and prove the planetary interpretation of the RV signal. We show that a circular single-planet solution can be excluded by means of a likelihood ratio test. Instead, we find that the RV variations can be explained either by an eccentric orbit or interpreted as a pair of planets on circular orbits near a period ratio of 2:1. Although the eccentric single-planet solution is slightly preferred, our statistical analysis indicates that none of these two scenarios can be rejected with high confidence using the RV time series obtained so far. Based on the eccentric interpretation, we find that GJ 4276 b is the most eccentric (eb = 0.37) exoplanet around an M dwarf with such a short orbital period known today.
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs

Context. For years, the standard procedure to measure radial velocities (RVs) of spectral observations consisted in cross-correlating the spectra with a binary mask, that is, a simple stellar template that contains information on the position and strength of stellar absorption lines. The cross-correlation function (CCF) profiles also provide several indicators of stellar activity. Aims. We present a methodology to first build weighted binary masks and, second, to compute the CCF of spectral observations with these masks from which we derive radial velocities and activity indicators. These methods are implemented in a python code that is publicly available. Methods. To build the masks, we selected a large number of sharp absorption lines based on the profile of the minima present in high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) spectrum templates built from observations of reference stars. We computed the CCFs of observed spectra and derived RVs and the following three standard activity indicators: full-width-at-half-maximum as well as contrast and bisector inverse slope. Results. We applied our methodology to CARMENES high-resolution spectra and obtain RV and activity indicator time series of more than 300 M dwarf stars observed for the main CARMENES survey. Compared with the standard CARMENES template matching pipeline, in general we obtain more precise RVs in the cases where the template used in the standard pipeline did not have enough S/N. We also show the behaviour of the three activity indicators for the active star YZ CMi and estimate the absolute RV of the M dwarfs analysed using the CCF RVs.
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs

Existing and upcoming instrumentation is collecting large amounts of astrophysical data, which require efficient and fast analysis techniques. We present a deep neural network architecture to analyze high-resolution stellar spectra and predict stellar parameters such as effective temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, and rotational velocity. With this study, we firstly demonstrate the capability of deep neural networks to precisely recover stellar parameters from a synthetic training set. Secondly, we analyze the application of this method to observed spectra and the impact of the synthetic gap (i.e., the difference between observed and synthetic spectra) on the estimation of stellar parameters, their errors, and their precision. Our convolutional network is trained on synthetic PHOENIX-ACES spectra in different optical and near-infrared wavelength regions. For each of the four stellar parameters,Teff, logg, [M/H], andvsini, we constructed a neural network model to estimate each parameter independently. We then applied this method to 50 M dwarfs with high-resolution spectra taken with CARMENES (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exo-earths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs), which operates in the visible (520–960 nm) and near-infrared wavelength range (960–1710 nm) simultaneously. Our results are compared with literature values for these stars. They show mostly good agreement within the errors, but also exhibit large deviations in some cases, especially for [M/H], pointing out the importance of a better understanding of the synthetic gap.
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs. A long-period planet around GJ 1151 measured with CARMENES and HARPS-N data

Detecting a planetary companion in a short-period orbit through radio emission from the interaction with its host star is a new prospect in exoplanet science. Recently, a tantalising signal was found close to the low-mass stellar system GJ 1151 using LOFAR observations. We studied spectroscopic time-series data of GJ 1151 in order to search for planetary companions, investigate possible signatures of stellar magnetic activity, and to find possible explanations for the radio signal. We used the combined radial velocities measured from spectra acquired with the CARMENES, HARPS-N, and HPF instruments, extracted activity indices from those spectra in order to mitigate the impact of stellar magnetic activity on the data, and performed a detailed analysis of Gaia astrometry and all available photometric time series coming from the MEarth and ASAS-SN surveys. We found a M$>$10.6 M$_{\oplus}$ companion to GJ 1151 in a 390d orbit at a separation of 0.57 au. Evidence for a second modulation is also present; this could be due to long-term magnetic variability or a second (substellar) companion. The star shows episodes of elevated magnetic activity, one of which could be linked to the observed LOFAR radio emission. We show that it is highly unlikely that the detected GJ 1151 b, or any additional outer companion is the source of the detected signal. We cannot firmly rule out the suggested explanation of an undetected short-period planet that could be related to the radio emission, as we establish an upper limit of 1.2 M$_{\oplus}$ for the minimum mass.
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs. Telluric absorption corrected high S/N optical and near-infrared template spectra of 384 M dwarf stars

