Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Stand Biomass Estimation Methods for Major Forest Types in the Eastern Da Xing’an Mountains, Northeast China

Currently, forest biomass estimation methods at the regional scale have attracted the greatest attention from researchers, and the development of stand biomass models has become popular a trend. In this study, a total of 5074 measurements on 1053 permanent sample plots were obtained in the Eastern Da Xing’an Mountains, and three additive systems of stand biomass equations were developed. The first additive system (M-1) used stand variables as the predictors (i.e., stand basal area and average height), the second additive system (M-2) utilized stand volume as the sole predictor, and the third additive system (M-3) included both stand volume and biomass expansion and conversion factors (BCEFs) as the predictors. The coefficients of the three model systems were estimated with nonlinear seemingly unrelated regression (NSUR), while the heteroscedasticity of the model residuals was solved with the weight function. The jackknifing technique was used on the residuals, and several statistics were used to assess the prediction performance of each model. We comprehensively evaluated four stand biomass estimation methods (i.e., M-1, M-2, M-3 and a constant BCEF (M-4)). Here, we showed that the (1) three additive systems of stand biomass equations showed good model fitting and prediction performance, (2) M-3 significantly improved the model fitting and performance and provided the most accurate predictions for most stand biomass components, and (3) the ranking of the four stand biomass estimation methods followed the order of M-3 > M-2 > M-4 > M-1. Our results demonstrated these additive stand biomass models could be used to estimate the stand aboveground and belowground biomass for the major forest types in the Eastern Da Xing’an Mountains, although the most appropriate method depends on the available data and forest type.
Information search behaviour - Is there a gap between tourist needs and DMO website performance

The purpose of this paper is to underline the importance of understanding tourist behaviour in the decision-making process in choosing a destination for travel or vacation, as well as the importance of applying the insights gained to the web marketing of tourist destinations. When selecting a travel destination, tourists search for information from a variety of sources. The Internet, an important information source, plays a vital role in this process. The websites of Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) are a source of information to tourists in the decision-making process of selecting a destination and they are a means of DMO marketing communication with the target market. Hence, special attention must be devoted to contents posted on the websites of DMOs to ensure they meet the requirements of tourists in the decision-making process of destination selection. Considering the marketing concept, marketers, when designing websites, need to take the needs and wants of tourists into account and adjust the contents of their websites accordingly. Importance- Performance Analysis can be carried out to test whether the contents posted on DMOs’ websites match tourist needs. This paper presents the application of Importance-Performance Analysis on the example of the websites of Croatian DMOs.
Promoting and Supporting Authentic Online Conversations – Which Comes First – The Tools or Instructional Design?

Abstract There are elements of instructional design which are fundamental to a higher education constructivist learning environment. These elements, embedded in a well-designed learning environment are necessary to promote academic discourse. The presence of communication tools alone in an online environment does not assure collaboration and construction of new knowledge. The skill of the facilitator is integral to achieving successful outcomes. This paper describes instructional design strategies which play a key role in promoting and supporting conversation which results in higher order thinking in the context of a pedagogical event conducted as a requirement of a Masters course.
A study to determine the importance of ward pharmacists reviewing discharge prescriptions

Objective: To evaluate the potential impact on appropriateness of discharge medication if discharge prescriptions were reviewed by the ward pharmacist before being dispensed. Method: Over a four-week period discharge prescriptions were reviewed by either the ward pharmacist involved in the patient's care (cases) or a dispensary pharmacist who had no knowledge of the patient's care (controls). A second review with the availability of patient records was carried out to identify additional queries that should have been raised prior to dispensing. Results: Fifty-five prescriptions (29 case, 26 control) containing 279 items (140 case, 139 control) were reviewed. Forty -four queries (23 case, 21 control) were found on initial checking of the prescription, 12 more queries (1 case, 11 control) were found on the second review of the prescription. There were 13 potentially clinically significant queries in the case group, 12 (92%) were made during initial prescription review. There were 23 potentially clinically significant queries in the control group, only 12 (52%) were made on initial prescription review. Changes to the prescription resulting from potentially clinically significant queries prior to dispensing occurred in 19 (79%) queries (10 case, 83%; and 9 control, 75% ). Of queries raised prior to dispensing in the control group, 18 involved contacting hospital staff for resolution where they could have been resolved using the inpatient prescription chart, notes or the patient themselves. This compared to only one in the case group. Conclusion: Review of discharge prescriptions by the ward pharmacist involved in the patient's care optimises the appropriateness of discharge medication and the efficiency of the discharge process. (author abstract)
Cucumber appearance quality detection under complex background based on image processing

