Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proteomic Comparison between Japanese Black and Holstein Cattle by Two-dimensional Gel Electrophoresis and Identification of Proteins

Differences of meat qualities between Japanese Black and Holstein have been known in Japan, however, the causative proteins and/or the genetic background have been unclear. The aim of this study was to identify candidate proteins causing differences of the meat qualities between the two breeds. Using technique of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, protein profiling was compared from samples of the longissimus dorsi muscle and subcutaneous adipose tissue. Five protein spots were observed with different expression levels between breeds. By using LC-MS/MS analysis and Mascot program, three of them were identified as ankyrin repeat protein 2, phosphoylated myosin light chain 2 and mimecan protein. Subsequently, we compared the DNA coding sequences of three proteins between breeds to find any nucleotide substitution. However, there was no notable mutation which could affect pi or molecular mass of the proteins. The identified proteins may be responsible for different characteristics of the meat qualities between Japanese Black and Holstein cattle.
The vectorial organization of the human myocardium is designed for optimal electrical and contractile activity: Clinical implications of its alterations

In this paper the organization of the human myocardium is reviewed at the tissue, cellular and molecular levels in order to understand the design that allows highly vectorial activities, such as the contraction of the cardiac pump and the electrical activity underlying its coordination. Amazingly, it appears that twisted helical structures are formed by molecules or by cells that are aimed to produce an efficient and coordinated contractile activity, which is needed for the propulsion of the blood from the North of the atria to the South of the ventricles and then to the blood vessel tree. Mutations of morphogenetic genes, mutations of monomeric proteins, their immature isoforms, and perturbing extraneous molecules can lead to abnormal organizations of crucial supramolecular structures (sarcomeric disarray, alteration of intercalated discs, abnormal gap junctions, misaligned myocardial fibers), which results in an abnormal clinical function. In addition, recent evidences suggest that mutations of specific genes controlling helical structures and the spiraling organization of the heart may contribute to well known malformations, such as transposition of the great arteries.
Dyskonto wartości przedsiębiorstwa z tytułu nadmiernego optymizmu. Podejście modelowe

Summary: The aim of the article is to show the impact of the phenomenon of excessive optimism on the value of the company. The research used a simple optimization model that uses the discount for excessive optimism in the valuation of the company. There are more positive than negative and neutral recommendations in the structure of prepared recommendations. Statistically, it would be reasonable for a stable growth market. And yet the stock market has a bull market, a bear market, and a period of horizontal trend. Why then, in the changing economic climate, positive recommendations always prevail. Research has shown that positive recommendations dominate. Then, the quotation price was compared on the day the positive recommendations were issued for the price that the company achieved after the quotation year. The obtained results indicate that despite the positive recommendations of brokerage houses, a significant part of the recommendations in companies gives a high price in relation to the actual earned by the company on the WSE. This analysis also showed the existence of excessive optimism among analysts.
Assessment of spatial and temporal patterns of green and blue water flows under natural conditions in inland river basins in Northwest China

In arid and semi-arid regions freshwater resources have become scarcer with increasing demands from socio-economic development and population growth. Until recently, water research and management has mainly focused on blue water but ignored green water. Furthermore, in data poor regions hydrological flows under natural conditions are poorly characterised but are a prerequisite to inform future water resources management. Here we report on spatial and temporal patterns of both blue and green water flows that can be expected under natural conditions as simulated by the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) for the Heihe river basin, the second largest inland river basin in Northwest China. Calibration and validation at two hydrological stations show good performance of the SWAT model in modelling hydrological processes. The total green and blue water flows were 22.05–25.51 billion m 3 in the 2000s for the Heihe river basin. Blue water flows are larger in upstream sub-basins than in downstream sub-basins mainly due to high precipitation and a large amount of snow and melting water in upstream. Green water flows are distributed more homogeneously among different sub-basins. The green water coefficient was 87%–89% in the 2000s for the entire river basin, varying from around 80%–90% in up- and mid-stream sub-basins to above 90% in downstream sub-basins. This is much higher than reported green water coefficients in many other river basins. The spatial patterns of green water coefficients were closely linked to dominant land covers (e.g. snow cover upstream and desert downstream) and climate conditions (e.g. high precipitation upstream and low precipitation downstream). There are no clear consistent historical trends of change in green and blue water flows and the green water coefficient at both the river basin and sub-basin levels. This study provides insights into green and blue water endowments under natural conditions for the entire Heihe river basin at the sub-basin level. The results are helpful to benchmark the natural flows of water in the basin as part of improved water resources management in the inland river basins of China.
Preliminary Results of Minimally Invasive Decompression, TLIF and Percutaneous Pedicle Screw Insertion in Stenotic Spondylolisthesis with Severe Facet Joint Osteoarthritis

