Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Isolation, Evaluation and Formulation of Selected Microbial Consortia for Sustainable Agriculture

Soil samples from various agro climatic zones of Andhra Pradesh, India were collected and screened for the isolation of effective microbes during 2009-10. Based on the efficacy and in vitro compatibility, nine microbial strains (Bacillus spp, Streptomyces spp, Azotobaacter spp and Frauteria spp) were identified and christened (VBT 01 to VBT 09). Each strain was evaluated for its plant growth promoting efficacy (PGP) in black gram (Vigna mungo (L.) Hepper) and its antagonistic activities against select pathogens. Pot culture studies recorded high percentage of seed germination (94.7%) when the black gram seeds were coated with VBT 09 as compared to untreated control (83.2%). Maximum radical length of 8.0 cm was recorded in VBT 09 as compared to control (0.53cm). PGP traits of all the strains such as Hydrogen cyanide (HCN), ammonia production and hydrolytic enzymes like cellulase, pectinase, protease and amylase were recorded at various levels. The positive production of HCN was recorded in VBT 05. Antagonistic activity was recorded against Macrophomina phaseolina (VBT 03), Sclerotium rolfsii (VBT 07), Fusarium oxysporum (VBT 05) and Rhizoctonia solani (VBT 04). Mycoparasitic activity of VBT 02 strain was significantly high (53.8% inhibition over control) against sclerotial bodies of Sclerotium rolfsii. However, none of the strains exhibited sclerotial parasitism against Rhizoctonia solani. Pot culture assay to study the consortia effect at different proportions recorded significant increase in shoot length (11.2cm) as compared to chemical fertilizer (9.77cm) and control (8.51cm). The root volume and shoot dry mass was 0.5cm3 and 0.15cm3 as compared to control 0.17cm3 and 0.09cm3 respectively. The total dry mass was higher in consortia treated pots (0.23g) than the pots treated with chemical fertilizer (0.2g). The consortium is named as Omega. An on-farm trial is being carried out to evaluate its efficacy as soil conditioner, plant growth promoter and disease resistance capabilities in paddy and sugarcane.
FACULTE DES SCIENCES ECONOMIQUES ET SOCIALES

Securitized real estate returns have traditionally been forecasted using economic variables. However, no consensus exists regarding the variables to use. Financial and real estate factors have recently emerged as an alternative set of variables useful in forecasting securitized real estate returns. This paper examines whether the predictive ability of the two sets of variables differs. We use fractional cointegration analysis to identify whether long-run nonlinear relations exist between securitized real estate and each of the two sets of forecasting variables. That is, we examine whether such relationships are characterized by long memory, short memory, mean reversion (no long-run effects) or no mean reversion (no long-run equilibrium). Empirical analyses are conducted using data for the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. The results show that financial and real estate factors generally outperform economic variables in forecasting securitized real estate returns. Long memory (long-range dependence) is generally found between securitized real estate returns and stocks, bonds, and direct real estate returns, while only short memory is found between securitized real estate returns and the economic variables. Such results imply that to forecast securitized real estate returns, it may not be necessary to identify the economic variables that are related to changing economic trends and business conditions.
EQUITY IN THE USE OF PHYSICIAN VISITS IN OECD COUNTRIES: HAS EQUAL TREATMENT FOR EQUAL NEED BEEN ACHIEVED?

