Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Following the Market? Hedonic Farmland Valuation Using Sales Prices versus Self-reported Values

Many farmland valuation studies rely on survey estimates to form the dependent variable in a first-stage hedonic model. This study, based in New York State, provides a microscale comparison of transaction prices and producers’ market value estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s June Area Survey. Although we find similar weighted value distributions, regression results identify differences in marginal effect estimates and illustrate how market thinness plays a role in the comparability of observed transaction prices and self-reported values. The findings have implications for future hedonic studies, including insights into behavioral differences concerning how farmers and market participants perceive the value of farmland. (JEL Q11, Q51)
Physical Activity Patterns of Pregnant Women in Rongo, Kenya

Women in poor rural communities often engage in heavy physical activity yet consume diets that are deficient in energy. Pregnant women often do not show an augmentation in kilocalorie intake yet continue with heavy physical work. Strenuous work may alter a pregnant woman’s nutritional status and therefore increase her risk of morbidity, mortality and low gestational weight gain which is a key risk factor for low birth weight. This study aimed to investigate levels of physical activity among pregnant women attending antenatal clinic at Rongo Sub-District Hospital. Objectives of the study included determining socio-economic factors, determining physical activity patterns and energy expenditure. The study adopted a longitudinal design and comprehensive sampling was used to select a sample of 100 pregnant women for the study. Data was collected by use of structured questionnaires for socioeconomic, and IPAQ for physical activity data. Observation was carried out on 10% of the women to obtain physical activity data. Data was analyzed by use of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Descriptive statistics was used to describe other data. Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient was used to test for significant relationships between variables. Energy expenditure on physical activity was found to be averagely 1780 ± 500 std kcal/day. The pregnant women spent 14 hours a day on activity and dedicated most of their time per day on domestic work (37%) and least on economic activities (11%). The study fills the knowledge gap, for a study of this kind has not been done in this locality and is of benefit to future research work, various government departments, local and international agencies, the community and pregnant women. The government and health and nutrition organizations need to monitor pregnant women’s activity patterns more closely in order to provide counselling as well as support to pregnant women.
Krammers-Wannier Duality in Lattice Systems

It was shown by R. Pierls [1] that in two dimensions or higher, the Ising model on a lattice necessarily has a region of low temperature with nonzero spontaneous magnetization. This implies the presence of a phase transition between such a low temperature ordered phase and a higher temperature disordered phase. A method for the calculation of this phase transition point was provided by H. A. Kramers and G. H. Wannier [2], using a duality relation between the high and low temperature expansions of the partition function of the system. The type of duality observed depends on the lattice structure. In this paper, the Kramers-Wannier duality in two dimensions will be studied, using the square, triangular, and hexagonal lattices as examples. Some extensions will also be briefly discussed.
Generative Dialogue System Using Neural Network

: A conversation between humans and computers is regarded as one of the most hard-core problems in computer science, which involves interdisciplinary techniques in information retrieval, Machine Learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. It is an Interactive Entity which automatically generates conversations to exchange information smoothly between people with little knowledge of the computer. The challenges lie in how to respond so as to maintain a relevant and continuous conversation with humans. This research applies a generative model-based method for conversation generation. This research is for the development of conversational agent, which generates conversations using recurrent neural network and its coupled memory unit.
Molecular Characterization and Phylogenetic Analysis of Full-length S1 Gene of GI-16 and GI-23 Infectious Bronchitis Virus in Qena, Egypt. J. World Poult. Res., 10 (1): 71-80. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.36380/jwpr.2020.10;