Object: Minimally invasive spine (MIS) procedures are increasingly being recognized as equivalent to open procedures with regard to clinical and radiographic outcomes. These techniques are also believed to result in less pain and disability in the immediate postoperative period. There are, however, little data to assess whether these procedures in combination with minimally invasive transforaminal interbody fusion (MI-TLIF) and percutaneous pedicle screw insertion are effective in complex cases of stenotic degenerative spondylolisthesis with severe facet joint osteoarthritis (FJO). Methods: This study retrospectively reviewed all patients who underwent lumbar instrumentation, fusion and decompression for degenerative spondylolisthesis with severe stenosis and facet joint osteoarthritis (FJO) between June 2010 and June 2011. Blood loss, operative time and intraoperative complications were assessed in all surgically treated patients who were treated with MIS decompression, MI-TLIF and percutaneous transpedicular instrumentation. Clinical outcome was measured using the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for back pain, leg pain, and activity level. Satisfaction was assessed with VAS for satisfaction. Radiological follow-up includes x-ray films, computed tomography and in some cases magnetic tomography scan. Results: Twenty four cases with severe stenotic changes accompanied by severe FJO were treated with minimally invasive procedure. The minimum follow-up was 6 months with a mean of 8 months. The mean preoperative ODI score was 46.8, decreasing to a mean of 23 postoperatively. The mean VAS leg and back pain scores were 67.5 improving to means of 25.8. Twenty one out of 24 cases experienced a clinical benefit according to VAS for satisfaction and ODI. Complications included wound healing disturbance (4%), CSF fistula (4%) and contralateral radiculopathy due to articular bone spurs (8%). The accuracy of pedicle screws was high and only one revision surgery was performed. Conclusion: MIS for severe stenotic spondylolisthesis leads to adequate and safe decompression of lumbar stenosis and results in a highly significant reduction of symptoms and disability. MIS-TLIF and percutaneous pedicle screw insertion constitute a promising treatment alternative for patients with severe stenosis and facet joint osteoarthritis.
Strategic and moral motivation for corporate social responsibility

This article examines the relationship between management’s view on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firms’ actual CSR efforts. It focuses on the practices of 111 Dutch firms with respect to five stakeholder groups—employees, supplies, customers, competitors and society at large—and their use of organisational instruments. We find that the moral (intrinsic) motive, which holds that CSR is a moral duty of companies towards society, induces a stronger involvement in CSR than the strategic (extrinsic) motive, which holds that CSR contributes to the financial success of the company in the long run. This particularly applies to ethical aspects of employee relations and the use of instruments to integrate CSR in the company’s organisation. With respect to consumer relations, the strategic and moral motives are equally important. As for relations with suppliers and competitors and society at large, we do not find a significant relationship between management’s strategic and moral view on CSR and actual CSR performance.
Automatic Normalisation of Historical Text

Spelling variation in historical text negatively impacts the performance of natural language processing techniques, so normalisation is an important pre-processing step. Current methods fall some way short of perfect accuracy, often requiring large amounts of training data to be effective, and are rarely evaluated against a wide range of historical sources. This thesis evaluates three models: a Hidden Markov Model, which has not been previously used for historical text normalisation; a soft attention Neural Network model, which has previously only been evaluated on a single German dataset; and a hard attention Neural Network model, which is adapted from work on morphological inflection and applied here to historical text normalisation for the first time. Each is evaluated against multiple datasets taken from prior work on historical text normalisation. This facilitates direct comparison of this work to that existing work. The hard attention Neural Network model achieves state-of-the-art normalisation accuracy in all datasets, even when the volume of training data is restricted. This work will be of particular interest to researchers working with noisy historical data which they would like to explore using modern computational techniques.
Multiple environmental determinants of regional species richness and effects of geographic range size