This paper uses methods proposed by Wagstaff and Van Doorslaer (2000) to generate new international comparative evidence for 1996 on the degree of horizontal equity achieved in health care utilisation in 14 OECD countries. The index of horizontal inequity used measures deviations in the degree to which the use of doctor visits is distributed according to need. The data for the 12 European Union member states are taken from the third wave of the European Community Household Panel, the data for Canada are from the second wave National Population Health Survey and the US data stem from the first wave of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. We find that in all countries physician visits tend to be significantly more concentrated among the worse-off. After standardising for need differences across the income distribution, significant horizontal inequity in total physician visits emerges in only 4 of the countries studied: Portugal, the United States, Austria and Greece. However, disaggregating by general practitioner and specialist visits reveals that this is the net effect from quite diverging patterns in the type of doctor consulted by income level: in all countries (except Luxembourg) the rich see a medical specialist more often than expected on the basis of need, while the use of GP visits is fairly closely related to need and in several countries even distributed somewhat pro-poor. The degree and distribution of private health insurance coverage and regional disparities seem to have the expected effect on inequity but in most countries their contribution is rather small. Only in the United States, the effect of private insurance cover is quite large. The results suggest that even in countries which have long achieved fairly universal and comprehensive degrees of health insurance coverage, some differential patterns of doctor utilization remain: higher income individuals are more likely to receive specialist services whereas lower income individuals are more inclined to use general practitioner care. To the extent that these differential use patterns result in differences of quality of treatment, persons in equal need cannot be said to receive equal treatment at all income levels.
Microencapsulation of Probiotic Bacteria in Dairy Products II : Encapsulation Materials and its Applications in Dairy Products

Dairy products in the human body play an important role in taking probiotic microorganisms. Probiotics demonstrate the therapeu tic ffect provided the high importance in dairy products. However the environmental conditions of bacteria (high acidity, bile salts, redox potential and chemical composition of the food carriers) duri ng the product's shelf life due to losing viability . Therefore, one of the strategies to increase the nu mber of these bacterias in fermented products is Microencapsulation (ME) method. ME is an immobiliza t on (capture) technique. According to this method encapsulation is a process to entrap a subst ance is called polymer. This review provides information about materials used to encapsulate pro biotic cells and encapsulated probiotics in dairy products.
Using social marketing tools to increase fuel-efficient stove adoption for conservation of the golden snub-nosed monkey, Gansu Province, China

SUMMARY Fuel wood is a key source of energy for many families in developing areas of China. Fuel efficient stoves are often identified as a win‐win solution for forest protections and public health/development in China and across the globe. However, the communication and connection between stoves and biodiversity conservation has been less clear, by both those who are promoting their use as well as those adopting the technology. Social marketing is the application of marketing principles used to sell products applied to “sell” ideas, attitudes, and behaviours to benefit the public good. The Campaign to Protect the Sichuan Golden Snub‐nosed Monkey in the Yuhe Nature Reserve, Gansu Province, China, was initiated in 2008 in an effort to inspire communities to protect forest habitat in the reserve, and quickly adopt fuel‐efficient stoves. Results of this study show significant increases in knowledge, attitudes, and interpersonal communication pre and post campaign (16 – 49 percentage points). Post‐campaign (within 1 year) results concluded 28.0% and 43.1% of those surveyed within 1 year of and 2.5 years adopted the technology. For those households that adopted fuel‐efficient stoves, consumption and gathering time were reduced by 40.1% and 38.2% respectively. Finally, preliminary research suggests that adoption of fuel‐efficient stoves also lead to a reduction in forest destruction, with a 23.7 % reduction in the number of newly felled trees in areas where the stoves had been adopted by greater than half of the surrounding community. The results of this study suggest that social marketing can be an effective tool for improving community knowledge and attitudes, decreasing destructive behaviour, and reducing threats to biological important forests in China.
Looking for imprints of the first stellar generations in metal-poor bulge field stars