Cucumber fruit appearance quality is an important basis of growth status. In order to improve the quality detection accuracy and processing efficiency of cucumber color image under complicated background, an improved GrabCut algorithm was proposed to extract the cucumber boundary. Firstly, including pixel size normalization, rectangular box set and scale image resolution, pretreatments of cucumber image were adopted to reduce the iteration times and operation time of GrabCut algorithm. Then, the Gaussian mixture model was chosen to find out the possible prospect of target region and background region in the preprocessed rectangular frame on the preliminary modeling. Meanwhile, by the optimization of K-means cluster to the initial GMM model, the effective target area was extracted. Finally, the whole image noise and serrated boundary was removed by morphological operations to segment the outline of the complete target prospects with appropriate structure size. And then the cucumber appearance quality detection instrument was designed to extract the texture and shape features exactly, so that it could obtain cucumber appearance quality and evaluate its growth effectively. With the segmentation experiments by almost 300 cucumber original images from greenhouse in Shandong Province, the results showed that the improved GrabCut algorithm could effectively extract the complete and smooth boundary of cucumber. With relatively high segmentation evaluation index, the precision was 93.88%, the recall rate was 99.35%, the F-Measure reached 96.53%, and the misclassification error was controlled at minimum 5.84%. The average running time was shortened to 1.4023 s. The comparison results showed that the improved GrabCut algorithm was the best, followed by the SLIC and traditional GrabCut method. Cucumber appearance quality detection instrument could also extract more accurate feature parameters. And it could meet the basic growth condition assessment by automatic image processing. Keywords: cucumber, complicated background, quality detection, image processing, GrabCut DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe. 20181104.3090 Citation: Ye H J, Liu C Q, Niu P Y. Cucumber appearance quality detection under complex background based on image processing. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2018; 11(4): 193-199.
Household debt and depressive symptoms among older adults in three continental European countries

Abstract In this comparative study focusing on the population aged 50 and over in three European countries, we investigate the association between household debt and depressive symptoms, and possible country differences in this association, using data from Waves 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 of the Surveys of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for Belgium, France and Germany. Multi-level regression models with random intercepts for individuals were used to analyse the association between household debt status and number of depressive symptoms (EURO-D score). Country differences in the household debt–depression nexus were tested using country interaction models. After controlling for other measures of socio-economic position and physical health, low or substantial financial debt was associated with a higher number of depressive symptoms in all countries. Housing debt was strongly linked to depressive symptoms for women while the association was weaker for men. The only country difference was that for both sexes substantial financial debt (more than €5,000) was strongly associated with depressive symptoms in Belgium and Germany, but the association was weak or non-significant in France. Associations between financial debt and depression were also evident in analyses of within-individual changes in depressive symptoms for a longitudinal sub-group, and in analyses using a dichotomised, rather than a continuous, measure of depression. The findings indicate that measures of household indebtedness should be taken into consideration in investigations of social inequalities in depression and suggest a need for mental health services targeted at indebted older people.
Mulberry leaves treated with bordeaux mixture protect silkworm caterpillars against fungal and viral diseases

The bordeaux mixture is used as a natural agricultural fungicide, and its application in sericulture can benefit the production of silkworm cocoons, Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae). The aim of this study was to verify whether the bordeaux mixture exerts a protective effect in B. mori against fungal and viral diseases. This experiment was performed during two seasons, autumn and spring, in which 7,500 caterpillars were used at the beginning of the third instar and divided into five groups, with three repetitions of 500 individuals each. In the three groups, the caterpillars were fed leaves of Mulberry ( Morus spp.) that were enriched with an aqueous bordeaux mixture solution at concentrations of 5, 10 and 20%. One group was fed exclusively mulberry leaves (control), and another was fed leaves that were moistened with water. Fungal contamination was evaluated in the integumentary surface of the insect and the mulberry leaves in the bed of creation by checking the number of colony-forming units (CFU). In the analysis of viral contamination, 20 caterpillars from each group at the beginning of the fifth instar were inoculated with 10 ? l of a suspension of Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus (BmNPV). Daily, from the second to the ninth day after inoculation (dai), two caterpillars of each group were anesthetized and formalin-fixed 7% for microscopic processing and viral cytopathology analysis. A completely randomized design was used, and the CFU were compared by Tukey test with 5% significance. The results showed a decrease of 55.1% in CFU present on the mulberry leaves in the fall, when the 5% bordeaux mixture solution was used. There was no significant difference between the groups based on the bordeaux mixture in this period. During the same period, reductions of CFU of 28.5, 74.9 and 74.4% were verified in the integument of B. mori when bordeaux mixture solutions of 5, 10 and 20% were used, respectively, compared with the data that were obtained in the control group. In the spring, no difference was observed between the groups that received bordeaux mixture solution and the control. In the case of BmNPV, the 10% bordeaux mixture solution promoted greater resistance to viral infection, possibly favoring the activation of defense mechanisms of insects. Therefore, we recommend the use of a 10% bordeaux mixture solution in mulberry leaves to control fungal and viral diseases in silkworm rearing.
How to make a good animation: A grounded cognition model of how visual representation design affects the construction of abstract physics knowledge

