Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence and Antibiotic Susceptibility Patterns of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) Isolated from Healthy Inhabitants of Uturu Rural Communities, Abia State, Nigeria

The antimicrobial resistance ability and extraordinary virulence of community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus which allow it infect healthy persons are major medical issues worldwide. A total of 84 (nose and ear swabs, urine) samples were collected from healthy individuals and screened for Staphylococcus aureus using standard microbiological techniques. Susceptibility testing of the isolates to oxacillin and to other conventional antimicrobial sensitivity discs of some antibiotics readily accessible in the study area was done using the discs diffusion method. Staphylococcus aureus was grown from 69(82.1%) samples while 51(60.7%) of the cultures were methicillin-resistant. The 51(60.7%) community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates showed a percentage resistance pattern which included 100% resistance to ampicillin followed by amoxicillin (64.7%)? vancomycin (35.3%)? erythromycin (19.6%)? ceftriaxone (17.6%)? gentamycin (13.7%)? ciprofloxacin (11.8%)? ofloxacin (7.8%). High resistance to vancomycin (35.3%) was recorded in the study area. Ofloxacin was the best antibiotic of choice in the treatment of disorders associated with community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the study area. Other antibiotics such as gentamycin, and ciprofloxacin proved to be potent in the management of MRSA infections. Ten solates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus obtained showed multidrug resistance to at least 4 antibiotics tested and this necessitates caution in the prescription of antibiotics without proper indication. The high prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the study area is of great public health importance and calls for effective measures including public enlightenment to discourage indiscriminate use of antimicrobials. Keywords: Community acquired methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus , prevalence, antibiotics susceptibility pattern, ofloxacin, Nigeria.
Three-dimensional null point reconnection regimes

Recent advances in theory and computational experiments have shown the need to refine the previous categorization of magnetic reconnection at three-dimensional null points—points at which the magnetic field vanishes. We propose here a division into three different types, depending on the nature of the flow near the spine and fan of the null. The spine is an isolated field line which approaches the null (or recedes from it), while the fan is a surface of field lines which recede from it (or approach it). So-called torsional spine reconnection occurs when field lines in the vicinity of the fan rotate, with current becoming concentrated along the spine so that nearby field lines undergo rotational slippage. In torsional fan reconnection field lines near the spine rotate and create a current that is concentrated in the fan with a rotational flux mismatch and rotational slippage. In both of these regimes, the spine and fan are perpendicular and there is no flux transfer across spine or fan. The third regime, c.
Non-novel Indefinites in Adverbial Quantification

This influence of accent has been taken as evidence that adverbial quantification is focus sensitive (cf. Rooth (1985)) or presupposition sensitive (cf. von Fintel (1994), Rooth (1995)). I will discuss a problem that has been identified by von Fintel and Rooth, the requantifiation problem. Roughly stated, standard accounts of indefinites as NPs that introduce new discourse referents are at odds with standard accounts of the focus sensitivity or presupposition sensitivity of (1), which force us to assume that indefinites may pick up existing discourse referents and “requantify” over them. I will argue for a special class of indefinites that pick up existing discourse referents, which I will call non-novel indefinites , to explain the nature
Rethinking Directed Technical Change with Endogenous Market Structure

I consider directed technical change in an economy where market structure is endogenous. Endogeneity of market structure leads to both theoretical and empirical implications that are substantially di erent from those in the existing literature and that in some cases are rather surprising. There are two dimensions of directed technical change: directed rm entry (new rms enter the industry with higher returns) and directed in-house research and development (R&D is higher in the industry with higher returns.). Directed rm entry responds to the industry market size e ect and the price e ect as in the existing literature. In sharp contrast to the existing literature, directed R&D depends on rm rather than industry market size. Furthermore, the rm's market size is endogenous here, and its response to economic conditions a ect several results on the behavior of directed technical change. The endogeneity of rm size has generally been ignored in the previous literature. Directed technical change alters the relative demands for factors of production and leads to a change in relative factor returns. Directed rm entry changes relative factor returns through a social return to variety (an externality), and directed R&D changes relative factor returns through changes in relative factor productivities. Empirically, the second channel is the main force shaping relative factor productivities and hence relative factor returns. The model also includes xed operating cost, which turns out to be important for the direction of R&D and for the existence of balanced growth path (BGP) for the economy. The model provides a complete solution for the economy's transition dynamics as well as its balanced growth path. ∗Department of Economics, European University Institute
Nutrient Cycling in Moist Tropical Forest

