Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three-step in vitro maturation culture of bovine oocytes imitating temporal changes of estradiol-17 β and progesterone concentrations in preovulatory follicular fluid

Abstract. The objective of the article is to evaluate the effect of three-step in vitro maturation (IVM) culture system imitating estradiol-17β (E2) and progesterone (P4) concentrations in preovulatory follicles on in vitro bovine embryo production. The cumulus–oocyte complexes (COCs) were collected from follicles (2 to 8 mm in diameter) of bovine ovaries obtained from a local slaughterhouse. For IVM, the COCs were cultured for 22 h in a three-step system: (1) culture in medium 199, containing 700 ng mL−1 E2 and 50 ng mL−1 P4, for 5 h, followed by the medium containing 150 ng mL−1 E2 and 150 ng mL−1 P4 for 11 h, and then the medium containing 20 ng mL−1 E2 and 300 ng mL−1 P4 for 6 h (EP group); (2) culture in the medium containing 700 ng mL−1 E2 for 5 h, followed by the medium containing 150 ng mL−1 E2 for 11 h, and then the medium containing 20 ng mL−1 E2 for 6 h (E group); or (3) culture in the medium containing 50 ng mL−1 P4 for 5 h, followed by the medium containing 150 ng mL−1 P4 for 11 h, and then the medium containing 300 ng mL−1 P4 for 6 h (P group). The COCs were cultured in the medium containing 1000 ng mL−1 E2 for 22 h (control group). After IVM, the COCs were co-incubated with sperm and further cultured. At 48 h after insemination, the cleavage rate of embryos was not different among the groups. At 192 h after insemination, the blastocyst formation rate of EP group was significantly higher than that of the other groups. The total cell number of blastocysts did not differ among the groups. In conclusion, these results demonstrate that the three-step IVM culture system of bovine oocytes imitating temporal changes of E2 and P4 concentrations in preovulatory follicular fluid improves the developmental potential of embryos in vitro.
Evaluation of SCIAMACHY Level-1 data versions using nadir ozone profile retrievals in the period 2003–2011

Abstract. Ozone profile retrieval from nadir-viewing satellite instruments operating in the ultraviolet–visible range requires accurate calibration of Level-1 (L1) radiance data. Here we study the effects of calibration on the derived Level-2 (L2) ozone profiles for three versions of SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric ChartograpHY (SCIAMACHY) L1 data: version 7 (v7), version 7 with m-factors (v7 mfac ) and version 8 (v8). We retrieve nadir ozone profiles from the SCIAMACHY instrument that flew on board Envisat using the Ozone ProfilE Retrieval Algorithm (OPERA) developed at KNMI with a focus on stratospheric ozone. We study and assess the quality of these profiles and compare retrieved L2 products from L1 SCIAMACHY data versions from the years 2003 to 2011 without further radiometric correction. From validation of the profiles against ozone sonde measurements, we find that the v8 performs better than v7 and v7 mfac due to correction for the scan-angle dependency of the instrument's optical degradation. Validation for the years 2003 and 2009 with ozone sondes shows deviations of SCIAMACHY ozone profiles of 0.8–15 % in the stratosphere (corresponding to pressure range ∼ 100–10 hPa) and 2.5–100 % in the troposphere (corresponding to pressure range ∼ 1000–100 hPa ), depending on the latitude and the L1 version used. Using L1 v8 for the years 2003–2011 leads to deviations of ∼ 1–11 % in stratospheric ozone and ∼ 1–45 % in tropospheric ozone. The SCIAMACHY L1 v8 data can still be improved upon in the 265–330 nm range used for ozone profile retrieval. The slit function can be improved with a spectral shift and squeeze, which leads to a few percent residue reduction compared to reference solar irradiance spectra. Furthermore, studies of the ratio of measured to simulated reflectance spectra show that a bias correction in the reflectance for wavelengths below 300 nm appears to be necessary.
Five Skills to Help Improve Caregiver-Child Interaction during Play

