Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non Local Corrections to the Electronic Structure of Non Ideal Electron Gases: The Case of Graphene and Tyrosine

We introduce a formal definition of a non local functional and show that the non local exchange-correlation potential functional, derived within Density-Functional Theory, is non local in the space of electronic densities. A previously developed non local exchange-correlation potential term, is introduced to approach the exact density-functional potential. With this approach, the electronic structure of the graphene surface and the tyrosine amino acid are calculated.
Cross Talk between Nitric Oxide and Phytohormones Regulate Plant Development during Abiotic Stresses

Plants, being sessile, are concurrently exposed to various biotic and abiotic stresses. The perception of stress signals in plants involves a wide spectrum of signal transduction pathways that interact to induce tolerance against adverse environmental conditions. This functional overlapping among various stress signaling cascades also leads to the expression of genes that regulate biosynthesis or action of other hormones. Phytohormonal signals, activated by both developmental and environmental responses, play a crucial role to develop stress tolerance in plants. Nitric oxide (NO) is one of the major players in plant signaling networks. Emerging evidence supports that NO interplays with signaling pathways of auxins, gibberellins, abscisic acid, ethylene, jasmonic acid, brassinosteroids, and other plant hormones to control metabolism, growth, and development in plants. This chapter focuses on the current state of knowledge of cross talk between signaling pathways of NO and phytohormones in plants exposed to various abiotic stresses.
The Return to Investment in Human Capital: The Case of the Value of Educational Attainment beyond the High School Diploma in Canada

Based on 2001 Canadian Census data, we investigate the return to investment in human capital in Canada. Internal rates of return (IRR) imply that the value of education varies by gender, level of education, and field of study. A bachelor's degree yields the highest IRR; the IRR from higher levels of education declines beyond the bachelor's degree. Women derive higher benefits from education than men. Finally, a bachelor's degree in engineering yields the highest IRR, followed by one in business/commerce and then by one in humanities.
Apparent Digestibility and Utilization of Protein and Phosphorus in diets of incorporated with Sprouted Sorghum, Phytase and Protease Enzymes for African Catfi sh (Clarias gariepinus)

Apparent digestibility, deposition and retention of crude protein and phosphorus were determined for 30%, 35%, 50% and 55% CP diets incorporated with sprouted sorghum, 750, 1000 and 1250 unitskg-1 phytase and protease enzymes ,fed to African catfi sh fi ngerlings.
Measuring and Modeling Race as a Multidimensional Construct: Evidence from Research on Racial Disparities in Education

This paper contributes to growing efforts to make use of multiple measures of race to advance empirical and theoretical understanding of racial disparities in consequential social outcomes. The central aim of the paper is to articulate and evaluate a potential analytical strategy for using race data collected in multiple formats to investigate the utility of using multiple measures of race to proxy for different potential proximate mechanisms. We investigate this possibility using racial disparities in education as our case study. A growing body of research understands race to be a multidimensional social construct and treats different measures of race as measures of the distinct dimensions of this construct. Building on this scholarship, we seek to answer two questions: (1) are different measures of race differentially associated with educational achievement in the contemporary United States? (2) can different measures of race serve as proxies for alternative mechanisms hypothesized to explain the association between ‘race’ and educational achievement? In preliminary work we find suggestive evidence that different measures do indeed appear to capture different dimensions of race and that these are associated with educational achievement. In particular, we find a strong linear association between ascribed skin color and grades in models including both self-identification and skin color measures. We find less evidence to support the idea that race measures might serve as proxies for underlying
A missing cornerstone in the Norwegian Priority Commission’s weighting scheme – Sub-treatment balancedness is a necessary property for priority setting criteria