Understanding patterns of species richness at broad geographic extents remains one of the most challenging yet necessary scientific goals of our time. Many hypotheses have been proposed to account for spatial variation in species richness; among them, environmental determinants have played a central role. In this study, we use data on regional bat species richness in the New World to study redundancy and complementarity of three environmental hypotheses: energy, heterogeneity and seasonality. We accomplish this by partitioning variation in species richness among components associated with unique and combined effects of variables from each hypotheses, and by partitioning the overall richness gradient into gradients of species with varying breadths of geographic distribution. These three environmental hypotheses explain most variation in the species richness gradient of all bats, but do not account for all positive spatial autocorrelation at short distances. Although environmental predictors are highly redundant, energy and seasonality explain different and complementary fractions of variation in species richness of all bats. On the other hand, heterogeneity variables contribute little to explain this gradient. However, results change dramatically when richness is estimated for groups of species with different sizes of geographic distribution. First, the amount of variation explained by environment decreases with a decrease in range size; this suggests that richness gradients of small-ranged species can not be explained as easily as those of broadly distributed species, as has been implied by analyses that do not consider differences in range size among species. Second, the relative contribution of environmental predictors to explained variation also changes with change in range size. Seasonality and energy are good predictors of species with broad distributions, but they loose almost all explanatory power for richness of species with small ranges. In contrast, heterogeneity, which is a relatively poor predictor of richness of species with large ranges, becomes the main predictor of richness gradients of species with restricted distributions. This suggests that range size is a different dimension on which heterogeneity and other environmental characteristics are complementary to each other. Our results suggest that determinants of species richness gradients might be complex, or at least more complex than many studies have previously suggested.
The effect of raw soybeans in mixtures for laying hens on production performance and the relative weight of the pancreas

The study was conducted on Isa Brown hybrid hens at the age of 49-57 weeks. The effect of using different levels of share of raw soybean of two varieties in mixtures for feeding hens on egg production, body weight, food consumption, the occurrence of defective eggs, mortality and the relative weight of the pancreas was studied. The possibility of replacing the heat-treated soybean grains, varieties Lana, with reduced trypsin inhibitor (TI) and Lydia with a standard level of TI, with raw soybean grains was examined. The research was conducted on the principle of two factorial experiment 2 x 4 (2 varieties x 4 levels of share of raw grain in the mixture) with a total of 8 diet treatments and 4 replicates per each treatment. In the first 5 weeks of the study, the differences in the number of eggs produced under the influence of tested factors were not significant. Under the influence of soybean varieties, the level of share of raw soybean and interaction of the studied factors showed significant differences (p<0.01) after 53 week of age. The use of soy with lower TI in the diet for laying hens resulted in a significantly greater capacity compared to standard variety. The share of raw soybean grains of 8 % in the mixtures significantly reduced the number of eggs laid. The differences in body weights, food consumption, occurrence of defective eggs and the relative weight of the pancreas were not significantly influenced by the studied factors or by their interaction effect. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. TR-31033]
Efficient Dimension Reduction Of Global Signature With Sparse Projectors For Image Near Duplicate Retrieval

In this paper, we tackle the storage and computational cost of linear projections used in dimensionality reduction for near duplicate image retrieval. We propose a new method based on metric learning with a lower training cost than existing methods. Moreover, by adding a sparsity constraint, we obtain a projection matrix with a low storage and projection cost. We carry out experiments on a well known near duplicate image dataset and show our algorithm behaves correctly. Retrieval performances are shown to be promising when compared to the memory footprint and the projection cost of the obtained sparse matrix.
Unsupervised building detection in complex urban environments from multispectral satellite imagery

