Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A direct-acting antiviral drug abrogates viremia in Zika virus–infected rhesus macaques

Galidesivir, a broad-spectrum direct-acting adenosine analog antiviral drug, abrogates viremia in rhesus macaques infected with Zika virus. An antiviral drug for Zika virus infection? Zika virus infection causes severe disease in infants and adults. To date, no vaccine or treatment is available. In new work, Lim et al. conducted four studies in rhesus macaques to determine the safety and effectiveness of the antiviral drug galidesivir against Zika virus infection. The researchers infected 70 rhesus macaques with contemporary Zika virus isolates and tested galidesivir at various times after infection and at different drug doses. Galidesivir treatment of rhesus macaques was safe and offered protection against Zika virus infection. These data suggest the continued evaluation of galidesivir for treating Zika virus and similar viral infections. Zika virus infection in humans has been associated with serious reproductive and neurological complications. At present, no protective antiviral drug treatment is available. Here, we describe the testing and evaluation of the antiviral drug, galidesivir, against Zika virus infection in rhesus macaques. We conducted four preclinical studies in rhesus macaques to assess the safety, antiviral efficacy, and dosing strategies for galidesivir (BCX4430) against Zika virus infection. We treated 70 rhesus macaques infected by various routes with the Puerto Rico or Thai Zika virus isolates. We evaluated galidesivir administered as early as 90 min and as late as 72 hours after subcutaneous Zika virus infection and as late as 5 days after intravaginal infection. We evaluated the efficacy of a range of galidesivir doses with endpoints including Zika virus RNA in plasma, saliva, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid. Galidesivir dosing in rhesus macaques was safe and offered postexposure protection against Zika virus infection. Galidesivir exhibited favorable pharmacokinetics with no observed teratogenic effects in rats or rabbits at any dose tested. The antiviral efficacy of galidesivir observed in the blood and central nervous system of infected animals warrants continued evaluation of this compound for the treatment of flaviviral infections.
Simultaneous Measurements of Dinitrogen Fixation and Denitrification Associated With Coral Reef Substrates: Advantages and Limitations of a Combined Acetylene Assay

Nitrogen (N) cycling in coral reefs is of key importance for these oligotrophic ecosystems, but knowledge about its pathways is limited. While dinitrogen (N2) fixation is comparably well studied, the counteracting denitrification pathway is under-investigated, mainly because of expensive and relatively complex experimental techniques currently available. Here, we combined two established acetylene-based assays to one single setup to determine N2-fixation and denitrification performed by microbes associated with coral reef substrates/organisms simultaneously. Accumulating target gases (ethylene for N2-fixation, nitrous oxide for denitrification) were measured in gaseous headspace samples via gas chromatography. We measured N2-fixation and denitrification rates of two Red Sea coral reef substrates (filamentous turf algae, coral rubble), and demonstrated, for the first time, the co-occurrence of both N-cycling processes in both substrates. N2-fixation rates were up to eight times higher during the light compared to the dark, whereas denitrification rates during dark incubations were stimulated for turf algae and suppressed for coral rubble compared to light incubations. Our results highlight the importance of both substrates in fixing N, but their role in relieving N is potentially divergent. Absolute N2-fixation rates of the present study correspond with rates reported previously, even though likely underestimated due to an initial lag phase. Denitrification is also presumably underestimated due to incomplete nitrous oxide inhibition and/or substrate limitation. Besides these inherent limitations, we show that a relative comparison of N2-fixation and denitrification activity between functional groups is possible. Thus, our approach facilitates cost-efficient sample processing in studies interested in comparing relative rates of N2-fixation and denitrification.
Bat habitat use in White Mountain National Forest

In 1992 and 1993, we surveyed the foraging and feeding activity of bat species with broadband bat detectors at 2 foliage heights in 4 age classes of northern hardwood and spruce/fir forest stands in White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire and Maine. The association of bat activity with trails and water bodies and the effect of elevation were measured. Mist nets, a harp trap, and ultrasonic detectors were used to establish species presence. Bat activity was concentrated at trail and water body edges and was uniform within a forest stand at the same sampling height. Within the forest, bat activity was highest in overmature (>119 yr, 35% of mean bat activity/night) hardwood stands and in regenerating (0-9 yr) stands of both forest types (26% of mean bat activity/night). The majority of bats trapped (56%) were adult male little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus). Our data indicate that a matrix of forest types and age classes including areas of regeneration (clearcuts and group cuts) and overmature hardwood, in combination with trails and water bodies, help fulfill the summer habitat requirements of bats in White Mountain National Forest.
Influence of dual vibrations on control of percussive hand-operated power tools – experimental investigations