Context. Efforts to look for signatures of the first stars have concentrated on metal-poor halo objects. However, the low end of the bulge metallicity distribution has been shown to host some of the oldest objects in the Milky Way and hence this Galactic component potentially offers interesting targets to look at imprints of the first stellar generations. As a pilot project, we selected bulge field stars already identified in the ARGOS survey as having [Fe/H] ~ -1 and oversolar [alpha/Fe] ratios, and we used FLAMES-UVES to obtain detailed abundances of key elements that are believed to reveal imprints of the first stellar generations. Aims. The main purpose of this study is to analyse selected ARGOS stars using new high-resolution (R~45,000) and high-signal-to-noise (S/N >100) spectra. We aim to derive their stellar parameters and elemental ratios, in particular the abundances of C, N, the alpha-elements O, Mg, Si, Ca, and Ti, the odd-Z elements Na and Al, the neutron-capture s-process dominated elements Y, Zr, La, and Ba, and the r-element Eu. Methods. High-resolution spectra of five field giant stars were obtained at the 8m VLT UT2-Kueyen telescope with the UVES spectrograph in FLAMES-UVES configuration. Spectroscopic parameters were derived based on the excitation and ionization equilibrium of Fe I and Fe II. The abundance analysis was performed with a MARCS LTE spherical model atmosphere grid and the Turbospectrum spectrum synthesis code.
ΒΕΛΤΙΣΤΟΠΟΙΗΣΗ ΠΕΡΙΦΕΡΕΙΑΚΗΣ ∆ΙΑΧΕΙΡΙΣΗΣ ∆ΗΜΟΤΙΚΩΝ ΣΤΕΡΕΩΝ ΑΠΟΒΛΗΤΩΝ: ΑΝΑΠΤΥΞΗ ΚΑΙ ΕΦΑΡΜΟΓΗ ΣΥΣΤΗΜΑΤΟΣ

This paper presents a new multicriteria mixed-integer linear programming model in a study on the regional management system for municipal solid wastes of the region of Central Macedonia in North Greece. The system is simulated as a network; the nodes are corresponding to waste producers (cities, villages) and facilities (both existing and candidate) for solid waste treatment and disposal, including transfer stations, material recovery facilities, waste-to-energy plants and landfills; the arcs are corresponding to the existing candidate transportation routes for raw wastes and residues. Various evaluation criteria are considered and a number of multicriteria approaches are implemented and an interactive trade-off method is applied to obtain the best compromise locations. The region consists of seven prefectures; at the first part of the study, each prefecture is considered independently of the others (intra-prefectural self-sufficiency) due to expressed political considerations, whereas in the second part, inter-prefectural co-operation is also envisaged for reasons of scale economics. 1 HELECO ’05, ΤΕΕ, Αθήνα, 3-6 Φεβρουαρίου 2005
Mind in life : biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind

Preface Acknowledgements Part I: The Enactive Approach 1. Cognitive Science and Human Experience 2. The Phenomenological Connection 3. Autonomy and Emergence 4. The Structure of Behavior Part II: Life in Mind 5. Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living 6. Life and Mind: The Philosophy of the Organism 7. Laying Down a Path in Walking: Development and Evolution Part III: Consciousness in Life 8. Life Beyond the Gap 9. Sensorimotor Subjectivity 10. Look Again: Consciousness and Mental Imagery 11. Temporality and the Living Present 12. Primordial Dynamism: Emotion and Valence 13. Empathy and Enculturation Appendix 1: Husserl and Cognitive Science Appendix 2: Emergence and the Problem of Downward Causation References
Comparative study of flood projections under the climate scenarios: links with sampling schemes, probability distribution models, and return level concepts

