Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intake, Digestibility, Body Weight and Carcass Characteristics of Tigray Sheep Fed Tef Straw Supplemented with Sesame Seed Meal or Wheat Bran and their Mixtures

The study was conducted over 90 days feeding and 7 days digestibility trials at Enda Selassie ATVET College to assess the effect of supplementation on feed utilization and carcass characteristics in tef (Eragrostis tef) straw based feeding of Tigray rams. The rams were arranged in a randomized complete block design divided into five blocks based on initial BW. The treatments comprised of ad libitum tef straw (control, T1) and daily supplementation with 300 g dry matter (DM) sole sesame (Sesame indicum) seed meal (SSM, T2), 0.65SSM:0.35 wheat bran (WB, T3), 0.35SSM:0.65WB (T4) and sole WB (T5). Tef straw used in the study contained low (30.6 g kg -1 DM) crude protein (CP) and high (825.8 g kg -1 DM) neutral detergent fiber (NDF) contrary to the supplement feeds. Total daily DM intake and DM intake as a percentage of BW were higher (P T3 > T4 > T5 > T1. Daily BW gain was negative and lower (P ones (50-71.1 g day-1). Out of all supplemented treatments, T5 was lower (P was higher (P Keywords: Tigray Sheep; Body Weight; Carcass; Intake; Sesame Seed Meal; Tef Straw; Wheat Bran
Experiments on the White Patch Retinex in RGB and CIELAB color spaces

Color constancy is an important process in a number of vision tasks. Most devices for capturing images operate on the RGB color space and, usually, the processing of the images is in this space, although some processes have shown a better performance when a perceptual color space is used instead. In this paper, experiments on the White Patch Retinex, a color constancy algorithm commonly used, are performed in two color spaces, RGB and CIELAB, for comparison purposes. Experimental results using an imagery set are analyzed using a no-reference quality metric and outcomes are discussed. It has been found that the White Patch Retinex algorithm shows a better performance in RGB than in CIELAB, but when color adjustments are implemented in sequence, firstly in CIELAB and then in RGB, much better results are obtained.
Malignancy after Heart Transplantation: A Systematic Review of the Incidence and Risk Factors Compared with Other Solid Organ Transplants

The continuing improvements in heart transplant (HT) outcomes have increased the risk of developing complications, such as post-transplant malignancy (PTM). Our aims are to focus on the incidence and risk factors in PTM in heart transplant recipients and compare with other solid organ transplantations (SOT). In 20 publications analyzed, the incidence of PTM in individuals undergoing SOT ranges from 4.1% to 16.3%, representing a 2 to 4-fold overall increased risk of cancer over the general population. It seems that the incidence of cancer risk is probably higher in HT than SOT recipients. Cutaneous carcinomas, post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorders (PTLD), carcinomas of lung and liver represent the four most common malignancies in this specific post-transplant population. It is also evident that the risk factors in developing PTM in HT recipients include immunosuppressive therapy, viral infection, older age, tobacco smoking, and unprotected sun-exposure. Transplant physicians should probably increase the threshold of attention for cancer risk surveillance in addition to anti-rejection therapy for graft survivals.
World ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level change (0–2000 m), 1955–2010

We provide updated estimates of the change of ocean heat content and the thermosteric component of sea level change of the 0–700 and 0–2000 m layers of the World Ocean for 1955–2010. Our estimates are based on historical data not previously available, additional modern data, and bathythermograph data corrected for instrumental biases. We have also used Argo data corrected by the Argo DAC if available and used uncorrected Argo data if no corrections were available at the time we downloaded the Argo data. The heat content of the World Ocean for the 0–2000 m layer increased by 24.0 ± 1.9 × 1022 J (±2S.E.) corresponding to a rate of 0.39 W m−2 (per unit area of the World Ocean) and a volume mean warming of 0.09°C. This warming corresponds to a rate of 0.27 W m−2 per unit area of earth's surface. The heat content of the World Ocean for the 0–700 m layer increased by 16.7 ± 1.6 × 1022 J corresponding to a rate of 0.27 W m−2(per unit area of the World Ocean) and a volume mean warming of 0.18°C. The World Ocean accounts for approximately 93% of the warming of the earth system that has occurred since 1955. The 700–2000 m ocean layer accounted for approximately one‐third of the warming of the 0–2000 m layer of the World Ocean. The thermosteric component of sea level trend was 0.54 ± . 05 mm yr−1 for the 0–2000 m layer and 0.41 ± . 04 mm yr−1 for the 0–700 m layer of the World Ocean for 1955–2010.
Incident prediction: a statistical approach to dynamic probability estimation : application to a test site in Barcelona