Abstract This article presents the results of pioneer experimental research into the impact of whole body vibration (WBV) and hand arm vibration (HAV) with different amplitudes and frequencies on percussive tools which are controlled by hand. In these studies the human operator is considered as the active element of the control system. The quality of control executed by the participants of the tests was assessed by the typical parameters existing in control system engineering, such as rise time, settling time, overshoot and integral square error (ISE). The tests were performed on an especially built stand. Results are presented in the form of time histories of step reference force. Forces realized by the operator were statistically analysed and graphically presented. Local (HAV) vibration of tools and accompanying dynamic forces between the handle and the vibrating tool have a big influence on control of the tool. An increase in the frequency of the tools’ vibration increases the adjustment range. The influence of platform vibrations on the adjustment range is relatively small.
The Inter-organizational Perspective in Blockchain Adoption within an Ecosystem

The initial excitement and low adoption of blockchain technology in the Financial Services industry provide insights into how the technological features of distributed ledger can be applied to organizations within an interconnected industry. This study uses grounded theory methodology to provide context and practical considerations into how multiple firms in connected industries can evaluate an “industry technology” that could change the ecosystem in which they operate. The study validates common technological, organizational, and environmental factors of adoption and introduces new factors such as networking and internet-like technology characteristics, industry interconnectedness, inter-organizational use cases, and consortiums to explain how firms are adapting to the transformational characteristics of blockchain technology.
How Countervailing Power Affects Value Co-Creation among Service Providers: A Comparison of the Travel and Mobility Sectors

Customers often have complex needs that cannot be met by a single service provider. Service integrators and service providers can use information technology to establish service ecosystems in order to provide customers an all-in-one solution. In this paper, we examine why hotel organizations are more willing to engage in value co-creation with service integrators than public transport organizations. We take the service-dominant logic perspective, augmented by the concept of (countervailing) power. Interviews with representatives from 26 German hotel and public transport organizations reveal a trade-off between greater satisfaction of customer needs and a potential loss of power. In contrast to hotel organizations, the service ecosystems of public transport organizations are characterized by institutional arrangements that restrict their price and place policies, and thus negatively affect their ability to develop and maintain countervailing power. Practitioners can apply our findings to design beneficial institutional arrangements and thus facilitate value co-creation.
When Does Trust Reinforce Intentions to Upgrade to Paid Online Healthcare Consultations? The Valence of Platform-Versus Service-Related Attitudes

For online healthcare businesses with a multi-tier pricing model, how to motivate patients to pay for high-end services is an important issue. Drawing on the freemium literature and the valence framework, we examined seven service quality-related antecedents of patients’ intentions to upgrade to premium services in the context of online healthcare consultation (OHC). We hypothesized that patients’ perceptions of OHC platform quality, free OHC service quality, and free OHC adoption risks should exert counterbalanced, direct impacts on their intentions to upgrade to premium services. Furthermore, the net outcome of this dual effect may be contingent on patients’ trust in the platform. We conducted an empirical study by surveying 409 OHC consumers in China. Preliminary results support the direct effects of platformand service-related evaluations for both their benefits and risks. The moderating analysis supports the effect of trust on mitigating the negative impacts of risk perceptions on upgrading intentions.
Individual Unlearning as Enabler for Innovation in Agile Information Systems Development

Agile information systems development (ISD) is an iterative development methodology, widespread among new product development teams. The agile ISD method is highly responsive to changing requirements, which enables innovation and outputs that meet customer demands. To remain responsive, team members need to continuously obtain new skills and knowledge, making learning an essential part of developing software. Prior research shows that parallel to the learning process the process of unlearning happens which is the intentional liberation of our mental models from false, obsolete and outdated knowledge, beliefs, and work patterns. Team members must be able to quickly and often unlearn, otherwise, their ability to respond to change with innovative solutions is impaired, resulting in adverse effects on the creation of new knowledge. Unlearning is extremely challenging for individuals to undertake in an agile ISD context and only possible under set circumstances that need to be understood. Hence, this research-in-progress paper theorizes about the process of unlearning in agile ISD teams by delineating a conceptual model of enablers and inhibitors on how to apply unlearning in software development. Our research concludes with an outlook on the empirical testing of the proposed conceptual model with a qualitative case study.
Fuzzy Superpixels Based Semi-Supervised Similarity-Constrained CNN for PolSAR Image Classification