Abstract. Traditional stationarity strategy for extrapolating future design floods requires renovation in response to the possible nonstationarity caused by changing climate. Capable of tackling such problem, the expected-number-of-events (ENE) method is employed with both Annual Maximum (AM) and Peaks over Threshold (POT) sampling schemes expatiated. The existing paradigms of the ENE method are extended focusing on the over-dispersion emerged in POT arrival rate, for which by virtue of the ability to account, the Negative Binomial (NB) distribution is proposed as an alternative since the common assumption of homogeneous Poisson process would likely be invalid under nonstationarity. Flood return levels are estimated and compared under future climate scenarios (embodied by the two covariates of precipitation and air temperature) using the ENE method for both sampling schemes in the Weihe basin, China. To further understand how flood estimation responds to climate change, a global sensitivity analysis is performed. It is found that design floods dependent on nonstationarity are usually but not necessarily more different from those analyzed by stationarity strategy due to the interaction between air temperature and precipitation. In general, a large decrease in flood projection could be induced under nonstationarity if air temperature presents dramatically increasing trend or reduction occurs in precipitation, and vice versa. AM-based flood projections are mostly smaller than POT estimations (unless a low threshold is assumed) and more sensitive to changing climate. The outcome of the biased flood estimates resulting from an unrestricted use of the Poisson assumption suggests a priority to the NB distribution when fitting POT arrival rate with significantly larger variance than the mean. The study supplements the knowledge of future design floods under changing climate and makes an effort to improve guidance of choices in flood inference.
P o S ( F P C P 2 0 1 7 ) 0 3 6 Belle II physics prospects

The Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB B-factory at KEK is expected to start collecting data at the beginning of 2018, opening a new era for collider physics. Complementary to the LHC experiments, Belle II is designed to explore the intensity frontier. Its target is to collect an integrated luminosity of 50 ab−1 by 2024, which is 50 times larger than the data sample recorded by the Belle experiment. The Belle II data will offer a unique possibility of searching for New Physics phenomena through precision study of rare and suppressed processes, as well as further revealing the nature of QCD in describing matter. The physics program of Belle II will be wide and only a selection of topics are highlighted in this paper: semileptonic and leptonic B decays, electroweak penguins decays, time-dependent CP-violating decays, studies of mixing and rare decays in the charm sector, lepton flavour violation in τ decays, opportunities in bottomonium physics and searches for the dark sector.
State Space-Based Method for the DOA Estimation by the Forward-Backward Data Matrix Using Small Snapshots

In this presentation, a new low computational burden method for the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation from noisy signal using small snapshots is presented. The approach introduces State Space-based Method (SSM) to represent the received array signal, and uses small snapshots directly to form the Hankel data matrix. Those Hankel data matrices are then utilized to construct forward-backward data matrix that is used to estimate the state space model parameters from which the DOA of the incident signals can be extracted. In contrast to existing methods, such as MUSIC, Root-MUSIC that use the covariance data matrix to estimate the DOA and the sparse representation (SR) based DOA which is obtained by solving the sparsest representation of the snapshots, the SSM algorithm employs forward-backward data matrix formed only using small snapshots and doesn't need additional spatial smoothing method to process coherent signals. Three numerical experiments are employed to compare the performance among the SSM, Root-MUSIC and SR-based method as well as Cramer–Rao bound (CRB). The simulation results demonstrate that when a small number of snapshots, even a single one, are used, the SSM always performs better than the other two method no matter under the circumstance of uncorrelated or correlated signal. The simulation results also show that the computational burden is reduced significantly and the number of antenna elements is saved greatly.
TheraGame: A home based virtual reality rehabilitation system

The limitations of existing virtual reality (VR) systems in terms of their use for home-based VR therapy led us to develop “TheraGame”, a novel video capture VR system. TheraGame operates on a standard PC with a simple webcam. The software is programmed using a Javabased visual interaction system. This system enables a quick and easy definition of virtual objects and their behavior. The user sits in front of the monitor, sees himself and uses his movements to interact with the virtual objects. The objective of this presentation is to present the system, a number of the current applications, and some initial pilot usage results. Results from a study of 12 healthy elderly subjects showed moderate to high levels of enjoyment and usability. These scores were also high as reported by 4 participants with neurological deficits. Some limitations in system functionality were reported by one person with stroke who used TheraGame at home for a period of 2.5 weeks. Overall, TheraGame appears to have considerable potential for home based rehabilitation.
No . 16 Technological Diversity and Jacob ’ s Externality Hypothesis Revised

