Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of diet dilution at early age on performance, carcass characteristics and blood parameters of broiler chicks

The effect of energy and protein dilution during 16 to 20 d of age, on performance, carcass characteristics and blood parameters of broiler chickens was studied in a completely randomized design with 3 treatments and 3 replicates in each treatment. A total of 144 mixed-sex chickens (Cobb 500) were randomly allocated to 9 pens. In order to dilute the diets three levels (0, 20 and 40%) of rice hull was used. During the experiment feed intake, body weight gain, feed conversion ratio were measured weekly. The results indicated that dilution of diet from 16 to 20 d of age increased feed intake in this period, but adjusted feed intake (excluded rice hull) was decreased (P<0.05). Restricted bird consumed more feed in the whole period of the experiment (16 to 44 d). With increasing dilution rate during restriction period, body weight gain of chickens decreased in comparison to control group (P<0.05). Due to compensatory growth after restriction period, restricted chickens had higher body weight gain than control groups at 44 d of age. Feed dilution up to 20 percent had not significant effect on feed conversion ratio in the whole period of the experiment. Diet dilution had not significant effect on carcass, breast meat, legs, proventriculus, heart and feet weight proportion. Diet dilution significantly increased gizzard weight proportion, and decreased abdominal fat pad weight, carcass crude fat, and increased carcass crude protein proportion (P<0.05). Feed dilution up to 20% increased HDL and decreased LDL concentration in plasma at 21 d of age. Diet dilution up to 40% decreased the concentrations of cholesterol, triglyceride, plasma T3, and increased the concentrations of uric acid and plasma T4 at 21 d of age (P<0.05). Diet dilution up to 20 percent increased plasma glucose concentration at 42 d of age (P<0.05). The results of the present study indicated that feed dilution with 20% rice hull during 16 to 20 d of age had not adverse effect on broiler performance and it also reduced abdominal fat pad weight and carcass crude fat proportion.
Philopatry and site fidelity of New Zealand sea lions (Phocarctos hookeri)

The New Zealand sea lion (NZ sea lion), Phocarctos hookeri, is New Zealand’s only endemic pinniped, and one of the worlds rarest otariids. It is classified as ‘Threatened’ based primarily on the low number of breeding sites and restricted distribution. In New Zealand, a species listed as ‘threatened’ is required to be managed to allow its recovery and removal from the list within 20 years. For NZ sea lions this is dependant on the establishment of new breeding areas. However, understanding the recolonisation processes for pinnipeds is still in its infancy with factors such as philopatry needing more research to understand individual dispersal and the recolonisation process. This paper presents the first quantitative investigation into the level of site fidelity and philopatry to breeding beaches in NZ sea lions. Data from resights of NZ sea lions marked as pups from the northern Auckland Island breeding area suggest that both site fidelity and philopatry are important characteristics of this species. Our results show that overall: (1) females have a higher resighting rate than males, particularly at natal sites; (2) female non-natal resightings are predominantly restricted to locations within the northern Auckland Island breeding area (an area of ~10 km2), whereas male resightings are more widely dispersed (up to 700 km to NZ mainland); and (3) philopatry occurs for both sexes, but is more predominant in females than males, with males displaying delay related to sexual and social maturity. The colonisation of new breeding habitats rarely occurs when philopatry is strong and population density is low, stable or declining such as seen for NZ sea lions. Therefore, this research indicates that management of NZ sea lions needs to minimise anthropogenic mortality and encourage population growth to maximise density at breeding sites and encourage females to disperse to establish new breeding areas.
Hormonal control of the plant cell cycle

Plant organogenesis is essentially a post-embryonic process that requires a strict balance between cell proliferation and differentiation. This is subject to a complex regulatory network which, in some cases, depends on the action of a variety of plant hormones. Of these, auxins and cytokinins are those best documented as impinging directly on cell cycle control. However, increasing evidence is accumulating to indicate that other hormones also have an impact on cell cycle control by influencing the availability of cell cycle regulators. In this article, we review the results that point to the variety of situations in which cell cycle progression is controlled by phytohormones.
Fast, Small, and Area-Time Efficient Architectures for Key-Exchange on Curve25519