Recently, deep learning has been highly successful in image classification. Labeling the PolSAR data, however, is time-consuming and laborious and in response semi-supervised deep learning has been increasingly investigated in PolSAR image classification. Semi-supervised deep learning methods for PolSAR image classification can be broadly divided into two categories, namely pixels-based methods and superpixels-based methods. Pixels-based semi-supervised methods are liable to be affected by speckle noises and have a relatively high computational complexity. Superpixels-based methods focus on the superpixels and ignore tiny detail-preserving represented by pixels. In this paper, a Fuzzy superpixels based Semi-supervised Similarity-constrained CNN (FS-SCNN) is proposed. To reduce the effect of speckle noises and preserve the details, FS-SCNN uses a fuzzy superpixels algorithm to segment an image into two parts, superpixels and undetermined pixels. Moreover, the fuzzy superpixels algorithm can also reduce the number of mixed superpixels and improve classification performance. To exploit unlabeled data effectively, we also propose a Similarity-constrained Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN) model to assign pseudo labels to unlabeled data. The final training set consists of the initial labeled data and these pseudo labeled data. Three PolSAR images are used to demonstrate the excellent classification performance of the FS-SCNN method with data of limited labels.
Name the Name - Named Entity Recognition in OCRed 19th and Early 20th Century Finnish Newspaper and Journal Collection Data

Named Entity Recognition (NER), search, classification, and tagging of names and name li ke frequent informational elements in texts, has become a standard information extraction procedure for textual data. NER has been applied to many types of texts and different types of entities: newspapers, fiction, historical records, persons, locations, chemical compounds, protein families, animals etc. Performance of a NER system is usually quite heavily genre and domain dependent. Entity categories used in NER may also vary. The most used set of named entity categories is usually some version of three partite categorization of locations, persons, and organizations. In this paper we report evaluation results with data extracted from a digitized Finnish historical newspaper collection Digi using two statistical NER systems, namely, Stanford Named Entity Recognizer and LSTM-CRF NER model. The OCRed newspaper collection has lots of OCR errors; its estimated word level correctness is about 70–75%. Our NER evaluation collection and training data are based on ca. 500 000 words which have been manually corrected from OCR output of ABBYY FineReader 11. We have also available evaluation data of new uncorrected OCR output of Tesseract 3.04. 01. Our Stanford NER results are mostly satisfactory. With our ground truth data we achieve F-score of 0.89 with locations and 0.84 with persons. With organizations the result is 0.60. With re-OCRed Tesseract output the results are 0.79, 0.72, and 0.42, respectively. Results of LSTM-CRF are similar.
Data Governance and Digitalization – A Case Study in a Data Governance and Digitalization – A Case Study in a Manufacturing Company Manufacturing Company

Digitalization poses a number of challenges for companies. In particular, enterprise and IT architectures of companies are becoming increasingly complex. Data architecture - a core element of the IT architecture - is the basic source for communication, decisions and processes. Hence, reliable data requires a homogenous data architecture controlled by guidelines and specifications (i.e., data governance). This study focuses on a requirements-based implementation of data governance. By applying a case study approach, using different data collection and evaluation methods, this study investigates a large-scale manufacturing enterprise’ approach towards data governance. Based on the data collected, recommendations for future action are provided. In particular, the relationship between corporate governance, IT governance and data governance, as well as data quality, are depicted, showing how structure and context are linked to rules, processes and policies. An important role in this context can be assigned to roles that are vital to successful data governance.
Thermal-Characteristics and Sex Determination in Field Nests of the Pig-Nosed Turtle, Carettochelys-Insculpta (Chelonia, Carettochelydidae), From Northern Australia

Carettochelys insculpta lays its eggs in shallow nests constructed in clean fine sand adjacent to water. Six nests had the following thermal characteristics: (1) core temperatures ranging from 26.1 to 33.7-degrees-C early in September, from 30.0 to 38.7-degrees-C early in October and from 28.4 to 36.8-degrees-C early in November; (2) a pronounced daily cycle in core temperatures of up to 6.4-degrees-C in amplitude, with the minimum occurring after sunrise in mid-morning and the maximum occurring in the evening; (3) a difference in the temperatures experienced by the top and bottom eggs in a single nest of up to 3.5-degrees-C at any one time. Nest heating and the maximum temperatures achieved were principally driven by solar irradiation, not ambient air temperatures. Hot nests produced females exclusively, nests intermediate in temperature produced a mixture of sexes, and the sole cool nest produced males exclusively. In nests that produced both sexes, males emerged from the deepest coolest eggs whereas females emerged from the shallowest eggs. Hence, field nests may yield both sexes either because egg temperatures are on the sex-determining threshold or because thermal gradients in nests span both male- and female-producing temperatures.
Does Process Reengineering and Digitalization Eliminate Corruption? Exploring 'Paperless' Vehicle clearance at Ghana's Port