Interaction synchrony defines how well a parent and child relate, with lower levels of synchrony associated with poor child outcomes. A 10-minute Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) was tested in a pre-posttest design for improving interactional synchrony in 40 low-income mothers and preschool children (Half of the mothers watched a child nutrition video and served as a control group). As a group, the mother-child synchrony levels were low-to-average. Mothers in the PCIT group were taught five skills (PRIDE) to use when playing with their children: praise, reflect, imitate, describe, enthusiasm. The PRIDE group improved in interactional synchrony, whereas the control group did not. Mothers in the PRIDE group also used more child-directed techniques and their children were coded as offering their mothers toys more frequently. The findings suggest that a brief intervention may improve the interactional synchrony of low-income mothers and their preschool children, which may enhance preschool age children’s social skills.
A method for improved SCIAMACHY CO 2 retrieval in the presence of optically thin clouds

Abstract. An optimal estimation based retrieval scheme for satellite based retrievals of XCO2 (the dry air column averaged mixing ratio of atmospheric CO2) is presented enabling accurate retrievals also in the presence of thin clouds. The proposed method is designed to analyze near-infrared nadir measurements of the SCIAMACHY instrument in the CO2 absorption band at 1580 nm and in the O2-A absorption band at around 760 nm. The algorithm accounts for scattering in an optically thin cirrus cloud layer and at aerosols of a default profile. The scattering information is mainly obtained from the O2-A band and a merged fit windows approach enables the transfer of information between the O2-A and the CO2 band. Via the optimal estimation technique, the algorithm is able to account for a priori information to further constrain the inversion. Test scenarios of simulated SCIAMACHY sun-normalized radiance measurements are analyzed in order to specify the quality of the proposed method. In contrast to existing algorithms for SCIAMACHY retrievals, the systematic errors due to cirrus clouds with optical thicknesses up to 1.0 are reduced to values below 4 ppm for most of the analyzed scenarios. This shows that the proposed method has the potential to reduce uncertainties of SCIAMACHY retrieved XCO2 making this data product potentially useful for surface flux inverse modeling.
Jean Pliya's La Secrétaire Particulière as an archetype of Satire

This form of creative art called literature is a principal tool for socio-political and economic struggles among other things. It paints life with a view to share human experiences, feelings, imaginations, observations, findings, predictions and suggestions for practical realities. In this paper, we attempt to elucidate Jean Pliya’s La Secretaire Particuliere as an archetype of satire. The purpose is to facilitate the comprehension of African Literature of French expression. Our review is premised on pragmatic approach, which holds that literature and other forms of creative arts have certain functions to perform in contributing to the development of human societies through moral or behaviour re-orientation. The paper concludes that satire is an essential mechanism in the hands of many African writers to achieve their motives. Keywords: Literature, creative arts, satire, fiction, non-fiction, society, development.
Intercomparison of Antarctic ice-shelf, ocean, and sea-ice interactions simulated by MetROMS-iceshelf and FESOM 1.4

Abstract. An increasing number of Southern Ocean models now include Antarctic ice-shelf cavities, and simulate thermodynamics at the ice-shelf/ocean interface. This adds another level of complexity to Southern Ocean simulations, as ice shelves interact directly with the ocean and indirectly with sea ice. Here, we present the first model intercomparison and evaluation of present-day ocean/sea-ice/ice-shelf interactions, as simulated by two models: a circumpolar Antarctic configuration of MetROMS (ROMS: Regional Ocean Modelling System coupled to CICE: Community Ice CodE) and the global model FESOM (Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model), where the latter is run at two different levels of horizontal resolution. From a circumpolar Antarctic perspective, we compare and evaluate simulated ice-shelf basal melting and sub-ice-shelf circulation, as well as sea-ice properties and Southern Ocean water mass characteristics as they influence the sub-ice-shelf processes. Despite their differing numerical methods, the two models produce broadly similar results and share similar biases in many cases. Both models reproduce many key features of observations but struggle to reproduce others, such as the high melt rates observed in the small warm-cavity ice shelves of the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas. Several differences in model design show a particular influence on the simulations. For example, FESOM's greater topographic smoothing can alter the geometry of some ice-shelf cavities enough to affect their melt rates; this improves at higher resolution, since less smoothing is required. In the interior Southern Ocean, the vertical coordinate system affects the degree of water mass erosion due to spurious diapycnal mixing, with MetROMS' terrain-following coordinate leading to more erosion than FESOM's z coordinate. Finally, increased horizontal resolution in FESOM leads to higher basal melt rates for small ice shelves, through a combination of stronger circulation and small-scale intrusions of warm water from offshore.
Effect of temperature on the drying characteristics, colour and ascorbic acid content of green and gold kiwifruits