This paper demonstrates fast and compact implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for efficient key agreement over Curve25519. Curve25519 has been recently adopted as a key exchange method for several applications and included in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommendations for public key cryptography. This paper presents three different performance level designs including lightweight, area-time efficient, and high-performance architectures. Lightweight hardware implementations are used for several Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to their resources being at premium. Our lightweight architecture utilizes 90% less resources compared to the best previous work while it is still more optimized in term of A middot; T (area×time). For efficient implementation from either time or utilized resources, our area-time efficient architecture can establish almost 7,000 key sessions per second which is 64% faster than the previous works. The area-time efficient architecture uses well scheduled interleaved multiplication combined with a reduction algorithm. Additionally, we offer a fast architecture for high performance applications based on the 4-level Karatsuba method and Carry-Compact Addition (CCA). Our high-performance architecture also outperforms previous work in terms of A middot; T. The results show 9% and 29% improvement in A middot; T and Ad middot; T (DSP_count×time), respectively. All architectures are variable-base-point implemented on the Xilinx Zynq-7020 FPGA family where performance and implementation metrics are reported and compared. Finally, various side-channel attack countermeasures are embedded in the proposed architectures.
Testing the cost of diet switching as a mechanism for the evolution of strict herbivory in lizards

Herbivory is rare in reptiles generally, and particularly so in lizards. My study seeks to explain why strict herbivory should evolve in lizards. Captive herbivorous reptiles raised on a high protein diet grow faster and reach sexual maturity more quickly than those fed a low protein diet. Given several disadvantages associated with eating plants, and the apparent advantages to herbivores that supplement their diets with animals, why should strict herbivory evolve in nature? I will test the hypothesis that switching from an herbivorous to a carnivorous diet, and back again to herbivory, is energetically costly for herbivorous lizards. This cost may be manifested as a decrease in digestive efficiency resulting from a concomitant disturbance of the gut endosymbiont community, which is responsible for fermenting plant fiber. If this hypothesis is supported, then the energy lost from the predicted decrease in digestive efficiency should be greater than the energy that would be gained from supplementing the diet with animals. My study imposes diet-switching treatments on desert iguanas (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) and compares their digestive efficiency and the community structure of their gut microbes before and after diet switches. I will determine whether significant changes in digestibility and endosymbiont community structure are associated with diet switches.
Cooperative Learning: Integrating Language and Content-Area Instruction

Teacher Resource Guides have been submitted to NCBE by practitioners involved in teacher education, research, and the education of language minority students. These Guides are intended to be practical resource guides on current or innovative teaching practices in bilingual education and in the education of limitedEnglish-proficient students. Every effort has been made to cull the most practical aspects of each curriculum guide and to incorporate these into a concise classroom resource with sample lesson plans or activities.
A Visualization of Network Data

The large amount of data network produced every day and its correct analysis and visualization is crucial, especially for telecommunication companies that request simulations to predict and avoid possible problems. A solution that allows the participant to visualize this information in an efficient and effective way is then necessary. With this work we tried to understand whether, by taking the advantages of both 2D and 3D, a hybrid technique is a viable solution. In order to do this, we analyzed different techniques, characteristics, and displays used for presenting information. We then performed several interviews to network data specialists to better understand who would benefit from this solution and what it should focus on. The process of the development of the prototypes is then explained and finally, qualitative and quantitative tests were performed. From these we were able to conclude that the hybrid prototype performed better on the spatially complex task and, although it has more features than the 2D prototype, it didn’t perform worse, obtaining results very similar to the latter. People also manifested their preference to the hybrid prototype.
Plastic phenotypes of antennule shape in Bosmina longirostris controlled by physical stimuli from predators

Three antennule morphotypes in the small cladoceran Bosmina longirostris have been considered to be hereditarily rigid phenotypes. However, we found that monoclonal populations of Bosmina collected from a Japanese lake were composed of individuals with all three antennule types when grown under laboratory conditions. This suggests that each of the morphotypes represents a phenotype of the species. A morphotype named ‚‚pellucida’’ observed in the monoclonal cultures has been considered to be effective in avoiding copepod predations. We therefore hypothesized that the morphotype is induced by factors from the predator, cyclopoid copepod. To test this hypothesis, a laboratory experiment was conducted in which the monoclonal individuals were exposed to the kairomones of the copepod Acanthocyclops with or without physical contacts with the predator. The morphotype was not altered when Bosmina was exposed to the predator kairomone alone, but to direct predation by the copepod. This suggests that the antennule type of B. longirostris is controlled by physical stimuli from the copepod. The individual death rate of B. longirostris resulting from a copepod strike is low, even though the population dynamics of the animals are often governed by copepod predation. This may have made the physical stimuli of attempted predations useful factors for the prey Bosmina.
Audio Source Separation Using Ontology-Based Weighted Ensemble

