Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Field and laboratory studies towards better use of saline irrigation water

The Shiyang River basin is located in the northwest China and suffers from water scarcity, drought and salinity. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of saline water on crop yield and on the soil water retention capacity under different irrigation treatments and climate conditions. A soil water and solute low model was calibrated at low salinity level (Tds= 0.8 g l-1 identiied as C08) and at a moderate salinity level (Tds =5 g l-1 identiied as C5). Numerical experiments were carried out on a dry and wet year The water retention capacity (WRC) was larger for the C5 treatment for all depths: 121.09 mm for the C08 and 249.53 mm for the C5 , both for the 0 – 100 cm soil layer. The lower WRC for the C08 treatment can be explained by higher percentage of macropores and by a partial redistribution for the C5 treatment of the porosity in smaller and more retentive micropores. Model calibration gave RMSE = 0.06 cm3 cm-3 for the C08 and 0.045 cm 3 cm-3 for the C5 For the C08 treatment available soil water, AW, in the 0 60 cm root zone was lower than WRC for 84 days in 2005 (dry year) and 71 in 2002 (wet year). For the C5 treatment, instead, AW < WRC for the entire irrigation season of 93 days in all years. The numerical experiments gave higher WUE on the C08 treatment than the C5 treatment for all years considered.
Correlation between habitual dietary fibre intake and postprandial plasma glucose levels in early adulthood

Abstract Background: Increasing dietary fibre (DF) intake through a habitual diet is recommended for preventing diabetes. Aim: To investigate a stepwise approach to nutrition education on DF intake among young adults in Japan with the largest deficit in habitual DF intake from the recommended value. Subjects and methods: Plasma glucose levels were measured in 54 adults in their 20s and 30s (29 men, 25 women) during fasting and at 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes. Habitual DF intake and postprandial plasma glucose level were analysed. Results: DF intake was low (men = 5.7 ± 1.5 g/1000 kcal; women = 6.3 ± 1.2 g/1000 kcal) with no sex difference. Comparison between low- and high-DF groups based on the cut-off point (7.0 g/1000 kcal) showed that the pattern of changes in postprandial plasma glucose levels was significant, and a significant increase was observed at 30 minutes in the low-DF group. Comparison by food group demonstrated that habitual intake of potatoes, green/yellow vegetables, other vegetables, seaweed, peas and beans, and fruits was significantly higher in the high-DF group. Conclusion: This study provides valuable information regarding food selection for preventing diabetes and suggests that 7.0 g/1000 kcal of DF is an effective target value for a stepwise approach to nutrition education in Japan.
Diversity of entomopathogenic fungi in rainforests of Chiang Mai Province , Thailand

International Tropical Mycological Research and Development Institiute, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, Yunnan, P.R. China Biocontrol Research Unit and Mycology Section, Department of Plant Pest Management, Faculty of Agricultural Technology, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Bangkok 10520, Thailand Mushroom Research Foundation, 128 Moo3, Bahn Pha Daeng, T. Pa Pae, A. Mae Taeng, Chiang Mai 50150, Thailand School of Science, Mae Fah Luang University, Tasud, Chiang Rai 57100, Thailand International Fungal Research & Development Centre, The Research Institute of Resource Insects, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Balongsi, Kunming 650224, PR China
Online Tracking and Publishers’ Revenues: An Empirical Analysis

While the impact of targeted advertising on advertisers’ campaign eﬀectiveness has been vastly documented, much less is known about the value generated by online tracking and targeting technologies for publishers – the websites that sell ad spaces. In fact, the conventional wisdom that publishers beneﬁt too from behaviorally targeted advertising has rarely been scrutinized in academic studies. We investigate how the (un)availability of users’ cookies, which aﬀects the ability of advertisers to perform behavioral targeting, impacts publishers’ revenues. We leverage a rich dataset of millions of advertising transactions completed across multiple websites owned by a large media company. We implement an augmented version of the inverse probability weighting, a double-robust estimator that allows us to estimate eﬀects even in the presence of potential confounding. We ﬁnd that when a user’s cookie is available publisher’s revenue increases by only about 4%. This corresponds to an average increase of $0.00008 per advertisement. The results contribute to the current debate over online behavioral advertising, and how beneﬁts accrued from tracking and targeting online consumers may be diﬀerentially allocated to various stakeholders in the advertising ecosystem.
Selection response for Streptococcus agalactiae resistance in Nile tilapia Oreochromis niloticus.

