Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interaction of hormones with reactive oxygen species in regulating seed germination of Vigna radiata (L.) Wilczek

Regulation of seed germination is quite complex and is further complicated by interaction of hormones like gibberellin (GA), abscisic acid (ABA) and ethylene. Moreover, the involvement of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in hormone signaling for such regulation is still less understood. The aim of the present study was to explore the interactive role of GA, ABA and ethylene and possible involvement of ROS in mediation of hormone action during seed germination of Vigna radiata. Seeds of V. radiata were germinated in presence of hormones, their biosynthesis or action inhibitors and in combinations with hydrogen peroxide and at intervals germination percentages were determined. Treated seeds were also tested for production of superoxide by NBT staining and analysed for NADPH oxidase (NOX) activity by in-gel assay. ABA and paclobutrazole (GA biosynthesis inhibitor) inhibited germination of non-dormant V. radiata seeds. GA recovered germination from inhibition by Ag+ (ethylene action inhibitor) whereas paclobutrazole-induced inhibition could not be recovered by ethylene. But ethylene could recover significantly ABA- inhibited germination. Treatment with H2O2 rescued germination from inhibition by ABA, paclobutrazole and Ag+ with efficiency in the order ABA> Ag+>paclobutrazole. Superoxide (O2.-) production, as revealed by NBT staining, was found mostly in the apical part of the axis in control and ethylene treated seeds and to a less extent in GA treated seeds while almost no stain was found in case of treatments with ABA, Ag+ and paclobutrazole. In-gel assay of NOX activity showed three bands in control and in case of treatments with ethylene, GA and fluridone while intensity became less for one or more bands in case of paclobutrazole, ABA and Ag+ treatment. It appears that ethylene and ABA is antagonistic to each other while GA is partially independent in regulating germination of Vigna radiata seeds through mediation of ROS.
RNAi and miRNA pathways in birds

RNA silencing denotes sequence-specific repression mediated by small RNAs. In vertebrates, there are two closely related pathways, which share several protein factors: RNA interference (RNAi) and microRNA (miRNA) pathway. The miRNA pathway regulates endogenous protein-coding gene expression and has been implicated in many biological processes. RNAi generally serves as a form of innate immunity targeting viruses and mobile elements. This text reviews miRNA and RNAi pathways in birds. Although the available literature on RNA silencing in birds is very limited, many features can be deduced from the genomic data in the public domain. miRNA, RNAi and other dsRNA-responding pathways in birds appear very much like those in mammals, important bird-specific features of RNA silencing pathways are yet to be identified. The miRNA pathway is likely the dominant small RNA pathway while the existence and functionality of endogenous RNAi remains unclear. Some variations may be present in the main bird antiviral interferon system.
Total arch replacement in the treatment of acute type A aortic dissection

The role of total arch replacement (TAR) in patients with acute type A aortic dissection (ATAD) has been much debated. There are numerous factors that contribute to the clinical decision-making process. These include patient cohort, clinical status of the patient, aortic anatomy, dissection morphology, and expertise of the surgeon and the center. In this review, we summarize early and late outcomes of TAR in ATAD patients and discuss the specific patient populations that may benefit from an aggressive surgical approach at the time of the initial acute presentation. We discuss techniques for TAR, differences in aortic remodeling, and long-term aortic prognosis of these patients.
Métodos para la estimación de la cabida cubierta a partir de ortofotografías de alta resolución y LiDAR aeroportado en dehesas españolas

Dehesas are high value agroecosystems that benefit from the effect tree cover has on pastures. Such effect occurs when tree cover is incomplete and homogeneous. Tree cover may be characterized from field data or through visual interpretation of remote sensing data, both time-consuming tasks. An alternative is the extraction of tree cover from aerial imagery using automated methods, on spectral derivate products (i.e. NDVI) or LiDAR point clouds. This study focuses on assessing and comparing methods for tree cover estimation from high resolution orthophotos and airborne laser scanning (ALS). RGB image processing based on thresholding of the ‘Excess Green minus Excess Red’ index with the Otsu method produced acceptable results (80%), lower than that obtained by thresholding the digital canopy model obtained from the ALS data (87%) or when combining RGB and LiDAR data (87.5%). The RGB information was found to be useful for tree delineation, although very vulnerable to confusion with the grass or shrubs. The ALS based extraction suffered for less confusion as it differentiated between trees and the remaining vegetation using the height. These results show that analysis of historical orthophotographs may be successfully used to evaluate the effects of management changes while LiDAR data may provide a substantial increase in the accuracy for the latter period. Combining RGB and Lidar data did not result in significant improvements over using LIDAR data alone.
Making better biogeographical predictions of species’ distributions