Blind audio source separation is an active area of research. In this problem, the input to the model is a sound wave with sounds produced from multiple sources. The paper suggests a novel ontology based weighted ensemble architecture to improve the accuracy of current models. We created a sample such architecture consisting of a Transformer to identify ontological categories of sound sources followed by an ensemble of Wave-U-Net Models. The finale result is taken after weighing the results based on the predicted categories. In addition, the paper introduces a novel dataset consisting of 53 categories. The new model is tested on the new datasets and better training and validation curves are obtained as compared to a single Wave-U-Net model. In addition, while this is not discussed in the paper, the architecture allows for training a model by intermixing different datasets: only models specialized for the respective sounds can be trained on the new datasets. Hence, even if the resulting dataset is imbalanced, this does not adversely effect the training procedure.
Causal inference and heterogeneity bias in social science

Because of population heterogeneity, causal inference with observational data in social science may suffer from two possible sources of bias: (1) bias in unobserved pretreatment factors affecting the outcome even without treatment; and (2)bias due to heterogeneity in treatment effects. Even when we control for observed covariates, these two biases may occur if the classic ignorability assumption is untrue. In cases where the ignorability assumption is true, “composition bias” can occur if treatment propensity is systematically associated with heterogeneous treatment effects.
IT Governance for Balancing Evolveability and Standardization in Health Information System Implementation in Ethiopian Context

Failing to balance standardization and evolveability in IS design and implementation process results sustainability failure which is common in developing country. IS research provides various IS design solution including layered modular architecture to address both evolveability and standardization simultaneously. However, this design solution requires appropriate IT governance mechanisms which lacks both theoretical and empirical explanation in IS research. The core of this research is understanding IT governance mechanism design that can balance standardization and evolveability in the course of IS design and implementation. The research uses the case of District Health Information System-2 (DHIS-2), layered modular architecture, design and implementation in public health care context of Ethiopia. The major research question guiding this study is how IT governance mechanism design and its interplay with IS architecture design shape DHIS-2 design and implementation process towards standardization and/or evolveability? The research strategy adopted in this case will be based on an interpretive case study approach.
Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) for Skin Cancer Classification

Skin cancer is one of the most threatening types of cancer, with an increasing rates throughout the decade. Detecting and classifying skin cancer in its early stages provides better chances for treatment. In the recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) emerged as a powerful solution that aids the diagnosis of skin cancer. In this paper, Human Against Machine (HAM) 10000 dataset is used to demonstrate skin cancer classification strategy. VGG16, VGG19, and a Deep CNN proposed in this paper are implemented, trained, and evaluated. The dataset pre-processing steps and methodology are illustrated, and the network parameters and training process are explained. The performance of all three networks are compared in terms of the average overall accuracy and loss.
Intraguild predation among aphidophagous predators

Since the publication of papers by Polis et al. (1989, 1992), intraguild predation (IGP) has been considered in numerous systems and a growing number of papers have been published, demonstrating the ubiquity and the importance of this interaction. It appears that aphidophagous guilds constitute especially favourable systems for IGP. Temporal and spatial distributions of aphids promote interactions, such as IGP, among natural enemies. However, despite extensive laboratory and field studies, several questions remain to be answered: Which traits of the different protagonists of the system may promote or hamper the occurrence of IGP? How do ants tending aphids modulate the interaction? How should one consider the "sub-lethal" effects (and the defensive mechanisms) associated with the risk of IGP? May IGP disrupt or enhance aphid control? These different issues are discussed by focusing on the predatory species in the complex system of aphidophagous guilds. It appears that, first, IGP may constitute one of the main forces influencing the structure and dynamics of aphidophagous guilds, and therefore it has to be taken into account in research studies, and second, because of the ephemeral nature of aphid colonies and the great number of species belonging to aphidophagous guilds, understanding all the implications of the interaction, both direct and indirect, constitutes a very complex task.
Lethal drought leads to reduction in nonstructural carbohydrates in Norway spruce tree roots but not in the canopy

Summary Heat waves and droughts are expected to increase in frequency and severity in many regions with future climate change, threatening the survival of a number of forest ecosystems. However, our understanding of the physiological processes and mechanisms underlying drought-induced tree mortality is incomplete. Here, we present results on the physiological response of young Norway spruce trees exposed to lethal drought stress. We applied three levels of drought treatment (control, drying–rewetting, complete drought) and monitored relevant physiological functions and processes of carbon and water relations at high temporal resolution until tree death occurred. Only trees subjected to continuous drought died in our experiment. Trees subjected to drying–rewetting cycles consistently recovered in their ability to transport water, indicating that these trees do not suffer permanent damage to the hydraulic system. In all cases, drought reduced carbon assimilation, caused changes in carbon allocation and appeared to have severely reduced phloem functioning and carbon translocation. Structural growth was sacrificed for carbon investment in maintenance respiration and osmoprotection. Severe drought caused trees to rely on stored carbon reserves but, in contrast to above-ground tissues, only root carbon pools were strongly reduced when trees died. Our results indicate that drought-induced changes in carbon allocation, use and transport differ between above- and below-ground tissues in trees. While root death may have been caused by carbon depletion, this was definitely not the case in above-ground tissues. Our findings indicate that mortality mechanisms are not defined at the organism level but rather within tree compartments.
A Case Study in Functional Data Analysis; Investigating the Geometry of the Internal Carotid Artery for Cerebral Aneurysms Classification(⋆)