The drying characteristics of green and gold kiwifruit were determined using an air velocity of 0.20 m/s at ambient humidity and different temperatures (60, 80 and 100 o C). The colour values (L*, a* and b*) and ascorbic acid content were also measured for the different fresh and dried kiwifruits. The drying of green and gold kiwifruit slices consists of a constant rate period (CRP) and two parts of falling rate period (FRP). The CRP drying rate, first and second FRP drying coefficients increase with drying temperature for both the green and gold kiwifruit slices. The first critical moisture content (CMC) and the dynamic equilibrium MC decrease with drying temperature for both the green and gold kiwifruit slices. The second CMC for both green and gold kiwifruit slices were not affected by drying temperature. The values for chroma of the dried green kiwifruit increased while the dried gold kiwifruit decreased with higher temperature as compared with the fresh samples. The values for hue angle of dried green and gold kiwifruits decreased at higher temperature. Lastly, the values for browning index of dried green and gold kiwifruits increased at higher temperature. There was not much change on the ascorbic acid contents of fresh and dried green and gold kiwifruits when drying at 60 and 80 o C. But there was about 19% decrease in the ascorbic acid content of dried green and gold kiwifruits after drying at 100 o C.
Research on Credit Risk Assessment of P2P Network Platform: Based on the Logistic Regression Model of Evidence Weight

As an emerging credit model, P2P network credit has been developing rapidly in recent years. At the same time, it also faces many credit risk problems. This paper focuses on the credit risk of borrowers, and constructs a model of WOE and logistic regression to evaluate the risk assessment of China’s P2P network platform, Hong ling Venture. The research results show that the main factors that affect the loan success rate of P2P lending platform include loan amount, annual interest rate, bidding transaction amount and proportion of repayment on time and so on. By constructing the model of combination of the logistic regression with weight of evidence, this paper provides an appropriate method to manipulate the borrowing information of loan borrowers and evaluates the borrowing behavior of borrowers simultaneously, so that P2P credit platform can reduce the credit risk caused by borrower.
A Data-driven Model for the Generation of Prosody from Syntactic Sentence Structures

Prosody describes the aspects of speech that go beyond its basic phonetic content. They include the melody and rhythm of speech, loudness and similar properties. Prosody is a vital part of speech that simplifies understanding and often serves as an additional information channel. While modern speech-synthesis systems are able to produce speech with prosody that sounds correct, they still lack the ability to make it lively enough so that the prosody does not immediately betray the artificial nature of the speech. This thesis aims to explore one the functions of prosody in synthesis, namely that of structuring speech. To that end, it proposes a more direct use of the syntax structure of the text for the generation of prosody. A new hierarchic approach to prosody generation is introduced that produces prosody directly from the syntax structure of the sentence. This is achieved by defining elementary prosody generation functions, called mutators, that describe the local contribution of a single node in the syntax tree to the global prosody of the sentence. We show that these mutator functions can be trained from natural speech and then combined according to the syntax structure of the sentence for the prosody generation. The result is a complex, yet flexible prosody generation model that can produce natural sounding prosody. In contrast to existing methods, the mutator functions directly generate physical prosodic parameters like fundamental frequency and duration, although stylized on a word level. This means that abstract prosody concepts like accent and phrase are represented only indirectly in the model, making it easier to learn new prosody models from arbitrary examples of natural speech and allowing to express more fine-grained the degrees of prosodic expression. The thesis explores different word stylizations
Effectiveness of Use-value Assessment in Preserving Farmland: A Search-theoretic Approach