Recent empirical evidence strongly supports Jacobs(1969) externality hypothesis, that urban diversity provides a more favourable environment for economic development. In order to correctly gauge Jacobs hypothesis, economic development should be understood as a result of innovations. Furthermore, it is argued that a relevant diversity-measure should take into account the degree of diversity between the inherent classes (e.g. pharmaceuticals are closer to chemicals than to forestry). These ideas are tested using regionally classi ed Swedish patent application data as a measure of innovativeness. Patent data are also used to reect technological diversity. The results show that the number of patent applications in Swedish regions, are highly and positively dependent on regional technological specialization, quite the opposite to Jacobsprediction. The paper raises general questions about earlier empirical results. It is concluded that the size of regions is important is an important factor to consider, since this in itself may a¤ect patenting intensity and technological diversity. JEL Classi cation: O31, R12, H41, O40 Keywords: Specialization, diversity, patenting, Sweden, regions The rst draft of this paper was presented at my visit at the Centre for Research on Innovation and Internationalization (CESPRI) at Bocconi University in Milan in 2002. I thank Stefano Breschi, Francesco Lissoni and Fabio Montobbio for useful discussions and suggestions. Financial support from the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation Research and Higher Education (STINT) that made this visit possible is also gratefully acknowledged. yJönköping International Business School, P.O. Box 1026, SE-551 11 Jönköping, Sweden
Marine alien species as an aspect of global change

The transport of organisms across oceans is an anthropogenic agent of global change that has profoundly affected the natural distribution of littoral biota and altered the makeup of biogeographic regions. The homogenization of marine biotas is a phenomenon especially affecting coastal regions and is spearheaded by a suite of opportunistic species at the expense of native species. Climate change may exacerbate the trend: sea surface temperatures, hydrodynamics, pH and carbonate cycles, already show marked fluctuations compared to the past. Alien invasive species are impacted by the change of marine climate in a variety of ways, which are we have just begun to notice, observe and interpret. A conceptual framework has yet to be conceived that links theories on biological introductions and invasions with the physical aspects of global change. Therefore predicting the scale of invasions or their impact on biodiversity is a daunting task. Integration of biological and environmental information systems, niche models, and climate projections would improve management of aquatic ecosystems under the dual threats of biotic invasions and climate change. The recorded spread of alien species and analysis of patterns of invasions may serve as the starting point for searching connections with climate change descriptors. The Mediterranean Sea is home to an exceptionally large number of alien species, resulting from its exceptional history and multiple vectors. For much of the twentieth century alien thermophilic species, which had entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, have been confined to the Levantine Basin. In recent years climate driven hydrographic changes have coincided with a pronounced expansion of alien thermophilic biota to the central and western basins of the Mediterranean. We discuss some changes in emergent functions and services in Mediterranean ecosystems under the combined effect of invasive species and climate changes.
Performance Comparison of Various Routing Protocols in IPv4-IPv6 Coexistence Environments

This aim was prescribed by the lack of research related to the routing protocols performance in dual-stack environments, and by the requirement to further examine the prevalent stereotype which describes that OSPF is most suitable for business networks and IS-IS is suitable for ISP networks. The objective of this paper was to examine the performance of the two most popular link-state routing protocols when employed in IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack business networks. The paper aimed to build the first step of scientific research in performance comparison of various routing protocols in IPv4-IPv6 coexistence environments that will become dominant and popular for a long time-space with the advent of IPv6. Moreover, IS-IS and OSPF were chosen for the comparison, as they build two proven efficient routing protocols with same routing function features. The purpose of the work was to offer proof-based advice for choosing the protocol that provides optimum performance in business organization networks, in the new growing network landscape, and recommend possible transfer from one protocol to another. This experiment was carried out by the renowned OPNET network simulator. The results of the simulations explored the appropriateness of IS-IS compared to OSPF, as far as it relates to routing table sizes, convergence times and throughput, where both protocols works equally in terms of jitter and end-to-end delay times. Depending on these results, it can be considered that IS-IS builds a more optimum solution for dual- stack business networks than OSPF.