Corruption occurs globally but is noted as a bottleneck to socioeconomic development in many developing countries. Reengineering of business processes, alongside digitalization, occurs in various developing countries as part of efforts to improve organizational processes and to help in the fight against corruption. But while such initiatives have been associated with some improvements, they have questionable results in the overall control of corruption. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how and why in developing countries corruption persists in spite of reengineered business processes and digitalization. Through an exploratory case of a reengineered digitalized vehicle import clearance process at Ghana’s ports (dubbed by the government as ‘paperless’), we inductively trace complex interdependencies in the situated sociotechnical work system involving information systems, processes, individuals and organizations as well as associated corrupt practices. Our analysis reveals a complex network of cross-cutting interactions, actors and interests underpinning corruption, as well as the creation of new corruption opportunities where digitalization had disrupted old ones. We discuss the implications of our findings and derive explanatory propositions to guide further research.
User-Centric Network-Model for Data Control with Interoperable Legal Data Sharing Artefacts

Organizations increasingly collaborate in digital ecosystems, whilst being aware that data is becoming a key asset. They require improved data control capabilities that prevent their shared data from being misused. Currently, such capabilities are typically realized as situation-specific closed ecosystem solutions in a ‘hub-model’ approach. This, however, hinders adoption of inter-organizational data sharing as end-users are faced with potential customer lock-in and major integration efforts to manage data sovereignty, trust and security over multiple data sharing relationships. As alternative, an open ‘network-model’ approach provides end-users a single entry-point for simultaneously controlling data sharing over multiple relationships with clear operational advantages in user-friendliness, complexity, efficiency and costs. However, it poses strong interoperability requirements on the legal concepts of data sharing agreements and usage contracts (terms-of-use). This paper contributes to the development of the network-model by identifying and assessing architectural options for realizing interoperability on the legal concepts for controlled data sharing.
The Role of Resistance to Change in Software Updates’ Impact on The Role of Resistance to Change in Software Updates’ Impact on Information Systems Continuance Information Systems Continuance

Although software updates are pervasively used by providers to enhance their software’s functionalities over time, our understanding of the influence of such changes in the IT artifact on users’ post-adoption beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions is still limited. Moreover, potential divergent reactions to software updates emanating from users’ individual differences have received little research attention so far. Drawing on the IS continuance model and theory of resistance to change, we investigate whether and how feature updates differentially affect the continuance intentions of users that are more vs less resistant to change. In a vignette-based online experiment with 149 participants, we find a positive effect of feature updates on the continuance intentions of less change resistant-users, although the effect disappears for more change-resistant users. A moderated mediation analysis reveals positive disconfirmation as mediating mechanism that is contingent on users’ resistance to change. Implications for research and practice as well as directions for future research are discussed.
Histological stages of retinal morphogenesis in chicken – a descriptive laboratory research

Abstract The similarity of the developmental anatomy of chicken with that of mammals has rendered it an appropriate animal model for understanding the anatomical and pathological aspects of human biological systems. The present study describes the age-dependent morphological differentiation stages of developing retina of chick embryos. The retinae of chicken embryos of ages 10 and 15 days incubation, of newly hatched chicks and also that of adult chicken were studied histologically. The retinae were processed both for routine microscopy and as araldite-embedded high-resolution sections. At all ages, different retinal layers were studied noting the changing shapes of nuclei and measuring the individual layer thickness. As the animal advances in age, the elongated to oval nuclear shape takes on a more round contour, the pigment content gradually increases, the initial cuboidal cells of the photoreceptor layer change over to tall columnar cells, their outer segments pushing their way into the epithelium layer, producing vacuolar appearances among the pigment granules, the inner and outer plexiform layers increase in thickness, while the nuclear layers, becoming more compact, decrease in thickness. The ganglion cell layer, initially multilayered, gradually becomes single-cell-layered with advancing age. This descriptive laboratory research presents a detailed retinal differentiation pattern, which contributes to the anatomical knowledge of retinal embryology as well as providing a comparative background for pathological deviations.