Abstract Search theory is used to present a theoretically defensible model to examine the effectiveness of use value assessment (UVA) in preserving farmland. The model is empirically tractable and supports the findings of past research. The analysis considers the impact of farm income, uncertainty, and the distribution of the offer price on the effectiveness of UVA in preserving farmland and shows, through the effect on the reservation price, that for a given distribution of the offer price, property-tax rate, and the difference between market-value and use-value of land, the preservation of agricultural land only takes place within a relevant range.
Maturity of ascostroma and spore dispersal of tar spot pathogen on Salix polaris in Ny-Ålesund

In Ny-Alesund, Spitsbergen Island, high Arctic Norway, tar spot disease caused by Rhytisma sp. occurs widely on Salix polaris. Plant pathogens can affect individual growth and community structure in many wild plants (Gilbert 2002). Although the disease has long been recorded in Spitsbergen Is. (Lind 1928, Hagen1941), the ecological characteristics of the pathogen have not been determined. To clarify the aspects of early stage in the life cycle of Rhytisma sp. , we investigated the ascostroma maturity levels and spore dispersal of the pathogen in both field and laboratory experiments.In field experiments, the pathogen developments were investigated in ascostromata and spores at the study site from snowmelt to late summer. The spore dispersal was periodically estimated using a trapping method using a slide glass with a layer of soft wax. In laboratory experiments, spore developments in ascostromata were compared among three deferent moisture conditions including natural drying, high humidy (99.9 %) and saturated conditions. The laboratory experiments were conducted at 15°C under light. The field experiments showed that the ascostroma was formed on the host leaves during the previous summer and on the fallen leaves over the winter. The ascostromata were immature just after snowmelt but matured in two weeks. The spores were dispersed by precipitation at the experiment site (Figure 1). A strong correlation (p < 0.05, R 2 =0.91) was found between the spore dispersion and precipitation. In laboratory experiments, ascostromata matured and released spores only under saturated condition (Figure 2). The laboratory experiments also showed that the minimum period for maturation of the ascostromata was five days at 15°C. These results demonstrated that saturation is necessary to release spores of the pathogen, at least for primary production of the spores from ascostroma. This suggests that the amount and frequency of rainfall highly influence spore release from matured ascostroma under field conditions at Ny-Alesund where is little precipitation in summer (34 mm / monthly mean precipitation of July).
The Influence of Culture on Financial Reporting Quality in Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether financial reporting quality relates to national culture. Besides the conventional corporate governance mechanism of the board of directors and substitute corporate governance mechanism of ownership structure, culture and religious traditions have been considered as having an important influence on corporate governance systems employed in any one country. Malaysia is a multiethnic society with Chinese and Malays dominating economics and politics in Malaysia. Ethnicity acts as a suitable surrogate for culture in Malaysia, which has a multiracial society, each section of which still maintains its own unique ethnic identity and values. This study uses a discretionary component of the accrual quality model as a measure for financial reporting quality to examine the association between ethnicity and financial reporting quality. This study finds no significant relationship between the race of chairman and race of CEO and accrual quality. Interestingly, this study reports higher financial reporting quality associated with firms dominated by Malay directors. The finding of this study suggests that the quality of financial reporting cannot be culturally free and is impacted largely by government policy. This study offers an alternative explanation on the association between governance and financial reporting quality by examining the role of ethnicity that explicates the unique institutional context of an Asian country.
Improved Production and Purification of Pectinase from Streptomyces sp. GHBA10 isolated from Valapattanam mangrove habitat, Kerala, India