Early studies of nutrient cycling in moist tropical forests described productive forests rich in nutrients (98, 114, 176) in which rates of primary production and the amounts of nutrients cycled clearly exceeded those in temperate zone forests. Reviews of global-scale patterns in biomass, production, and nutrient cycling reported these results as representative of tropical forests (130, 175). At the same time, tropical forest soils were described as acid, infertile clays that harden irreversibly to "laterite" when cleared (106), or as bleached quartz sands low in mineral nutrients (88). This apparent paradox was crystallized by Whittaker (174) in the statement "The tropical rain forest thus has a relatively rich nutrient economy perched on a nutrient-poor substrate" (p. 271). Reviews of more recent research on overall patterns of mineral cycling in the tropics (78, 124), and of important components such as biomass (20, 21), litterfall nutrients (123, 164), and decomposition (5), clearly show that patterns of nutrient cycling in tropical forests are diverse. It makes no more sense to describe a 'typical' tropical forest than a 'typical' temperate forest (33, 151). Variations in mineral cycling nonetheless follow coherent, explicable patterns in tropical forests. Our purposes in undertaking this review are: (a) to illustrate the patterns of nutrient cycling in moist tropical forests; (b) to identify the mechanisms which regulate those patterns; and (c) to show how those patterns affect the productivity, physiology, and population biology of tropical forests and their large-scale linkages with aquatic ecosystems and the atmosphere. We emphasize the cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and magnesium; these are the best-studied soil-derived nutrients, and they are the nutrients most likely to limit primary production and other ecosystem functions.
A Survey on the Barriers of Benchmarking Implementation in Malaysia Oil Palm Industry

Malaysia is the largest producer and exporter of palm oil. Nevertheless, Malaysia may soon lose its position if there are lacks of initiatives to sustain it. Benchmarking can be used to stimulate process improvement by determining best practices across oil palm organizations through understanding critical success factors which enabled higher performance in leading organizations. The main objective of this paper is to identify benchmarking barriers that hinder or disrupt the benchmarking implementation in oil palm industry. To achieve these objectives, 700 sets of questionnaire were distributed among oil palm planters and millers in Malaysia. The survey results had indicated that the three main obstacles faced in implementing benchmarking in oil palm industry are: lack of understanding of benchmarking knowledge, lack of clarity with regard to specific areas to be benchmarked and management culture. In the authors’ opinion this survey findings would be useful and considerable interest to all level of benchmarking practitioners in the oil palm industry.
Balancing realism and complexity: An accurate optimization model for electricity usage in smart homes

Smart homes have the potential to achieve optimal energy consumption with appropriate scheduling. It is expected that 35% of households in North America and 20% in Europe will be smart homes by 2020. The control of smart appliances can be based on optimization models, which are desirable to be realist and efficient. However, from the optimization perspective, sometimes increasing realism implies a decrease in efficiency. One should make a trade-off between realism and complexity. Many of the optimization models in the literature have limitations on the types of appliances considered and/or their reliability. This paper proposes an Home Energy Management scheduling model that is accurate and efficient from the optimization perspective. Our model is an extensive appliance integrated mixed integer linear optimization model that minimizes the energy cost while keeping a given level of user comfort. Our main contribution is not only the variety of specific and accurate appliances models considered, but also their integration into a single optimization model. We consider the use of energy in appliances and electric vehicles (EV) and take into account renewable local generation, batteries, and demand-response. We propose models of a shower, a fridge and a hybrid EV that considers both the electricity consumption and the conventional fuel cost. We present computational results to validate the model and indicate how it overcomes the limitations of other models in the literature. For the instances considered in Brazil, our model gives results that, compared to the closest models in the literature, provide a cost savings in the range of 8% and 389% over a horizon of 24 hours.
Iodine emissions from the sea ice of the Weddell Sea

Abstract. Iodine compounds were measured above, below and within the sea ice of the Weddell Sea during a cruise in 2009, to make progress in elucidating the mechanism of local enhancement and volatilisation of iodine. I2 mixing ratios of up to 12.4 pptv were measured 10 m above the sea ice, and up to 31 pptv was observed above surface snow on the nearby Brunt Ice Shelf – large amounts. Atmospheric IO of up to 7 pptv was measured from the ship, and the average sum of HOI and ICl was 1.9 pptv. These measurements confirm the Weddell Sea as an iodine hotspot. Average atmospheric concentrations of CH3I, C2H5I, CH2ICl, 2-C3H7I, CH2IBr and 1-C3H7I were each 0.2 pptv or less. On the Brunt Ice Shelf, enhanced concentrations of CH3I and C2H5I (up to 0.5 and 1 pptv respectively) were observed in firn air, with a diurnal profile that suggests the snow may be a source. In the sea ice brine, iodocarbons concentrations were over 10 times those of the sea water below. The sum of iodide + iodate was depleted in sea ice samples, suggesting some missing iodine chemistry. Flux calculations suggest I2 dominates the iodine atom flux to the atmosphere, but models cannot reconcile the observations and suggest either a missing iodine source or other deficiencies in our understanding of iodine chemistry. The observation of new particle formation, consistent with the model predictions, strongly suggests an iodine source. This combined study of iodine compounds is the first of its kind in this unique region of sea ice rich in biology and rich in iodine chemistry.
Automatic Grading of Diabetic Retinopathy on a Public Database