Real-time models for estimating incident probabilities (EIP models) are innovative methods for predicting the potential occurrence of incidents and improving the effectiveness of incident management policies devoted to increasing road safety. EIP models imbedded in traffic management systems can lead to the development of control strategies for reducing the likelihood of incidents before they occur. This paper presents and discusses the design, implementation and off-line testing of an EIP model in the PRIME (Prediction of Congestion and Incidents in Real Time for Intelligent Incident Management and Emergency Traffic Management) Project of the “Information Societies Technology Programme” of the EU. A statistically-oriented approach based on Generalized Linear Regression models with polytomous responses is developed: geometry, traffic and weather conditions are taken as explanatory variables at a road section level and a binary variable related to incident occurrence or otherwise for the prevailing conditions is taken as a response variable on the first level of decision. Once the probability of a generic incident has been predicted, the lower level models in the selected hierarchical approach will predict the probabilities of
Do Higher Wages Reflect Higher Productivity? Education, Gender and Experience Premiums in a Matched Plant-Worker Data Set

Do wage differences between workers with high and low levels of education, between males and females and between workers with different levels of experience reflect differences in productivity? We address this set of questions on the basis of a data set with variables for individual workers matched with a comprehensive data set for manufacturing plants in Norway for the period 1986-93. The results suggest that workers with higher education tend to be more productive, roughly in accordance to their wage premium. Female workers are cet. par. found to be less productive than male workers, and this is reflected in their wages. Experienced workers are on average found to be more productive. For workers with 8 to 15 years of experience, the productivity premium exceeds the wage premium, while the opposite is the case for workers with more than 15 years of experience.
MODELING OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE SWITCHING ARC AND HYDRAULIC DRIVING MECHANISM IN GAS-BLAST CIRCUIT BREAKERS

The presence of an arc in a circuit breaker interrupter creates an opposing force to the driving mechanism by changing of the pressure ﬁeld. This opposing force alters the dynamics of the driving mechanism, the travel characteristics of the moving contact and therefore the switching process. The severity of the inﬂuence depends on the structure of the interrupter, the travel proﬁle and also the current waveform, especially the magnitude of the fault current. A 252 kV puﬀer circuit breaker was used in the present work to study the key factors that contribute to the uncertainty of the predicted contact travel based on coupled simulation.
Islam Hadhari’s Principles and Reward Management Practices: A Conceptual Study in Malaysian Private Organizations

ABSTRACT Many best practice models exist that describe successful approaches to reward management which influence by the cultural, legal, organizational and administrative challenges in Islamic world. Thus, the decision in setting and designing reward programs in raising productivity through human effort has always been controversial. Studies that were undertaken in numerous countries have shown varying degrees of success of such practices. Even though there is a substantial amount of foreign literature on this subject, there is a paucity of information concerning the extent of such application in Malaysia. As Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim country, Islam, through national culture influences organizations. This paper is an attempt to provide further insights into the theory and practice of reward management in the local context as Malaysia is implementing Islam Hadhari’s principles in the country. The study adopts a qualitative approach. A tentative research model is developed first, based on an extensive literature review. The qualitative field study then is carried out to explore the perceptions of reward management in the Malaysian private organizations from the Islamic perspective. Twelve Malaysian private organizations of various sizes are studied via interviews with key personnel. The paper will also contribute theoretically and practically by providing direction and suggestions in designing and implementing the reward programs for the private organizations in the Malaysian environment. KEYWORDS : Reward management, Islam Hadhari, Culture
Biological Importance of Rumination and Its Use On-Farm

Rumination is controlled by dietary and management factors such as fiber amount and particle size, degree of overcrowding, grouping strategies, and other potential stressors in the management environment. Rumination reflects cow health and is highly sensitive to the state of well-being. However, direct observation of rumination is labor intensive and only a few cows may be monitored intensively at once. In recent years, commercial systems for monitoring rumination activity have become available, and published research indicates that there is reasonable correlation between visual and electronic monitoring systems (Schirmann et al., 2009). Current research and onfarm experiences are beginning to demonstrate the value of monitoring rumination to identify nutritional problems, find cows in estrus, detect health disorders earlier, streamline fresh-cow examinations, and adjust treatment protocols based on cow responsiveness. As research accumulates, we expect routine rumination monitoring to increase because rumination responds to stressors up to 24 h sooner than traditional measurements allowing for more effective cow management.
Organizational Citizenship Behavior and its Relationship with Personnel Organizational Performance of Customs in the West Azerbaijan Province