Light from celestial objects interacts with the molecules of the Earth's atmosphere, resulting in the production of telluric absorption lines in ground-based spectral data. Correcting for these lines, which strongly affect red and infrared wavelengths, is often needed in a wide variety of scientific applications. Here, we present the template division telluric modeling (TDTM) technique, a method for accurately removing telluric absorption lines in stars that exhibit numerous intrinsic features. Based on the Earth's barycentric motion throughout the year, our approach is suited for disentangling telluric and stellar spectral components. By fitting a synthetic transmission model, telluric-free spectra are derived. We demonstrate the performance of the TDTM technique in correcting telluric contamination using a high-resolution optical spectral time series of the feature-rich M3.0 dwarf star Wolf 294 that was obtained with the CARMENES spectrograph. We apply the TDTM approach to the CARMENES survey sample, which consists of 382 targets encompassing 22357 optical and 20314 near-infrared spectra, to correct for telluric absorption. The corrected spectra are coadded to construct template spectra for each of our targets. This library of telluric-free, high signal-to-noise ratio, high-resolution (R>80000) templates comprises the most comprehensive collection of spectral M-dwarf data available to date, both in terms of quantity and quality, and is available at the project website (http://carmenes.cab.inta-csic.es).
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs. A deep transfer learning method to determine Teff and [M/H] of target stars

The large amounts of astrophysical data being provided by existing and future instrumentation require efficient and fast analysis tools. Transfer learning is a new technique promising higher accuracy in the derived data products, with information from one domain being transferred to improve the accuracy of a neural network model in another domain. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of applying the deep transfer learning (DTL) approach to high-resolution spectra in the framework of photospheric stellar parameter determination. To this end, we used 14 stars of the CARMENES survey sample with interferometric angular diameters to calculate the effective temperature, as well as six M dwarfs that are common proper motion companions to FGK-type primaries with known metallicity. After training a deep learning (DL) neural network model on synthetic PHOENIX-ACES spectra, we used the internal feature representations together with those 14+6 stars with independent parameter measurements as a new input for the transfer process. We compare the derived stellar parameters of a small sample of M dwarfs kept out of the training phase with results from other methods in the literature. Assuming that temperatures from bolometric luminosities and interferometric radii and metallicities from FGK+M binaries are sufficiently accurate, DTL provides a higher accuracy than our previous state-of-the-art DL method (mean absolute differences improve by 20 K for temperature and 0.2 dex for metallicity from DL to DTL when compared with reference values from interferometry and FGK+M binaries). Furthermore, the machine learning (internal) precision of DTL also improves as uncertainties are five times smaller on average. These results indicate that DTL is a robust tool for obtaining M-dwarf stellar parameters comparable to those obtained from independent estimations for well-known stars.
DASH: Database Shadowing for Mobile DBMS