Cerebral aneurysms are deformations of cerebral vessels cha racterized by a bulge of the vessel wall. This pathology is common in the adult populatio n; between 1% and 6% of adults develop a cerebral aneurysm during their lives (Rin kel et al., 1998). Usually cerebral aneurysms are asymptomatic and not disrupting; ho wever the rupture of a cerebral aneurysm, even if quite uncommon, is a tragic event that implies death in more than 50% of cases. The origin of the aneurysmal pathology is still unclear. Pos sible explanations, discussed in the medical literature, focus on the interacti ons between biomechanical properties of artery walls and hemodynamic factors, such as w ll shear stress and pressure; the hemodynamics is in turn strictly dependent on vascular geometry. See for instance Hassan et al. (2005) and Castroet al. (2006). The study of these interactions is the main goal of the AneuRisk Project, a scientific endeavor which joins researchers of different scientific fields ranging from neurosurgery and neuroradiology to statistics, numerical analysis and bio-engineering. Most of the statistical modeling within the AneuRisk Project has been aimed at revealing dependencies between vessel geometries and onse t of an urysm. Investigations
Employment of Dictionary-based Approach in Opinion Word Elicitation: A Case Study in the Hoteling Domain

Opinion mining and sentiment mining as a sub fields of data mining and machine learning nowadays are interesting research fields due to the increasing number of user roles and their attempts in declaring their opinions in various domains of social networks and e-commerce. These areas are closely related to artificial intelligence and especially natural language proceesing. For this reseaon, employing developed algorithm with high accuracy for other languages in another language especilaay Persian is very difficult and sometimes impossible. The number of conducted research on Persian language is a few ones and deploying the results of such algorithms on e-commerce domain is necessary and of high importance. There are some associated challenges for conduction such research such as the the lack of graph based dictionarires including the sentiment words, the graph based dictionaries including the dependency of words and the degree of their dependency and softwares for determining the sentence's part opf speech. Some of such tools are existed but either are incomplete or they are not limited to a special domain which make using them very challenging and time consuming. This paper describes our attempt to construct a graph based dictionary in Persian language including the opinion and sentiment words of different part of speech for hoteling and tourism domain that using them for researchers leards to higher accuracy and faster processing time in the related areas.
A comparison of methods to quantify prolamin contents in cereals

Hydrophobic prolamins are endosperm storage proteins accounting for about 40% of the total protein in most cereal seeds. Despite the absence of a reference method, several procedures have been periodically published to quantify prolamins in cereals. The aim of this study was to compare a conventional fractionation assay (LND) vs three other methods: one based on sequential extractions (HAM) and two rapid turbidimetric procedures (L&H and DRO). Prolamins were extracted in duplicate on barley, corn and wheat samples. For the turbidimetric prolamin evaluation in barley and wheat, a universally available purified gliadin, as alternative to purified zein, was also tested as standard reference material (SRM). The extraction prolamin values were different among grain types (P<0.01) and methods (P<0.01) without interaction (P>0.05). LND agreed sufficiently well both with HAM and with L&H methods (R2=0.664 and R2=0.703, respectively, P<0.01). On all tested cereals, LND and L&H gave similar prolamin extraction values (P>0.05), whereas a higher prolamin quantification was obtained using HAM (P<0.05). Overall, DRO did not provide similar comparison and performance parameters with respect to other method comparisons. The effect of changing purified zein with purified gliadin was noteworthy only for L&H, both for wheat and barley samples (P<0.01). Considering the increasing attention of animal nutritionists on prolamins, our results could get useful information for routine laboratory analysis.
Resolving Security Issues of Cognitive Radio Networks

The cognitive radio (CR) network has been studied in the form of open source by vast number of communities, and the potential expectation is very high since the CR is based on reprogrammable platform. However, as the peer-to-peer software has been abused, so high is the chance that the CR network can be abused public wide. Consequently, the benefit from the study of next-generation wireless network can be at risk because law breakers could abuse the CR. In this contribution, we analyze the issues and the problems of the CR and discuss an efficient measure against security attacks.