Summary 1. Biogeographical models of species’ distributions are essential tools for assessing impacts of changing environmental conditions on natural communities and ecosystems. Practitioners need more reliable predictions to integrate into conservation planning (e.g. reserve design and management). 2. Most models still largely ignore or inappropriately take into account important features of species’ distributions, such as spatial autocorrelation, dispersal and migration, biotic and environmental interactions. Whether distributions of natural communities or ecosystems are better modelled by assembling individual species’ predictions in a bottom-up approach or modelled as collective entities is another important issue. An international workshop was organized to address these issues. 3. We discuss more specifically six issues in a methodological framework for generalized regression: (i) links with ecological theory; (ii) optimal use of existing data and artificially generated data; (iii) incorporating spatial context; (iv) integrating ecological and environmental interactions; (v) assessing prediction errors and uncertainties; and (vi) predicting distributions of communities or collective properties of biodiversity. 4. Synthesis and applications. Better predictions of the effects of impacts on biological communities and ecosystems can emerge only from more robust species’ distribution models and better documentation of the uncertainty associated with these models. An improved understanding of causes of species’ distributions, especially at their range limits, as well as of ecological assembly rules and ecosystem functioning, is necessary if further progress is to be made. A better collaborative effort between theoretical and functional ecologists, ecological modellers and statisticians is required to reach these goals.
Measuring the psychological drivers of participation in collective

A growing number of global health interventions involve Background: community members in activism to prevent violence against women (VAW), but the psychological drivers of participation are presently ill-understood. We developed a new scale for measuring three proposed drivers of participation in collective action to address VAW in the context of urban informal settlements in Mumbai, India: perceived legitimacy, perceived efficacy, and collective action norms. We did a household survey of 1307 men, 1331 women, and 4 Methods: trans persons. We checked for 1) social desirability bias by comparing responses to self-administered and face-to-face interviews, 2) acquiescence bias by comparing responses to positive and negatively worded items on the same construct, 3) factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis, and 4) convergent validity by examining associations between construct scores and participation in groups to address VAW and intent to intervene in case of VAW. Of the ten items, seven showed less than five percentage point Results: difference in agreement rates between self-administered and face-to-face conditions. Correlations between opposite worded items on the same construct were negative (p<0.05), while correlations between similarly worded items were positive (p<0.001). A hierarchical factor structure showed adequate fit (Tucker-Lewis index, 0.920; root mean square error of approximation, 0.035; weighted root mean square residual, 1.952). Perceived legitimacy, efficacy and collective action norms all predicted participation in groups to address VAW and intent to intervene in case of VAW, even after adjusting for social capital (p<0.05). This is the first study to operationalize a measure of the Conclusion: psychological drivers of participation in collective action to address VAW in a lowand middle-income context. Our novel scale may provide insight into modifiable beliefs and attitudes community mobilisation interventions can address to inspire activism in similar low-resource contexts. 1 2 2
Microphone Array Deconvolution Methods for Efficient Aeroacoustic Testing in Wind Tunnels

Microphone array techniques are widely used in wind tunnels to help analysing aeroacoustic noise radiated by scaled models, for instance, airframe noise in aeronautics. Such techniques provide a view of the noise source mechanisms without perturbing the flow or the acoustic field at the source location. Next to the conventional beamforming method, deconvolution techniques such as CIRA or Clean-SC have the advantage to provide quantitative source information and improved resolution. However, they are typically much more demanding in terms of computational effort which makes it difficult to use them during the test campaign where time is limited. This issue can be solved by using optimized computation algorithms based on GPGPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units). This paper presents the approach and implementation strategy for accelerating calculation of deconvolution maps. Results are shown for an airframe noise case (Array Analysis Benchmark of the test case DLR 1 DO-728 Aircraft Half Model in closed wind tunnel). Very high speed up can be achieved which makes it possible to analyse data right after the measurement and therefore gain efficiency in wind tunnel testing process.
T OWARD HUMAN - LIKE OBJECT NAMING IN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL SYSTEMS