In this work, we propose Database Shadowing, or DASH, which is a new crash recovery technique for SQLite DBMS. DASH is a hybrid mixture of classical shadow paging and logging. DASH addresses four major issues in the current SQLite journal modes: the performance and write amplification issues of the rollback mode and the storage space requirement and tail latency issues of the WAL mode. DASH exploits two unique characteristics of SQLite: the database files are small and the transactions are entirely serialized. DASH consists of three key ingredients Aggregate Update, Atomic Exchange and Version Reset. Aggregate Update eliminates the redundant write overhead and the requirement to maintain multiple snapshots both of which are inherent in the out-of-place update. Atomic Exchange resolves the overhead of updating the locations of individual database pages exploiting order-preserving nature of the metadata update operation in modern filesystem. Version Reset makes the result of the Atomic Exchange durable without relying on expensive filesystem journaling. The salient aspect of DASH lies in its simplicity and compatibility with the legacy. DASH does not require any modifications in the underlying filesystem or the database organization. It requires only 451 LOC to implement. In Cyclomatic Complexity score, which represents software complexity, DASH renders 33% lower (simpler) mark than PERSIST and WAL modes of SQLite. We implement DASH for SQLite on Android and extensively evaluate it on widely used smartphone devices. DASH yields 4x performance gain over PERSIST mode (default journaling mode). Compared to WAL mode (the fastest journaling mode), DASH uses only 2.5% of the storage space on average. The transaction latency of DASH at 99.9% is one fourth of that of WAL mode.
A high-temperature stable spectrally-selective solar absorber based on cermet of titanium nitride in SiO 2 deposited on lanthanum

Spectrally-selective solar absorber is required to be thermally stable at high operational temperature. However the currently available absorbers aren't stable beyond 700 °C. Here we explore a new absorber with cermet of TiN in SiO2 on LaAlO3 substrate that can be used for long term at 700 °C. The optimized cermets contain TiN with volume fraction of 60% and 65% as sun-light absorption media, SiO2 as anti-reflection coating (ARC), and tungsten (W) as infrared (IR) reflection layer. The absorbers demonstrate an absorptance higher than ~95% before annealing and ~94% after annealing at 700 °C, which will be useful for especially concentrated solar applications.
Impulsive-Analytic Disposition: Instrument Pilot-Testing.

The likelihood-to-act (LtA) survey measures impulsive and analytic dispositions in solving mathematics problems. The current version has 16 impulsive and 16 analytic items. Its validity was assessed using a sample of 27 in-service and 92 pre-service teachers. Both the impulsive and analytic subscales were found to have internal consistency reliability, but they were not correlated with one another. The impulsive subscale was predictive of correctness in classifying the LtA items. The analytic subscale was predictive of how well a participant would perform in Part 2 of a math test after taking Part 1 and being warned that some items could be tricky.
SIZE SELECTIVITY OF SORTING GRID FOR COMMON PANDORA ( PAGELLUS ERYTHRINUS ( LINNAEUS , 1758 ) ) IN THE GULF OF ANTALYA , EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN

Size selectivity of sorting grid was studied for Common pandora in the Gulf of Antalya. Trawling’s were carried out in October December 2012, with a traditional bottom trawl net (600 mesh around the mouth). The fish totally retained in upper codend (catches) and bottom codend (escapes) were used to estimate the selectivity. Selectivity data analyzed as covered cod-end method by means of a logit function of Maximum Likelihood Method. The Kolmogorov – Smirnov test (KS – test) was applied in order to determine the difference between size groups of escapes and catches codends. The percentages of the total catch in terms of weight were 56% retained and 44% escaped. Mean L50 value of common pandora was calculated as 14.47 ± 0.27 cm. Total weight of common pandora caught in hauls was 29.937 kg. The results confirm that using sorting grid fixed mesh codend gave higher L50 value than size selectivity studies with different mesh size and shapes.
The emergence of land change science for global environmental change and sustainability

Land change science has emerged as a fundamental component of global environmental change and sustainability research. This in- terdisciplinary ﬁeld seeks to understand the dynamics of land cover and land use as a coupled human–environment system to address theory, concepts, models, and applications relevant to environmental and societal problems, including the intersection of the two. The major components and advances in land change are addressed: observation and monitoring; understanding the coupled system—causes, impacts, and consequences; modeling; and synthesis issues. The six articles of the special feature are introduced and situated within these components of study.