This research has been done with the purpose of analyzing the organizational citizenship behavior and its relationship with personnel organizational performance of customs in the west Azerbaijan Province. To achieve this goal, 254 employees were selected by simple random sampling method. This paper has descriptive and correlational based on data’s collection and through questionnaire on organizational citizenship behavior and organizational performance data was collected. Results showed that there is a significant relation between organizational citizenship behavior and organizational performance. So that the dimensions of respect, dignity, altruism, civic virtue, conscientiousness and sportsmanship and there is a significant positive relationship and be able to 6/24 percentage explain organizational performance. Also, the relation between altruism and conscientiousness were observed more degrees of organizational performance. So, with the exception of chivalry component, all components of organizational citizenship behavior, especially altruism and conscientiousness has significant role
Disaggregate Matching Functions

This paper deals with empirical matching functions. The paper is innovative in several ways. First, unlike in most of the existing literature, matching functions are estimated not only on aggregate, but also on disaggregate levels which is unusual due to the scarcity of appropriate data. Moreover, the unique data set used allows to distinguish inflows into jobs by sources. Results for different measures of flows found in the literature can therefore be replicated using a single data set. Labor markets can be disaggregated by occupations, rather than by industries or regions. Furthermore, disaggregation is possible for age and educational groups. The paper allows detailed insights into the pattern of frictions in labor markets, on mismatch and labor market tightness, and therefore provides valuable information necessary for the conduct of labor market policies.
Been There, Bottled That: Are State and Behavioral Work Engagement New and Useful Construct “Wines”?

DANIEL A. NEWMANTexas A&M UniversityDAVID A. HARRISONPennsylvania State UniversityMacey and Schneider (2008) have providedan informative treatise on the psychologicalconstruct of employee engagement. Webelieve their conceptual work is a thought-provoking exemplar of how intuitive con-structs (such as engagement) can begin tobe legitimized for the academic audience,hopefully strengthening communicationbetween scientists and practitioners. Theyattempt to specify the meaning of the popu-lar concept vis-a`-vis more long-standingconstructsofjobsatisfaction,organizationalcommitment, job involvement, positiveaffect and affectivity, and proactive and cit-izenship behavior. The engagement label issummarily applied to describe psychologi-cal states, traits, and behaviors. Much effortis spent parsing among established con-structswithregardtotheirpartialconceptualoverlap with the newer label.We offer three reactions to Macey andSchneider’s paper. First, because employeeengagement comprises no new conceptualcontent,butratherablendofoldcontent,itismost appropriately speciﬁed as a higherorder latent construct. Second, the utility ofa state engagement construct depends uponevidence for its discriminant validity fromrelated higherorderconstructs,namelyover-alljobattitude.Third,thetermengagement—even as typically used by practitioners andlaypersons—canbeparsimoniouslyconcep-tualized as a second-order factor of widelystudied work behaviors, including focal jobperformance, withdrawal behavior, and citi-zenship behavior. That term and constructhave already been forwarded and expli-catedinpriorwork,includingameta-analyticsummary of attitude–behavior relationshipsinvolving more than 500 original studies(Harrison, Newman, & Roth, 2006). Thisprevious work supported a broad attitude–engagementmodelthat unifiedseveralindi-vidual-level constructs in both the predictorand the criterion spaces and offered analternative view on employee engagement,suggesting that (a) engagement should bedistinguished from job attitudes and (b)engagement can be both intuitivelyand par-simoniously modeled as a higher orderbehavioral construct.Is Engagement a New Construct? Welaudthegeneralgoalofcoalescingideasand evidence into abstractions that can
The shape of CMB temperature and polarization peaks on the sphere

We present a theoretical study of CMB temperature peaks, including its effect over the polarization field, and allowing nonzero eccentricity. The formalism is developed in harmonic space and using the covariant derivative on the sphere, which guarantees that the expressions obtained are completely valid at large scales (i.e., no flat approximation). The expected patterns induced by the peak, either in temperature or polarization, are calculated, as well as their covariances. It is found that the eccentricity introduces a quadrupolar dependence in the peak shape, which is proportional to a complex bias parameter bϵ, characterizing the peak asymmetry and orientation. In addition, the one-point statistics of the variables defining the peak on the sphere is reviewed, finding some differences with respect to the flat case for large peaks. Finally, we present a mechanism to simulate constrained CMB maps with a particular peak on the field, which is an interesting tool for analysing the statistical properties of the peaks present in the data.
PRELIMINARY PCR-TTGE ANALYSES OF BACTERIAL COMMUNITIES ASSOCIATED WITH POLLEN FROM ANEMOPHILOUS TREES: POTENTIAL IMPACTS ON PLANTS AND HUMAN HEALTH