Visual representations play a critical role in teaching physics. However, since we do not have a satisfactory understanding of how visual perception impacts the construction of abstract knowledge, most visual representations used in instructions are either created based on existing conventions or designed according to the instructor’s intuition, which leads to a significant variance in their effectiveness. In this paper we propose a cognitive mechanism based on grounded cognition, suggesting that visual perception affects understanding by activating “perceptual symbols”: the basic cognitive unit used by the brain to construct a concept. A good visual representation activates perceptual symbols that are essential for the construction of the represented concept, whereas a bad representation does the opposite. As a proof of concept, we conducted a clinical experiment in which participants received three different versions of a multimedia tutorial teaching the integral expression of electric potential. The three versions were only different by the details of the visual representation design, only one of which contained perceptual features that activate perceptual symbols essential for constructing the idea of “accumulation. ” On a following post-test, participants receiving this version of tutorial significantly outperformed those who received the other two versions of tutorials designed to mimic conventional visual representations used in classrooms.
Neutrino masses from universal fermion mixing

If three right-handed neutrinos are added to the Standard Model, then, for the three known generations, there are six quarks and six leptons. It is then natural to assume that the symmetry considerations that have been applied to the quark matrices are also valid for the lepton mass matrices. Under this assumption, the solar and atmospheric neutrino data can be used to determine the individual neutrino masses. Using the � 2 fit, it is found that the mass of the lightest neutrino is (2‐5) × 10 −3 eV, that of the next heavier neutrino is (10‐13) × 10 −3 eV, while the mass of the heaviest neutrino is (52‐54) × 10 −3 eV.
Egg production and quality of local female chicken by dietary self-selection reared under semi-scavenging system in the tropics

The feeding standard for local chicken breeds in Indonesia has not been published yet. The present study were aimed to measure egg production and quality while estimating the ME and CP needs during production for local female chickens reared under semi-scavenging system in the tropics (Indonesia) through dietary self-selection. A total of 138 twenty two week-old chicks were randomly distributed into 12 sheltered pens, 10-14 birds each. Two feeding methods (control and self-selection) were assigned to pens, so each treatment consisted of 6 replicates. The control group received a control diet complying with the Hy-line Brown Nutrient Requirements Standard, whereas the self-selection group had access to the control and four other diets (high energy-high protein, low protein-high energy, high protein-low energy, and low protein-low energy diet). Feeds and drinking water were provided ad libitum to 53 weeks of age. Feed consumption (FC), CP intake, ME intake, concentration of dietary CP and ME and egg production were recorded weekly. Egg quality was measured three times. Daily temperature and relative humidity in the morning (07:00), noon (12:00), and afternoon (17:00) were 21.8 to 28.1°C and 46 to 88%; 24.7 to 34.5°C and 35 to 72%; and 23.5 to 34.5°C and 36 to 80%, respectively. Data were analyzed using Proc Mixed of SAS, but egg quality was analyzed by ANOVA. The results showed that feeding method had apparent effect on CP intake (P=0.018) and ME intake, dietary concentration of CP and ME, egg production (P<0.001) but not on FC. The effect of week and feeding method by week interaction were also very significant for all performance, except egg production was not affected with feeding method by week interaction. Weekly CP and ME intake of the self-selection group were greater than those of the control (105.8 vs. 101.3 g/bird; P=0.018 and 1,709 vs. 1,575 kcal/bird; (P<0.001), respectively). Dietary concentrations of CP and ME in the self-selection group was higher (P<0.001) than those in the control group (189.3 vs. 180.7 g/kg and 3,053 vs. 2,810 kcal/kg, respectively). Egg production of the self-selection group was higher (P<0.001) than those of the control (60.5% vs. 55%). Over all, egg quality (eggshell thickness, shell strength, shell weight, egg weight, Hmm, color, compare, HU, and yolk weight) was similar, except color and compare were higher in choice-fed birds when they grew older. Local female chickens were able to select diets to adjust their nutrient requirements by selecting more of an energy-rich diet and less of a protein-rich diet. CP and ME requirement by local female chickens were more likely greater than the current formulated for them in order to increase egg production.
Effects of taxon sampling and tree reconstruction methods on phylodiversity metrics