*Corresponding author’s Email: nabila.osman@vet.svu. edu.eg; ORCID: 0000-0002-0176-0349 Received: 22 Jan. 2020 Accepted: 28 Feb. 2020 ABSTRACT Infectious Bronchitis Virus (IBV) is a highly evolving virus that affects respiratory, urinary and reproductive systems. This virus is recognized as an important pathogen due to the continuous genesis of new variants that threaten the poultry industry worldwide. The aim of this study was to characterize emerging IBV variants originated from field outbreaks in Qena province, Egypt, and to study their genetic relationships with global strains. From September 2017 to January 2019, 52 field samples were collected from broiler flocks suspected of being infected with IBV. The collected samples were inoculated into embryonated chicken eggs via allantoic route for virus isolation. The IBV presence was confirmed using real-time reverse transcriptase PCR (rRT-PCR) assay targeting nucleocapsid (N) gene and finally, nine samples were selected from 29 positive samples with rRT-PCR for further genetic characterization through full-length spike (S1) gene sequencing. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that one isolate (IBV/CK/EG/QENA-4/2017) clustered within genotype I lineage 16 (GI-16). On the other hand, the remaining eight isolates (2017-2018) belonged to genotype I lineage 23 (GI-23) and clustered separately in monophyletic clade. The isolates in this study were found to share only 74.6-82.1% amino acid identity with the commonly used vaccine strains in Egypt. In conclusion, findings of this study provide informative data on circulating IBVs in the study area and highlight the importance of adopting a convenient vaccination strategy that can be more efficient for controlling the emergence of new IBV variants.
Higher Order Local Linearization Methods for Solving Stochastic Differential Equations with additive noise

In this paper a new class of stable, high order methods for solving stochastic ordinary differential equations (SDEs) with additive noise is introduced. This is based on the addition of an stochastic correction term to the deterministic part of the LL approximation, which is determined as the solution of a suitable auxiliary SDE. For the latter, any discretization scheme can be used leading to what we call the High Order Stochastic Local Linearization Methods. In particular, combining with (explicit) Taylor or Runge Kutta methods yields to new classes of stable integrators. This permits to improve the order of convergence of the LL method without loss of its stability properties. The feasibility and performance of this methods are illustrated by means of computer simulations.
IDEAL AND GENERALIZED SOFT-AND-HARD BOUNDARIES

Ideal boundary is defined as a surface on which the complex Poynting vector does not have a normal component for any time-harmonic fields. The general ideal boundary conditions for the electromagnetic fields include those of the PEC and PMC boundaries as well as the soft-and-hard surface (SHS) defining a direction of vanishing electric and magnetic fields on the surface. It is possible to generalize the SHS conditions by requiring that the field components each vanish along a tangential complex vector which need not be the same. Implications of these conditions to electromagnetic fields are discussed in the paper.
Determination of Yield and Yield Components of Some Dry Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L) Genotypes Grown in Central Anatolia Ecological Conditions

DOI: 10.21276/sb.2017. 3.11. 8 Abstract: In this study, it was aimed to determine the adaptations, yield potentials of some dry bean genotypes and some agricultural characteristics to the Central Anatolian ecology. The research was carried out in three replications according to the randomized blocks design for two years in 2015 and 2016 in a farmer’s experiment area in the center of Mucur district of Kirsehir province. It was determined that there were significant statistical differences between the genotypes in terms of all examined yield parameters. When the agronomic characteristics of the genotypes were evaluated together, it was found that K.1084, A.40, A.130 and GK.314 genotypes had very low values of yield parameters and Goynuk 98, Sahin 90 and A.27 genotypes were found to be more suitable for adaptation to Kirsehir ecological conditions than other genotypes. It was suggested that these genotypes should be laid emphasis on in terms of region.
Prevalence of common diseases of broiler and layer at Gazipur district in Bangladesh

The present study was conducted to determine the prevalence of broiler and layer diseases at Gazipur sadar upazilla veterinary hospital in Bangladesh. A total of 296 either dead or sick birds were considered for the present study. Diagnosis of different diseases was made on the basis of history, owners complains, age of birds, presenting signs, clinical and necropsy examination findings. The prevalence of diseases was recorded in broiler (n=189) 63.9% and layer (n=107) 36.1%. In broiler the prevalence of Colibacillosis (33.4%) was higher followed by Omphalitis (23.8%), Infectious Bursal Disease-IBD (15.3%), Newcastle disease-ND (9.0%), mixed infection (7.4%), Gout (5.3%) and Coccidiosis (5.8%). In case of layer highest prevalence was recorded in Salmonellosis (19.6%). while other diseases were Collibacilosis (15.9%), Mycoplasmosis (12.1%), ND (10.3%), IBD (8.4), Mareks (9.3%), mixed infection (8.4%), Fowl Cholera (4.7%) and Mycotoxicosis (4.7%). The present findings will help poultry researchers and practitioner to know the present status of infectious diseases of commercial chickens in the study area and also help to establish flock based control strategy. Asian J. Med. Biol. Res. June 2017, 3(2): 290-293
The Influence of Recruitment and Selection Policies on Employee Performance in County Governments in Kenya