The potential of selection to improve resistance to streptococcosis was evaluated in a commercial population of Nile tilapia in Thailand. The base generation (G0) consisted of offspring from 98 sires and 149 dams using a partly nested design. At 60 days post-hatch, 30 fish from each family were injected intraperitoneally with a Streptococcosis agalactiae solution (1 × 109 CFU/ml) and evaluated for 14 days. Disease resistance was recorded as the number of days from challenge until death (DD) and as a binary (BIN) trait (dead/alive) on day 14. Three models were used for genetic analyses: Cox frailty model for DD; animal model for DD; and animal model for BIN. Age at challenge was fitted as a covariate and contemporary group as fixed or random effect, depending on the model. Fish from the 18 most resistant families were selected to produce the first generation (G1). Heritability estimates for G0 were 0.22, 0.14 ± 0.02 and 0.11 ± 0.02 for the Cox, linear DD and linear BIN models, respectively. Selection response indicated that the risk of death decreased to 54%, survival time increased to 3.4 days and survival rate increased to 21%. These results suggest that genetic improvement is possible for this population.
ANXA7 regulates trophoblast proliferation and apoptosis in preeclampsia

Preeclampsia (PE) is a unique gestational disorder leading to maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. AnnexinA7 (ANXA7) is a calcium‐dependent phospholipid‐binding protein that promotes membrane fusion during exocytosis. However, the function of ANXA7 in placental trophoblast is poorly understood. The present study aimed to investigate a possible association between ANXA7 and human trophoblast apoptosis.
Microbubble Radiation Force-Induced Translation in Plane-Wave Versus Focused Transmission Modes

Due to the primary radiation force, microbubble displacement has been observed previously in the focal region of single-element and array ultrasound probes. This effect has been harnessed to increase the contact between the microbubbles and targeted endothelium for drug delivery and ultrasound molecular imaging. In this study, microbubble displacements associated with plane-wave (PW) transmission are thoroughly investigated and compared to those obtained in focused-wave (FW) transmission over a range of pulse repetition frequencies, burst lengths (BLs), peak negative pressures, and transmission frequencies. In PW mode, the displacements, depending upon the experimental conditions, are in some cases consistently higher (e.g., by 28%, when the longest BL was used at PRF = 4 kHz), and the axial displacements are spatially more uniform compared to FW mode. Statistical analysis on the measured displacements reveals a slightly different frequency dependence of statistical quantities compared to transient peak microbubble displacements, which may suggest the need to consider the size range within the tested microbubble population.
Generation Debt

Achieving debt-free public higher education is an important goal for society as a whole and the left in particular. Education is a human right, and anyone who is willing and able should be able to attend an institution of higher education irrespective of their ability to pay for it. Public disinvestment in education needs to be challenged, because changing the very nature of higher education and exacerbating inequality even further is more than a budgetary matter.
Understanding the role of social factors in recovery after hip fractures: A structured scoping review.

Poor recovery among older adults with hip fractures can occur despite successful surgical repair and rehabilitation, suggesting other factors might play a role in recovery, such as social factors. The aim of this scoping review was to provide an overview of the literature on the role of social factors in older adult's recovery after hip fracture. This review followed the York Framework and its modifications and recent reporting guidelines. Two independent researchers searched main medical databases (CINAHL, EMBASE, Medline, PsycINFO and the Cochrane libraries) from inception to June 2017, for studies investigating social factors and recovery post hip fracture. Studies were excluded if they were qualitative, perspective papers or if participants were < 65 years or they were not living in the community. We screened 2,503 unique abstracts in total and 19 studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Social factors investigated in the included studies were social support, socioeconomic factors and living arrangement. We classified outcomes in the studies into three subgroups: physical functional recovery, mortality and other outcomes (pain, hospital length of stay and quality of life). We found evidence that social support and socioeconomic factors (e.g. socioeconomic status) were significantly associated with an increase in functional recovery, a decrease in mortality and other outcomes, but conflicting evidence was found for the effect of one's living arrangement. Only two included studies were randomised controlled trials. To conclude, social factors, such as social support and socioeconomic status, affect physical functional recovery and mortality in older adults with hip fractures. However, this is an under researched area that lacks rigorously designed studies and would benefit from more studies with rigorous designs.
Bridging Standards Development and Infrastructure Usage by Means of Concept Graphs : the Liaison of CLARIN and ISO TC 37 SC 4 in Practice

The present submission reports on a pilot project conducted at the Institute for the German Language (IDS), aiming at strengthening the connection between ISO TC37SC4 “Language Resource Management” and the CLARIN infrastructure. In terminology management, attempts have recently been made to use graph-theoretical analyses to get a better understanding of the structure of terminology resources. The project described here aims at applying some of these methods to potentially incomplete concept fields produced over years by numerous researchers serving as experts and editors of ISO standards. The main results of the project are twofold. On the one hand, they comprise concept networks dynamically generated from a relational database and browsable by the user. On the other, the project has yielded significant qualitative feedback that will be offered to ISO. We provide the institutional context of this endeavour, its theoretical background, and an overview of data preparation and tools used. Finally, we discuss the results and illustrate some of them.
Evaluation of the Referral Process and Patterns to a Canadian Specialized Eating Disorders Treatment Program.