A generic algorithm is presented for automatic extraction of buildings and roads from complex urban environments in high-resolution satellite images where the extraction of both object types at the same time enhances the performance. The proposed approach exploits spectral properties in conjunction with spatial properties, both of which actually provide complementary information to each other. First, a high-resolution pansharpened colour image is obtained by merging the high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) and the low-resolution multispectral images yielding a colour image at the resolution of the PAN band. Natural and man-made regions are classified and segmented by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Shadow regions are detected by the chromaticity to intensity ratio in the YIQ colour space. After the classification of the vegetation and the shadow areas, the rest of the image consists of man-made areas only. The man-made areas are partitioned by mean shift segmentation where some resulting segments are irrelevant to buildings in terms of shape. These artefacts are eliminated in two steps: First, each segment is thinned using morphological operations and its length is compared to a threshold which is determined according to the empirical length of the buildings. As a result, long segments which most probably represent roads are masked out. Second, the erroneous thin artefacts which are classified by principal component analysis (PCA) are removed. In parallel to PCA, small artefacts are wiped out based on morphological processes as well. The resultant man-made mask image is overlaid on the ground-truth image, where the buildings are previously labelled, for the accuracy assessment of the methodology. The method is applied to Quickbird images (2.4 m multispectral R, G, B, near-infrared (NIR) bands and 0.6 m PAN band) of eight different urban regions, each of which includes different properties of surface objects. The images are extending from simple to complex urban area. The simple image type includes a regular urban area with low density and regular building pattern. The complex image type involves almost all kinds of challenges such as small and large buildings, regions with bare soil, vegetation areas, shadows and so on. Although the performance of the algorithm slightly changes for various urban complexity levels, it performs well for all types of urban areas.
The Role of Non-Opioid Analgesic Techniques in the Management of Postoperative Pain

An increasing number of complex operations are being performed on an outpatient basis for which the use of conventional opioid-based IV patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) and central neuraxial (spinal and epidural) analgesia are not practical techniques for pain management. For that and other reasons, effective treatment of acute postsurgical pain presents unique challenges for practitioners (1). This expanding outpatient surgery requires a perioperative analgesic regimen that is highly effective, has minimal side effects, is intrinsically safe, and can be easily managed away from the hospital or surgical center (2).
Combination of intermittent haemodialysis and high-volume continuous haemofiltration for the treatment of severe metformin-induced lactic acidosis

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Systematic Monetary Policy and Persistence

Woodford (1999 and 2003) has raised the theoretical possibility that in a standard, forward looking sticky price model, an independent channel of inertia might arise as a result of policy behavior. We analyze this assertion empirically, and estimate a standard model, in which the monetary authority is assumed to commit to an optimal rule. We contribute to the existing literature by identifying the purely policy induced persistence present in the model. We also analyze the role of the structural parameters reflecting policy preferences and price flexibility in altering the policy induced, as well as the overall persistence properties of the model. We find that such a model is able to replicate most of the data's moments. In constrast to previous empirical literature, lagged terms in both modelled Phillips and IS curves are found to be either insignificant or very small. Commitment policy alone can explain a substantial part of output persistence. While the pricing mechanism at the heart of this model helps transfer output persistence into inflation persistence, commitment policy manages to undo this link by undershooting the inflation target following a positive 'cost push' shock so that inflation persistence is slightly reduced compared to the discretionary policy case.
Direct observation of the CVD growth of monolayer MoS2 using in situ optical spectroscopy

Real-time monitoring is essential for understanding and precisely controlling of growth of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide (2D TMDC) materials. However, it is very challenging to carry out such studies during chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Here, we report the first, real time, in situ study of the CVD growth of 2D TMDCs. More specifically, the CVD growth of a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) monolayer on sapphire substrates has been monitored in situ using differential transmittance spectroscopy (DTS). The growth of the MoS2 monolayer can be precisely followed by observation of the evolution of the characteristic optical features. Consequently, a strong correlation between the growth rate of the MoS2 monolayer and the temperature distribution in the CVD reactor has been revealed. Our results demonstrate the great potential of real time, in situ optical spectroscopy to assist the precisely controlled growth of 2D semiconductor materials.