DOI: 10.21276/sjahss.2018. 6.4. 4 Abstract: This study paper is a report on the investigation of how county governments recruitment and selection policies influence employee performance in Kenya. The unit of study was County governments in Kenya. A descriptive design was employed in the form of a survey. The target population comprised all the county employees at the level of middle, senior and above in the 47 counties in Kenya, with estimated total employees of 58,617. Simple random sampling technique was used to sample the counties to be used in the study. Consequently, six counties were sampled for participation based on demographic and geographic characteristics of the county. Stratified random sampling technique was used to sample individual study respondents, numbering 224 in total distributed accordingly among the counties of study. Data was collected using questionnaire and secondary source, eliciting information as per the study objectives as well as gathering information with respect to respondent demographic profile. Descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations, frequencies and percentages) was performed using SPSS. Inferential statistics consisting of ordered regression analysis and correlation coefficient analysis were used to analyze the data. The study findings pointed that employment policies such as equal employment opportunity have a direct significant influence on employee performance at 5% level. This study recommends that county governments promote fair employment policies during their recruitment and selection process since this influence employee performance.
Fast Onthe-Fly Near-field Antenna Measurement at 500 GHz

A near-field antenna measurement system using On-the-Fly (OTF) method is described here. Compared with the step-and-integrate technique, which samples discrete positions at certain step, the OTF scan obtains the near-field data while the scanner is still moving, thus greatly reducing the measurement time. Measurement done at 500GHz is presented here, showing the OTF method can improve the efficiency by a factor of nearly 2.5 and the accuracy of the data is comparable with that get from the step-and-integrate method. The scan effect of OTF is also discussed
YIELDS AND ECONOMICS OF CONSERVATION SYSTEMS FOR COTTON PRODUCTION

Year-long long cropping practices with no-till can be an efficient way to build organic matter in southern soils and, along with residue from winter crops, provides a system with unparalleled benefits for improving soil and water quality. In the 1980s and 90s, the NRCS in cooperation with farm groups and land grant universities established practices called best management practices (BMPs) farmers could implement to protect surface water bodies from non-point source pollution originating from agricultural lands. An experiment was initiated in 2001 at the LSU AgCenter Macon Ridge Research Station to evaluate some of these BMPs. No-till cropping systems that included cotton, corn, soybean, grain sorghum, wheat and winter cover crops were compared with traditional monocrop practices for annual yield and net returns above variable expenses. The studies include evaluation of doublecropping wheat and cotton; and doublecropping wheat with cotton in various rotations with soybean, corn and grain sorghum. The annual yields of the doublecrop systems have been higher than monocrop systems because of the added yield of wheat grain that averaged 63 bu/acre. Cotton usually sustained yield reductions of about 10% in double crop systems. This yield reduction is a significant economic penalty because it represents a loss directly from the net returns. However, it also represents a direct exchange for 63 bu of wheat per acre. Using enterprise budgets based on the yields and inputs for each system and annual prices, doublecropping was more profitable than monocropping. From 2001 through 2007, doublecrop cotton/wheat produced annual net returns that ranged from $164.00 to $340.00 per acre from average yields of 63 bu wheat per acre and 1030 lb cotton lint per acre. The system of producing three crops in two years of corn-wheat-cotton, soybean-wheat-cotton, and sorghum-wheat-cotton averaged annual net returns that ranged from $261 to $320.00 per acre. In comparison, monocrop cotton averaged much lower net returns of $112.00 to $167.00 per acre from average yields of 1152 lb lint per acre.
Brain MRI: a useful tool for screening of hypertensive patients for silent cerebro-vascular damage