Partitioning a rich set of objects into words is a fundamental aspect of human language and a major challenge for machines. Recently, it has been argued that word meanings evolve under pressure to optimize the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle and that this framework may be used to inform AI systems with human-like semantics. However, a major challenge for invoking this approach at scale is that it assumes an underlying representation of the environment which is often unknown. Here, we address this challenge by leveraging deep learning models for specifying such underlying representations. We demonstrate our approach in the domain of containers by evaluating optimal IB container-naming systems derived from representations generated by each layer of CORnet-S, a brain-inspired deep learning image classifier. We show a gradient in success in accounting for the containernaming systems of Dutch and French, where the deeper layer of CORnet-S that roughly corresponds to a high-level object recognition area in the brain outperforms shallower layers that correspond to lower-level visual processing. This suggests that our approach may be useful for testing the relevance of various types of non-linguistic representations to the emergence of word meanings, and could potentially aid in informing artificial neural agents with human-like semantics.
Efficient Identification in Linear Structural Causal Models with Auxiliary Cutsets

We develop a a new polynomial-time algorithm for identiﬁcation of structural coefﬁcients in linear causal models that subsumes previous state-of-the-art methods, unifying several disparate approaches to identiﬁcation in this setting. Building on these results, we develop a procedure for identifying total causal effects in linear systems.
Study of Thermal Distribution and Comfort in

Thermal comfort is an essential element for the human body and is increasingly becoming a crucial factor to be considered in footwear design. The previous study has shown that thermal conditions play a dominant role in-shoe climate. Development of thermal models that are capable of predicting in-shoe temperature distributions is an effective way to assist in design optimization. The aim of this study was to analyse the distribution of temperature, and the level of thermal comfort during wear of footwear through predicted mean vote (PMV) & percentage person’s dissatisfaction (PPD) model using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. These will make easier to approximate the heat transferthermal-comfort relationships among the components. Four different temperatures ranges from very cold to very hot such as -20°C, 7°C,40°C,50°C were considered for this analysis,. The occupant (human foot) felt neutral to slightly cool in the cold weather and felt very hot in the hot weather within the footwear, and their PPD is more than 25%, 24%, 99.1%, and 99.1% respectively that means 74-75% persons will be satisfied in the cold and only of 0.99% persons will be satisfied in the hot country. Thus from this study, it can be concluded that the effectiveness of the footwear design for keeping the human foot thermally comfortable for different variety of weather can be assessed through this technique of CFD simulation.
Regulation of Neurogenesis in Mouse Brain by HMGB1

The High Mobility Group Box 1 (HMGB1) is the most abundant nuclear nonhistone protein that is involved in transcription regulation. In addition, HMGB1 has previously been found as an extracellularly acting protein enhancing neurite outgrowth in cultured neurons. Although HMGB1 is widely expressed in the developing central nervous system of vertebrates and invertebrates, its function in the developing mouse brain is poorly understood. Here, we have analyzed developmental defects of the HMGB1 null mouse forebrain, and further examined our findings in ex vivo brain cell cultures. We find that HMGB1 is required for the proliferation and differentiation of neuronal stem cells/progenitor cells. Enhanced apoptosis is also found in the neuronal cells lacking HMGB1. Moreover, HMGB1 depletion disrupts Wnt/β-catenin signaling and the expression of transcription factors in the developing cortex, including Foxg1, Tbr2, Emx2, and Lhx6. Finally, HMGB1 null mice display aberrant expression of CXCL12/CXCR4 and reduced RAGE signaling. In conclusion, HMGB1 plays a critical role in mammalian neurogenesis and brain development.
Geographic patterns of crayfish symbiont diversity persist over half a century despite seasonal fluctuations

We analyzed historical data from 1961 to 1965 for species occurrences of branchiobdellidans and their crayfish hosts throughout the Mountain Lake Region of southwestern Virginia, USA to quantify geographic variability in species composition and identify patterns in host and symbiont diversity. We collected contemporary census data of branchiobdellidan assemblages from the same region in 2011 to 2014 for intra-annual variation in symbiont abundance and species composition. We compared historical and contemporary records to assess the stability of geographic patterns in symbiont diversity over decadal timescales. Branchiobdellidan assemblages followed a hump-shaped relationship with Strahler stream order. Much of the geographic variation in symbiont species composition was explained by host species composition, despite low host specificity in branchiobdellidans. There were strong seasonal cycles in branchiobdellidan abundance and species composition. A comparison of historical and contemporary records revealed little change in species distributions over 50 years. Thus, branchiobdellidan species composition changes predictably along habitat gradients, tracks variation in host composition, is repeatable across decadal timescales, and follow strong cyclic seasonal changes in total and relative abundances. These results suggest that complex but deterministic ecological processes drive symbiont population dynamics at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Copyright © 2016 by The Author(s). Published by the International Association of Astacology. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. A R T I C L E I N F O
Effect of Capital Management on the Performance of Private Commercial Banks in Rwanda: A Case Study of Bank of Kigali