Abstract The amount and patterns of phylodiversity in a community are often used to draw inferences about the local and historical factors affecting community assembly and can be used to prioritize communities and locations for conservation. Because measures of phylodiversity are based on the topology and branch lengths of phylogenetic trees, which are affected by the number and diversity of taxa in the tree, these analyses may be sensitive to changes in taxon sampling and tree reconstruction methods. To investigate the effects of taxon sampling and tree reconstruction methods on measures of phylodiversity, we investigated the community phylogenetics of the Ordway‐Swisher Biological Station (Florida), which is home to over 600 species of vascular plants. We studied the effects of (a) the number of taxa included in the regional phylogeny; (b) random versus targeted sampling of species to assemble the regional species pool; (c) including only species from specific clades rather than broad sampling; (d) using trees reconstructed directly for the taxa under study compared to trees pruned from a larger reconstructed tree; and (e) using phylograms compared to chronograms. We found that including more taxa in a study increases the likelihood of observing significantly nonrandom phylogenetic patterns. However, there were no consistent trends in the phylodiversity patterns based on random taxon sampling compared to targeted sampling, or within individual clades compared to the complete dataset. Using pruned and reconstructed phylogenies resulted in similar patterns of phylodiversity, while chronograms in some cases led to significantly different results from phylograms. The methods commonly used in community phylogenetic studies can significantly impact the results, potentially influencing both inferences of community assembly and conservation decisions. We highlight the need for both careful selection of methods in community phylogenetic studies and appropriate interpretation of results, depending on the specific questions to be addressed.
Exploring Neuromodulatory Effects of Adenosine Deaminase and Corazonin in Emerald Jewel Wasp Venom

: The parasitoid jewel wasp Ampulex compressa induces hypokinesia (a sleep-like state) and reduced fecundity in its host, the American cockroach Periplaneta americana , through direct envenomation of its central nervous system (CNS). Over 250 venom components discovered through transcriptome analysis, I chose to investigate actions of adenosine deaminase (ADA) and corazonin (CRZ) on the host brain. To confirm presence of venom ADA, I applied venom to mammalian cells expressing cockroach adenosine receptor (AR) with fixed concentrations of adenosine (ADO). I investigated effects of ADA on insect locomotion by directly injecting it into the central complex (CX), known to be targeted by the wasp sting. I also attempted to interfere with adenosine signaling by silencing AR gene expression using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster . Recent studies of CRZ in ponerine ants suggested that this peptide suppresses fecundity. Therefore, Ampulex CRZ was injected into the CX and changes in fecundity was monitored. In particular, I measured relative gene expression of vitellogenin (VG) which are yolk proteins, in addition to measuring average protein content and average volumes of the ovarioles in stung, non-stung, and CRZ-injected females. Furthermore, egg-laying behaviors of envenomated and CRZ-injected gravid females were investigated. Results of my research indicate that decreased AR signaling has no effect on spontaneous movements or escape response. Thus, the role of venom ADA may be to alter the physiology of the host to make it optimal for larval consumption. Both stung and CRZ-injected gravid females displayed ootheca-less egg-laying behaviors and undeveloped ovaries. However, only envenomated females exhibited a decrease in VG gene expression. It is suggested that the role of CRZ in the venom may be to suppress ovary development and preserve energy within females. Results of my research elucidate alternate mechanisms of how venoms can inhibit reproductive abilities as well as provide further insight on the effects of ADO and CRZ in the CNS of arthropods.
Trajectory planning in the presence of risk regions

Trajectory Planning in the Presence of Risk Regions by Michael Allan Sherwood Dr. Laxmi P. Gewali, Examination Committee Chair Professor of Computer Science University of Nevada, Las Vegas We consider the problem of developing fast algorithms for computing short collision6ee paths for aerial vehicles in the presence of obstacles and enemy radar installations. When aerial vehicles are deployed in such regions, it is critical to compute admissible paths having reduced exposure to threats. The generalized version of this problem is known to be NP-hard [4], We consider simplified versions in two dimensions. One of the specific problems we address is to adjust a given Â -legged trajectory to reduce exposure to threats. We also propose an algorithm to compute a ^-legged risk-reduced path using a stage graph which runs in time where m is the number of vertices per turn region and p is the number of radar and obstacle polygon edges. In addition, we describe methods for obtaining multiple risk-reduced paths and node disjoint paths from the stage graph. We also discuss the implementation of the proposed algorithms.