Objective To describe the referral process and patterns to the Calgary Eating Disorders Program (CEDP). Method A retrospective chart review for the study period of May 2014 to May 2016 was completed and a descriptive evaluation of the referral process was outlined. Results The results summarize the steps in the referral process from initiation of referral to booking an assessment. The CEDP received 918 referrals during the study period, yet 60% did not materialize into a patient assessment. Regardless of age, the two most common reasons were patients declined treatment and did not meet program criteria. Physicians who refer to the CEDP are mostly female, family physician specialty and from Calgary. Patients referred to the CEDP are predominantly females, have an average age of 25 years and are mainly referred for 'eating disorder symptoms-diagnosis unclear', regardless of age. The majority of patients are not severely ill at the time of referral. More than 50% of patients have psychiatric comorbidities, with depression, anxiety and substance abuse being the most common. The average wait times to the CEDP are 12 weeks. Conclusions This is the first study in Canada to assess referral patterns to a specialized eating disorders program. Results from this study have elucidated the reasons for referral fall-through and highlighted areas of improvement in the referral process. Understanding referral trends is a necessary foundation to advance our knowledge of the factors that contribute to referrals materializing into assessments and ultimately optimizing patient care.
Tilburg University On the Rule of Chance Moves and Information in Two-Person Games

The value of information has been the subject of many studies in a strategic context. The central question in these studies is how valuable the information hidden in the chance moves of a game is for one or more of the players. Generally speaking, only the extra possibilities that are beneficial for the players have been considered so far. In this note we study the value of information for a special class of two-person games. For these games we also investigate how “badly” the players can do, both with and without knowing the result of the chance move. In this way one can determine to what extent the players are restricted in their possibilities by the fact that some information is hidden in the chance moves of the games. This allows for a comparison of the influence of the chance move to the control that the players have over the game result.
Discriminative Video Representation Learning Using Support Vector Classifiers

Most popular deep models for action recognition in videos generate independent predictions for short clips, which are then pooled heuristically to assign an action label to the full video segment. As not all frames may characterize the underlying action—indeed, many are common across multiple actions—pooling schemes that impose equal importance on all frames might be unfavorable. In an attempt to tackle this problem, we propose discriminative pooling, based on the notion that among the deep features generated on all short clips, there is at least one that characterizes the action. To identify these useful features, we resort to a negative bag consisting of features that are known to be irrelevant, for example, they are sampled either from datasets that are unrelated to our actions of interest or are CNN features produced via random noise as input. With the features from the video as a positive bag and the irrelevant features as the negative bag, we cast an objective to learn a (nonlinear) hyperplane that separates the unknown useful features from the rest in a multiple instance learning formulation within a support vector machine setup. We use the parameters of this separating hyperplane as a descriptor for the full video segment. Since these parameters are directly related to the support vectors in a max-margin framework, they can be treated as a weighted average pooling of the features from the bags, with zero weights given to non-support vectors. Our pooling scheme is end-to-end trainable within a deep learning framework. We report results from experiments on eight computer vision benchmark datasets spanning a variety of video-related tasks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across these tasks.
Marginal variable screening for survival endpoints

When performing survival analysis in very high dimensions, it is often required to reduce the number of covariates using preliminary screening. During the last years, a large number of variable screening methods for the survival context have been developed. However, guidance is missing for choosing an appropriate method in practice. The aim of this work is to provide an overview of marginal variable screening methods for survival and develop recommendations for their use. For this purpose, a literature review is given, offering a comprehensive and structured introduction to the topic. In addition, a novel screening procedure based on distance correlation and martingale residuals is proposed, which is particularly useful in detecting nonmonotone associations. For evaluating the performance of the discussed approaches, a simulation study is conducted, comparing the true positive rates of competing variable screening methods in different settings. A real data example on mantle cell lymphoma is provided.
Presumptive iatrogenic hypoadrenocorticism induced by high‐dose ketoconazole administration in a dog