With the growing diabetes epidemic, retina specialists have to examine a tremendous amount of fundus images for the detection and grading of diabetic retinopathy. In this study, we propose a first automatic grading system for diabetic retinopathy. First, a red lesion detection is performed to generate a lesion probability map. The latter is then represented by 35 features combining location, size and probabil- ity information, which are finally used for classification. A leave-one-out cross-validation using a random forest is conducted on a public database of 1200 images, to classify the images into 4 grades. The proposed system achieved a classification accuracy of 74.1% and a weighted kappa value of 0.731 indicating a significant agreement with the reference. These pre- liminary results prove that automatic DR grading is feasible, with a performance comparable to that of human experts.
An in vitro study of Biofield Energy Healing Based Herbomineral Formulation for Skin Protection

The current research work deals with the impact of the Consciousness Energy Healing Treatment (The Trivedi Effect®) based herbomineral test formulation and cell medium (DMEM) against various skin health parameters. The test formulation is the combination of minerals (zinc chloride, sodium selenate, and sodium molybdate), L-ascorbic acid, herbal (Centella asiatica) extract, and tetrahydrocurcumin (THC). The test formulation and DMEM media were divided into two equal parts, i.e. one part received the Biofield Energy Treatment by Eileen Mary Meagher and was labeled as the Biofield Treated (BT) samples, while other represented was defined as the untreated test (UT) samples. The MTT assay showed that the test formulation was found safe and nontoxic with greater than 75% cell viability. Cell proliferation assay using BrdU method showed an improved proliferation rate by 343.23%, 316.13%, and 512.75% in the UT-DMEM + BT-Test formulation, BT-DMEM + UT-Test formulation, and BT-DMEM + BT-Test formulation groups, respectively at 17.5 µg/mL, compared with the untreated group. The collagen level was significantly increased by 15.70% and 13.52% at 2.5 and 0.625 µg/mL, respectively in the UT-DMEM + BT-Test formulation compared with the untreated group. The level of elastin was increased by 47.0% and 64.1% at 2.5 and 1.25 µg/mL, respectively in the BT-DMEM + UT-Test formulation, group compared with the untreated group. Hyaluronic acid synthesis was increased by 4.37%, 41.47%, and 19.74% at 2.5, 1.25, and 0.625 µg/mL, respectively in the UT-DMEM + BT-Test formulation group with respect to the untreated group. Melanin synthesis was significantly inhibited by 8.83%, 5.78%, and 12.68% at 0.0125, 0.0625, and 0.125 µg/mL, respectively in the UT-DMEM + BT-Test formulation group compared with the untreated group. Anti-wrinkling effect showed an improved cell viability by 4.32% and 2.47% at 2.5 µg/mL in the UT-DMEM + BT-Test formulation and BT-DMEM + UT- Test formulation groups, respectively in HFF-1 cells compared with the untreated group. Wound healing activity using scratch assay exhibited improved a healing rate up to 6% in the HFF-1 and HaCaT cells lines in the Biofield Energy Treated Test formulation. In conclusion, results suggest that The Trivedi Effect®- Consciousness Energy Healing Treatment based test formulation and medium have the ability to improve the skin health and can be used as skincare products cosmetics for anti-ageing, anti-wrinkling action and for the treatment of many skin diseases such as Eczema, diaper rash, chickenpox, measles, warts, acne, hives, wrinkles, ringworm, Rosacea, psoriasis, seborrheic dermatitis, skin cancer, etc.
Ability Bias, Skewness and the College Wage Premium

Changes in educational participation rates across cohorts are likely to imply changes in the ability-education relationship and thereby to impact on estimated returns to education. We show that skewness in the underlying ability distribution is a key determinant of the impact of graduate expansion on the college wage premium. Calibrating the model against the increased proportion of university students in Britain, we find that changes in the average ability gap between university students and others are likely to have mitigated demand-side forces.
On the Growth of Selmer Groups of an Elliptic Curve with Supersingular Reduction in the Z 2 -extension of Q