Pollen from wind-pollinated plants is the predominant cause of pollinosis which corresponds mainly to allergic rhinitis and conjunctivitis. Bacterial communities associated to leaves and roots surface were analysed for many years with both culture-dependent and independent methods. However, microbiota of pollen grains was rarely investigated and never with a molecular fingerprint technique. The aim of this study was to perform a preliminary analysis of the pollen microbiota by applying PCR-TTGE method. Pollen samples were collected from various anemophilous trees genera (Cephalotaxus, Cupressus, Pinus, Platanus and Quercus) in Montpellier (France) in 2013. Thorough pollen preparation was essential to a successful recovery of DNA from pollen. Regarding the results, pollen microbiota was tree genus-dependent. In addition, intra-tree genus variations were also observed. The Gammaproteobacteria class was the most represented in pollen samples whatever the tree genus. Among this class, some bacteria were recognized as phytopathogens (Pseudomonas, Erwinia) but also opportunistic human pathogens (Pseudomonas, some enterobacteria). PCR-TTGE is a suitable tool to analyse the microbiota associated with pollen responsible for phytopathogenicity or affecting the human respiratory tract.
Optical properties measurement of several photonic crystal fibers

We report the fabrication process for several types of photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), which enables mass-production with a 125micrometers diameter. Five layers of silica capillary tubes having 2 mm inner and 3 mm outer diameters were stacked in a hexagonal pattern around a silica rod of a 3 mm diameter. By jacketing a large silica tube around the tube stack, the preform for a PCF was obtained. Another type of PCF was made by stacking four tubes in one layer, which had 6 mm inner and 8 mm outer diameters. In order to draw PCFs from both types of preforms, a drawing tower for conventional fibers was used. In the beginning of the drawing process, the temperature was set to be the running temperature for the conventional fiber, and then lowered by a couple of hundreds degrees. The optical properties of the fabricated PCFs were measured with various hole sizes and pitches. These include the intensity distribution of the guided beam that was a single mode at 1550 nm, and the transmission loss measured by using the cut back method, and the fundamental mode cut-off characteristic at a short wavelength, and the numerical aperture measured at several wavelengths by using the far field patterns.
Interdependence of the banking sector and the real sector: evidence from OECD countries

This article investigates the validity of the credit view hypothesis in eleven OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries over the period 1987:QI to 2003:QIII. The existence of a long-run relationship between the banking sector and the real sector is supported by cointegration test results. For some of the countries in the sample, Granger causality tests show the leading role of the banking sector in the real sector, thus supporting the credit view hypothesis, whereas for other countries, the same tests indicate no interdependence.
Collaborative Visioning or Urban Planning as Therapy? The Politics of Public-Private Policy Making

One aspect of a recent restructuring of urban economies, societies, and spaces has been a change in urban planning practice. Planning is increasingly privatized and decentralized in U.S. cities. Private planning consultants are often hired by public-private coalitions in order to shape the future of cities, while the planning processes they institute are frequently claimed to be consensus-based, collaborative, and inclusionary, rather than elite-centered and expert-driven. This paper discusses the use of “visioning”—an increasingly popular technique that develops goals for the future of a city through consensus-based meetings, open to all parties—as developed by New Century Lexington, a public-private planning initiative in Lexington, Kentucky. It argues that: (1) new public-private planning procedures, incorporating collaborative techniques, frequently become the institutional sites of political struggle over how future urban geographies are produced; (2) in order to understand the role of visioning in contemporary urban politics and in policy making outcomes, we must recognize the sociospatial context in which it is deployed; and (3) in the case of New Century, the way in which local elites controlled the mechanics of the visioning process made dissent difficult and, therefore, produced a vision of the future largely parallel to their standard economic development models.
An Improved Global Harmony Search Algorithm for the Identification of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems Based on Volterra Filter Modeling

This paper describes an improved global harmony search (IGHS) algorithm for identifying the nonlinear discrete-time systems based on second-order Volterra model. The IGHS is an improved version of the novel global harmony search (NGHS) algorithm, and it makes two significant improvements on the NGHS. First, the genetic mutation operation is modified by combining normal distribution and Cauchy distribution, which enables the IGHS to fully explore and exploit the solution space. Second, an opposition-based learning (OBL) is introduced and modified to improve the quality of harmony vectors. The IGHS algorithm is implemented on two numerical examples, and they are nonlinear discrete-time rational system and the real heat exchanger, respectively. The results of the IGHS are compared with those of the other three methods, and it has been verified to be more effective than the other three methods on solving the above two problems with different input signals and system memory sizes.