Background: Worldwide hypertension is an important public-health challenge because of its high frequency and concomitant risks of cardiovascular, renal, cerebrovascular disease and death. Current guidelines for the management of hypertension mainly recommend the search for preclinical damage to the heart and kidneys. However, extending this search to other organs, for instance the brain, might improve risk stratification, might optimize antihypertensive therapy and might, in the end help to further reduce the burden of disease attributable to hypertension. Methods: 84 consecutive hypertensive patients with no target organ damage were enrolled in study to find out silent brain damage over a period of one year. Results: Mean body mass index (BMI) of the study population was 28.4±2.5 kg/m (range 23.2 to 35.3kg/m). 33 (39.3%) subjects had white matter lesions. 13 (15.47%) study subjects were found to have vascular changes which included micro angiopathic changes, infarcts and reduced/slow blood flow. 33 (39.3%) subjects were found to have normal brain MRI in the study. Early brain MRI was found to be beneficial in patients who had uncontrolled blood pressure either due to lack of treatment or irregular use of anti-hypertensive treatment. This was true for every age group in general and particularly in subjects above the age of 50 years. Conclusions: The screening of hypertensive patients for silent cerebrovascular damage with brain MRI may be useful in stratifying the risk of future cerebrovascular disease.
Glycaemic control in a cardiothoracic surgical population: Exploring the protocol-practice gap

Background . Glycaemic control constitutes an important component in the management of critically ill patients. As such, all healthcare workers involved in the management of critically ill patients need to ensure that it is achieved adequately. To avoid glucose variability and to maintain normoglycaemia, evidence-based protocols are implemented to guide clinical care. However, it has been suggested that with the use of protocoldirected therapy, protocol-practice gaps are common and therefore protocol adherence must be audited regularly. The aim of this study was to evaluate adherence to the glucose control protocol by nurses in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit (ICU) at a tertiary academic hospital. Methods . A retrospective study involving the review of ICU charts of all post-cardiac surgery patients ≥16 years admitted to the cardiothoracic ICU during March 2011. A convenience sampling method was used. Results . A total of 741 glucose readings for 22 patients were evaluated. The median (interquartile range) glucose reading was 7.8 mmol/L (6.7 - 9.3 mmol/L). Overall, 411 (55.5%) protocol violations were recorded and 629 (84.9%) of the total readings were abnormal. Protocol violations were similar between the day and night staff; 188 (54.7%) and 223 (58.5%) were recorded, respectively ( p =0.256). Of the readings, 464 (62.6%) were conducted by ICU-trained nurses and 245 (33.2%) by non-ICU-trained nurses. There were fewer protocol violations recorded by the ICU-trained nurses compared with the non-ICU-trained nurses, i.e. 53.3% and 63.7%, respectively ( p <0.05). Conclusion . Adherence to the glucose-control protocol was suboptimal. These results may suggest that the training and education of healthcare workers in implementing protocols is an ongoing and dynamic process, and that there is a need for the regular evaluation of protocol adherence in order to identify protocol-practice gaps.
Effects of structural distortions on the electronic structure of 
T
-type transition metal dichalcogenides