Let E be an elliptic curve defined over Q. If E has good ordinary reduction at a prime p, the growth of Tate-Shafarevich groups (and Selmer groups) of E in a Zp-extension can be understood by usual Iwasawa theory. But if E has supersingular reduction at p, the growth of Selmer and Tate-Shafarevich groups is more complicated. For an odd prime p, the most basic case was dealt with in [6] where the main assumption was that p does not divide the L-value L(E, 1)/ΩE (where ΩE is the Néron period). The aim of this paper is to study the case p = 2 under the same assumption on the L-value, namely 2 6 | L(E, 1)/ΩE . For a prime number p, we consider the cyclotomic Zp-extension Q∞/Q whose n-th layer we denote by Qn, namely Qn is the intermediate field with [Qn : Q] = pn. For an odd p, the condition p 6 | L(E, 1)/ΩE implies rank E(Q∞) = 0 (see [6]), but for p = 2 this does not hold. We will see that for p = 2 the condition p = 2 6 | L(E, 1)/ΩE would imply that the Selmer groups over Qn always have positive corank for n ≥ 1, hence would imply rankE(Qn) > 0 if we assume the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (see Corollary 1.2). So the situation is different. As usual, put ap = p + 1 − #E(Fp). In the following, we suppose p = 2 and E has good supersingular reduction at 2. When a2 = 0, we have two nice Iwasawa functions which describe the p-adic L-function of E by Pollack [11], and we can define ± Selmer groups as in Kobayashi [5], and can study them by the same method as for p > 2. In this paper, we consider the case a2 6= 0 (so a2 = ±2). Let Sel(E/Qn) be the Selmer group of E over Qn of E[2∞] (cf. 2.1). We will determine the Galois module structure (and the structure as an abelian group) of Sel(E/Qn) completely in the case a2 = ±2 under the assumption
A global climatology of tropospheric and stratospheric ozone derived from Aura OMI and MLS measurements

Abstract. A global climatology of tropospheric and stratospheric column ozone is derived by combining six years of Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) ozone measurements for the period October 2004 through December 2010. The OMI/MLS tropospheric ozone climatology exhibits large temporal and spatial variability which includes ozone accumulation zones in the tropical south Atlantic year-round and in the subtropical Mediterranean/Asia region in summer months. High levels of tropospheric ozone in the Northern Hemisphere also persist in mid-latitudes over the eastern part of the North American continent extending across the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of the Asian continent extending across the Pacific Ocean. For stratospheric ozone climatology from MLS, largest column abundance is in the Northern Hemisphere in the latitude range 70° N–80° N in February–April and in the Southern Hemisphere around 40° S–50° S during August–October. Largest stratospheric ozone lies in the Northern Hemisphere and extends from the eastern Asian continent eastward across the Pacific Ocean and North America. With the advent of many newly developing 3-D chemistry and transport models it is advantageous to have such a dataset for evaluating the performance of the models in relation to dynamical and photochemical processes controlling the ozone distributions in the troposphere and stratosphere. The OMI/MLS gridded ozone climatology data are made available to the science community via the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ozone and air quality website http://ozoneaq.gsfc. nasa.gov/ .
Functional Diversity of Soil Bacteria from Organic Agro Ecosystem

Modern farming practices have negatively impacted not only agricultural productivity but also soil health, food quality and environmental pollution (Ram, 2003). Recently, alternative farming systems especially organic farming is becoming popular around the globe. Organic farming has various advantages over modern agricultural practices especially sustainability and environmental safety of agricultural production. Sustainability and environmental safety of agricultural production relies on ecofriendly approaches like biofertilizers, biopesticides and crop residue return (Subramaniam et al., 2014). Organic farming relies heavily on the natural breakdown of organic matter to replace nutrients taken from the soil by crops. These eco-friendly approaches foster soil microorganisms (Bohme et al., 2005; Esperschütz et al., 2007; International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 12 (2017) pp. 3500-3518 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Modeling of Solar Radiation Potential in Iran Using Artificial Neural Networks

Solar radiation data play an important role in solar energy relevant researches. These data are not available for some locations due to the absence of the meteorological stations. Therefore, solar radiation data have to be predicted by using solar radiation estimation models. This study presents an integrated Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach for estimating solar radiation potential over Iran based on geographical and meteorological data. For this aim, the measured data of 31 stations spread over Iran were used to train Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks with different input variables, and solar radiation was the output. The accuracy of the models was evaluated using the statistical indicators of Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Correlation Coefficient (R); hence, the best model in each category was identified. The Stepwise Multi NonLinear Regression (MNLR) method was used to determine the most suitable input variables. The results obtained from the ANN models were compared with the measured data. The MAPE and RMSE were found to be 2.98% and 0.0224, respectively. The obtained R value was about 99.85% for the testing data set. The results testify to the generalization capability of the ANN model and its excellent ability to predict solar radiation in Iran.