The study was about capital management and performance of the banking sector with Bank of Kigali as the case study. The study was motivated by the various episodes of private bank failures in many parts of the world. This study therefore, examined the role of capital management on the performance of banking sector. To achieve, this objective, the following specific objectives guided this study: To explore the capital management techniques used by bank of Kigali; To examine the level of performance of Bank of Kigali To analyse a relationship between capital management and performance of the bank of Kigali and to examine challenges in the capital management and solution to the mentioned challenges. A multi-method approach composed of both qualitative and quantitative research design was used. Data was collected from both primary and secondary sources using questionnaire and documentation were used. A population comprised of 50 bank employees was selected, from which a sample of 32 respondents was determined using the Kreijcie and Morgan formula. Data was captured using the statistical package for sciences (SPSS) and presented into frequency tables. A regression analysis was carried out using SPSS. A significance test t≤5% was assumed. The findings indicated that a variation of 70.8%, 42%, 63%, 71.6% and 64% in the capital adequacy, asset quality, management efficiency, earnings and liquidity of the bank is caused by capital management and other variables. More still, the findings from the survey indicated that the bank encounters a number of challenges which include, but not limited to capital modelling, quantification of risks and interpretation Basing on the results the study concluded that capital management is a key component in the performance management of the banking sector. The study suggested the following policies for the effective performance management of the bank; establishing the internal capital assessment process committee, capital buffers to cover the unexpected losses, use of stress and back-testing and active involvement of the board of directors in the capital management.
La vitamine D, une nouvelle panacée ?

Besides its well known anti-rachitic properties, vitamin D has numerous in vitro and in vivo actions on the proliferation-differentiation of epidermal and cancer cells, as well as on the recruitment, differentiation and activities of the immune cells. Even though numerous association studies have suggested a possible link between a low vitamin D status and the risk of developing tumoral, auto-immune, neurologic or cardiovascular diseases, further data have proven to be more discordant and at best modest. In addition, the range of vitamin D doses or status active on these extra-skeletal pathologies remains poorly defined, between insufficiency and overload. Looking forward to clearly needed randomized intervention studies, optimal vitamin D status and intakes remain best defined on the basis of the vitamin D indisputable effects on calcium homeostasis and skeletal mineralization.
Efﬁcient Drone Positioning Scheme for Capacity Enhancements in Cellular Network

Recently, the use of drones as ﬂying base station to assist the terrestrial cellular networks for capacity enhancements has been studied. In this paper, the drones are used to ofﬂoad the cellular trafﬁc from the ground base-stations in the geographical locations where user density is signiﬁcantly high. To do this, an efﬁcient drone positioning scheme is introduced where the drones are positioned at optimal locations in an area. The problem is formulated to optimize the drone location and the coverage area to serve the maximum number of cellular users. Simulation results are drawn to analyze the effect of user density on the coverage area of drones in a cell.
A Review on Object Detection in Thermal Imaging and Analysing Object and Target Parameters

- The use of thermal imaging has become a major application in military. Thermal images provide a clear image even during night times. Using image recognition in identifying the target and embedded system in aiming the enemy, we can attack the enemy at a faster rate than usual. The thermal image is captured, enemy is identified automatically and the enemy is targeted. This application could be utilized in war fields where the enemy is targeted with the least efforts of man. This will promote the efficiency of attack in the war fields. For image processing, we can use OpenCV or MATLAB software. First the object is going to be detected from the image and that image has to be aligned at the centre of the object. After detecting the object, the next task is to recognize the object as gun, the instruction is going to aim the gun to target the object. For object detection SVM technology is better thing to use.
Comparison of Quality Gap of Physiotherapy Services in Public and Private Centers in Zahedan City Using SERVQUAL Model (Iran)

Accepted: 13 Nov, 2016 Abstract Background and Objectives: In order to provide better services in physiotherapy centers, factors such as awareness of perception and expectations of service recipients, determination of the gap between these two categories, plays a very important role. This study was conducted with the objective of evaluating the quality of physiotherapy services provided in public and private physiotherapy centers of Zahedan city using SERVQUAL model.