Single-layer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) can adopt two distinct structures corresponding to different coordination of the metal atoms. TMDCs adopting the $T$-type structure exhibit a rich and diverse set of phenomena, including charge density waves (CDWs) in a $\sqrt{13}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\sqrt{13}$ supercell pattern in ${\mathrm{TaS}}_{2}$ and ${\mathrm{TaSe}}_{2}$, and a possible excitonic insulating phase in ${\mathrm{TiSe}}_{2}$. These properties make the $T$-TMDCs desirable components of layered heterostructure devices. In order to predict the emergent properties of combinations of different layered materials, one needs simple and accurate models for the constituent layers which can take into account potential effects of lattice mismatch, relaxation, strain, and structural distortion. Previous studies have developed ab initio tight-binding Hamiltonians for $H$-type TMDCs [S. Fang et al., Phys. Rev. B 98, 075106 (2018)]. Here we extend this work to include $T$-type TMDCs. We demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of our model using three example systems: a one-dimensional sinusoidal ripple, which represents a longitudinal acoustic phonon; the $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2$ CDW in ${\mathrm{TiSe}}_{2}$; and the $\sqrt{13}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\sqrt{13}$ CDW in ${\mathrm{TaS}}_{2}$. Using the technique of band unfolding we compare the electronic structure of the distorted crystals to the pristine band structure and find our tight-binding model reproduces many features revealed by direct density functional theory calculations, provided the magnitude of the distortions remains in the linear regime. This model of the strain response of single layers is a necessary ingredient for the construction of models of van der Waals heterostructures with multiple layers, because the deformation and strain from mechanical relaxations in a twisted bilayer have important effects on the electronic structure.
Les bartonelloses, maladies infectieuses émergentes

Le spectre des infections a Bartonella transmises de l'animal a l'homme est en constante augmentation. D'une part, le nombre des especes de bartonelles incriminees dans des zoonoses est passe de 1 a 7 en l'espace de 10 ans et, d'autre part, de nombreuses manifestations cliniques isolees sont maintenant associees a des infections par bartonella henselae, l'agent principal de la maladie des griffes du chat et sont considerees comme des formes atypiques de cette derniere. Les animaux, en particulier le chat domestique, sont les principaux reservoirs de ces bacteries. Les chats sont porteurs sains et peuvent etre bacteriemiques durant plusieurs mois, sans aucune expression clinique de leur infection. Celle-ci se transmet de chat a chat essentiellement par l'intermediaire des puces. Les connaissances actuelles concernant l'origine, les manifestations cliniques et l'epidemiologie de ces infections emergentes sont presentees.
Optimized Caching and Spectrum Partitioning for D2D Enabled Cellular Systems With Clustered Devices

Caching at mobile devices and leveraging device-to-device (D2D) communication are two promising approaches to support massive content delivery over wireless networks. The analysis of cache-enabled wireless networks is usually carried out by assuming that devices are uniformly distributed, however, in social networks, mobile devices are intrinsically grouped into disjoint clusters. In this regards, this paper proposes a spatiotemporal mathematical model that tracks the service requests arrivals and account for the clustered devices geometry. Two kinds of devices are assumed, particularly, content clients and content providers. Content providers are assumed to have a surplus memory which is exploited to proactively cache contents from a known library, following a random probabilistic caching scheme. Content clients can retrieve a requested content from the nearest content provider in their proximity (cluster), or, as a last resort, the base station (BS). The developed spatiotemporal model is leveraged to formulate a joint optimization problem of the content caching and spectrum partitioning in order to minimize the average service delay. Due to the high complexity of the optimization problem, the caching and spectrum partitioning problems are decoupled and solved iteratively using the block coordinate descent (BCD) optimization technique. To this end, an optimal and suboptimal solutions are obtained for the bandwidth partitioning and probabilistic caching subproblems, respectively. Numerical results highlight the superiority of the proposed scheme over conventional caching schemes under equal and optimized bandwidth allocations. Particularly, it is shown that the average service delay is reduced by nearly 100% and 350%, compared to the Zipf and uniform caching schemes under equal bandwidth allocations, respectively.
Simulations for Karlin random fields

We investigate the simulation methods for a large family of stable random fields that appear in recent literature, known as the Karlin stable set-indexed processes, including fractional Levy-Chenstov stable fields as special cases. Our methods exploit a new representation for Karlin stable set-indexed processes which facilitates efficient simulations, and we implement the standard procedure introduced by Asmussen and Rosinski (2001) by first decomposing the random fields into large-jump and small-jump parts, and simulating each part separately. Computational issues arise when passing from time-indexed processes to manifold-indexed ones, and our methods are adjusted accordingly.