Abstract A 11‐year‐old male neutered Shih Tzu was referred to a tertiary facility with a history of weight loss, decreased appetite, polydipsia, and lethargy. The dog had a 10‐year history of nonspecific allergic dermatitis and was being treated with 16 mg/kg of ketoconazole q12h for Malassezia dermatitis. Vague gastrointestinal signs, hypocholesterolemia, and lack of a stress leukogram increased suspicion for hypoadrenocorticism (HA). An adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) stimulation test identified hypocortisolemia on pre‐ and post‐ACTH samples and ketoconazole was discontinued. After a short course of corticosteroid treatment, an ACTH stimulation test was repeated and pre‐ACTH cortisol concentration was within the reference range, and the post‐ACTH cortisol concentration was mildly increased. The temporal association between return of adequate adrenocortical cortisol production and discontinuation of ketoconazole led to the conclusion that the dog had developed iatrogenic HA secondary to ketoconazole treatment.
Inverse‐probability‐of‐treatment weighted estimation of causal parameters in the presence of error‐contaminated and time‐dependent confounders

Inverse‐probability‐of‐treatment weighted (IPTW) estimation has been widely used to consistently estimate the causal parameters in marginal structural models, with time‐dependent confounding effects adjusted for. Just like other causal inference methods, the validity of IPTW estimation typically requires the crucial condition that all variables are precisely measured. However, this condition, is often violated in practice due to various reasons. It has been well documented that ignoring measurement error often leads to biased inference results. In this paper, we consider the IPTW estimation of the causal parameters in marginal structural models in the presence of error‐contaminated and time‐dependent confounders. We explore several methods to correct for the effects of measurement error on the estimation of causal parameters. Numerical studies are reported to assess the finite sample performance of the proposed methods.
Transient Receptor Potential Channels and Metabolism

Transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are nonselective cationic channels, conserved among flies to humans. Most TRP channels have well known functions in chemosensation, thermosensation, and mechanosensation. In addition to being sensing environmental changes, many TRP channels are also internal sensors that help maintain homeostasis. Recent improvements to analytical methods for genomics and metabolomics allow us to investigate these channels in both mutant animals and humans. In this review, we discuss three aspects of TRP channels, which are their role in metabolism, their functional characteristics, and their role in metabolic syndrome. First, we introduce each TRP channel superfamily and their particular roles in metabolism. Second, we provide evidence for which metabolites TRP channels affect, such as lipids or glucose. Third, we discuss correlations between TRP channels and obesity, diabetes, and mucolipidosis. The cellular metabolism of TRP channels gives us possible therapeutic approaches for an effective prophylaxis of metabolic syndromes.
Fabry disease genotype, phenotype, and migalastat amenability: Insights from a national cohort

Fabry disease (FD) is a rare X‐linked lysosomal storage disorder caused by α‐galactosidase A (α‐Gal A) deficiency. The progressive accumulation of globotriaosylceramide results in life‐threatening complications, including renal, cardiac, and cerebrovascular diseases. The pharmacological chaperone migalastat was recently approved as an alternative to enzyme replacement therapy in patients with amenable mutations. In this article, we investigate the proportion of amenable mutations, related to phenotype, in a population of adult patients with FD in Switzerland. This study included 170 adult patients (n = 64 males) from 46 independent pedigrees with 39 different identified mutations over the last 59 years. Overall, 68% had the classic phenotype and 48% fulfilled the current amenability criteria. Migalastat was stopped in 2/11 (18%) patients: the only male classic patient, because of lack of efficacy based on lyso‐Gb3 levels, and one patient with a benign variant. In males, the achieved enzyme activities in peripheral leucocytes under migalastat treatment differed from the activities in HEK‐cells after incubation with migalastat (eg, 33% in PL vs 41% HEK‐cells for p.F113L; 43% in leucocytes vs 36% in HEK‐cells for p.N215S, 24‐30% in leucocytes vs 96% in HEK‐cells for S238N). In this national cohort, we found a relatively high proportion of patients with amenable GLA mutations, which, however, had heterogeneous extent of amenability: the higher the residual α‐Gal A activity, the higher the chaperone effect. Further studies are required to investigate the long‐term benefits of migalastat therapy depending on the achieved enzyme activities in different amenable mutations.
From Need Analysis to Model Development : Using Process-Genre Approach in Teaching Article Writing to EFL Students

A good learning model is the one developed based on the analysis of learning needs and feasibility. There are many models materials for teaching article writing proposed by the instructional designers but it is not a guarantee that those models are suitable with the characteristics of the students. This article discusses the process-genre model for teaching article writing based students’ needs. This was a research and development study conducted at State University of Padang, Indonesia. The data of the study were obtained from students’ responses on the questionnaires regarding the students’ needs on learning article writing. The results of the study show that (1) there are some explanation and examples that should be considered as the input in teaching and learning process, (2) students need to be able to have deep understanding of every part of the article, and (3) students need the appropriate tasks/activitis that directly help improve their knowledge and skills in developing the article. The appropriate model for teaching RA writing based on the result of need analysis consists of syllabus, stages in teaching and learning process, and learning materials. Thus the appropriate need analysis can be used effectively in developing a process-genre model for teaching article writing.