Pectinases are enzymes that catalyze the hydrolysis of pectin (polygalacturonic acid) to galacturonic acid residues. Actinomycetes are efficient degraders of plant debris as they produce extracellular enzymes like cellulase, xylanase and pectinase. The present investigation focuses on improvement of pectinase production through media optimization, followed by its purification. Submerged fermentation was carried out using a mangrove isolate of Streptomyces sp. GHBA10, identified by 16S rDNA sequencing. The highest yield of the enzyme was obtained from 0.3% (w/v) pectin and 0.1% (w/v) tryptone at an initial medium pH of 8.5, when incubated at 30°C and 150 rpm for 6 days with an inoculum size of 5% (v/v). The effect of surfactants such as sodium dodecyl sulphate, Triton X-100, Tween-20, Tween-80 and cetrimide on the enzyme production revealed that cetrimide significantly enhanced the enzyme secretion. The crude pectinase was purified by salt precipitation, dialysis and gel filtration chromatography. The specific activity of the purified pectinase was estimated to be 2610 U/mg of enzyme protein. Purification revealed 3.5-fold increase in specific activity of the enzyme. Sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis revealed an apparent molecular weight of 32 kDa. This pectinase may be industrially used in extraction and clarification processes.
Suppressive Subtraction Hybridization on Stimulated Primary Horse Macrophages

Matia‰ovic J., P. Kralik, L. Leva, M. Faldyna, P. Hofiin: Suppressive Subtraction Hybridization on Stimulated Primary Horse Macrophages. Acta Vet Brno 75, 2006: 337-341. To study genes potentially involved in genetic resistance to infectious diseases in the horse, suppressive subtraction hybridization was used to identify genes expressed in primary horse macrophages after their stimulation with E. coli. Overnight culture of blood monocyte-derived macrophage cells was stimulated with E. coli K12 in ratio 40 E. coli cells to one macrophage cell. After 4 hours of incubation, non-phagocyted bacteria were washed away. Following next 20 hour incubation in MEM alpha containing 5 µg of gentamycin in 1 ml of media, mRNA was isolated and used in Clontech PCR-Select cDNA Subtraction Kit. Expression of several known horse genes, as well as some new ESTs (expressed sequence tags) showing sequence similarity with immunity-related genes from other species was identified. SSH, horse, monocyte, immunity
Some biochemical properties of guaiacol peroxidases as modified by salt stress in leaves of salt-tolerant and salt-sensitive safflower ( Carthamus tinctorius L.cv. ) cultivars

The kinetics properties of guaiacol peroxidase (GP) and its isozymic pattern, and lipid peroxidation product were comparatively analyzed in two varieties of safflower ( cv. M-CC-190 as salt-tolerant and cv. IL-111 as salt-sensitive cultivars) under normal and different concentrations of NaCl. The pH profile of GP activity in leaves extract of two cultivars in control and salt stressed plants showed different pattern of pH dependency with three maxima peaks at pH 4.5, 6.5 and 8 in salt-tolerant cultivar and two maxima peaks at pH 4.5 and 6.5 in salt-sensitive cultivar. Comparison of catalytic efficiency for GP between two cultivars at respective pH, showed that, salt-tolerant cultivar in both control and salt stressed condition had higher catalytic efficiency than salt-susceptible cultivar. The GP activity on the gels revealed four and two isoforms of peroxidases in salt-tolerant and salt-sensitive cultivars, respectively. GPs increased their expression with higher levels of salinity. However, in salt-sensitive cultivar GPs expression exhibited threshold behavior, with increase expressions in isoenzymes up to a certain level of salinity (25 mM NaCl), followed by decrease to a level of expressions corresponding to the control groups. The levels of lipid peroxidation as indicated by thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) were higher in the sensitive variety than the tolerant under control and NaCl salinity. The overall results obtained in this study suggest that, oxidative stress may play an important role in salt-stressed safflower plants and that the greater protection of M-CC-190 leaves from salt-induced oxidative damage results, at least in part, through the increase of the GPs activity, catalytic efficiency and induction of specific isoenzymes (P1 and P4).