The Norwegian government recently put in place a priority commission tasked with suggesting a set of explicit criteria for priority setting in the health care sector. The commission suggested three criteria, the first two of which equate to cost-effectiveness, where, essentially, the gain is measured in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). The third criteria specifies that the number of QALYs be multiplied by a factor depending on the total health loss – also measured in QALYs – without the treatment in question. In this paper, we will show that the suggested weighting scheme creates contradictory situations in which the priority of treatment programmes will change based on arbitrary bundling (where two or more treatments are combined into one) or sub-divisions (where a treatment is split up into two or more components.) We show that these types of problems can be avoided or ameliorated if the QALY weighting scheme satisfies a property which we call sub-treatment balanced – informally, that the total weighted QALY gain is preserved when treatments are bundled or sub-divided. To our best knowledge, this property has not previously been discussed in the priority setting literature. We demonstrate that sub-treatment balance can easily be achieved in general, and in particular we show how to adapt the weighting scheme suggested by the Norwegian priority commission in order to satisfy this sub-treatment balance. Finally, we argue that any weighting scheme used in health care priority setting should be sub-treatment balanced with respect to any other attribute of a treatment which policy makers would want to take into account when making their decisions. At the time of writing, the Norwegian government has yet to conclude on a final set of criteria for prioritization, and a task-group, lead by professor Jon Magnussen, is re-evaluating the severity criterion suggested by the priority commission. However, sub-treatment balance is still relevant, as it should be required of any weighing scheme, and is crucial given that (i) the criterion results in weighting QALYs, and (ii) if the selected measure of severity is affected by the administered treatment. Published: Online November 2015. In print August 2016.
Segmenting Consumers to Inform Agrifood Value Chain Development in Nepal

The Nepalese government is piloting agricultural projects that are described as taking a value chain approach to development. Although consumer value lies at the core of value chain man-agement principles, none of these projects adopts a consumer perspective. This is an example of a more widespread gap in both the literature and practice as to how consumer perspectives can be used in the development of agrifood value chains in developing countries. This paper addresses this gap by surveying consumers of tomatoes in Nepal, segmenting them using cluster analysis and demonstrating how consumer segmentation can provide strategic direction for value chain development. The research identifies four distinct segments of tomato consumers in Kathmandu. The high value consumer segment, which is also the largest segment, places most importance on credence-based attributes that cannot be ensured unless a whole-chain effort is employed, indi-cating that developing value chains would be necessary if this need is to be met, and that such effort would pay off. An analysis of existing supply chains shows discrepancies between con-sumer expectations and the delivery of value, suggesting improvement opportunities to develop these chains.
CONTRIBUTION OF THE EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICAL EDUCATION CURRICULA TO THE FUNCTIONAL ABILITIES DEVELOPMENT

The purpose of this research is to determine how much is the specially programed performance of physical education, with increased demands and application of additional exercises, influenting the functional abbilities. Research had a longitudinal caracter, and experimental program was carried out on the sample of 185 first-grade pupils of the elementary school, age of 7 years ± 6 months. The sample is divided into two groups: experimental group 106 and control one 79 pupils. Six metrical instruments were used for evaluation of functional abilities of pupils. Final data processing included only the examinees that participated at initial and final measurement. Basic statistic parametars were calculated by processing of data during initial and final measuring. The multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and univariate analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were applied in order to determine the effects of the experimental program. Based on retrieved results it could be concluded that specially programed performance of physical education had a significant influence on changing the most functional abbilities of pupils.
CSR Stipulations of Companies Act, 2013 and Actual CSR Expenditure by Top Indian Companies Prior to Its Implementation: A Comparative Study

Businesses being economic enterprises are inherently social institutions and need to balance responsibilities towards stakeholders extending beyond legal requirements to maximize long term impact of business on society. This is particularly relevant in a developing country like India where disparities have significantly widened after economic liberalization. The Companies Act, 1956 had no mandatory provisions for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and companies operated CSR programs according to their own policies. The Companies Act, 2013 has made CSR spending mandatory for a certain size of companies - these companies from the ongoing financial year will have to spend at least two percent of their three year average net profits on CSR. This paper studies Corporate Social Responsibility commitments of the ten largest and most powerful companies in India prior to the implementation of CSR provisions of Companies Act 2013. Top ten Indian Companies from the 2013 Forbes Global 2000 list were selected - incidentally, five companies each of the private and public sector feature in our select list. Contents of company websites, annual reports and CSR reports were analyzed to understand areas of CSR intervention and expenditure. Actual contribution towards CSR was compared with stipulations of the Companies Act, 2013 to assess whether companies were fulfilling the norms now prescribed by the Companies Act , 2013 or will have to scale up their CSR programs significantly to meet the requirements of the new Act and the provisions of Companies (Corporate Social Responsibility Policy) Rules, 2014 which came into effect from April 1, 2014. Studies suggest that large corporations are precursors to CSR commitments in a society. Hence, CSR in these top Indian companies are probably influencing other companies. This study will provide a glimpse into the future of CSR implementation in the country in the light of the Companies Act, 2013.
Evolving in advance: Interleaving simulated and physical environments in robot evolution

Control structures for physical robots can be evolved in simulated and physical environments. In this study, the interleaving of simulated and physical environments during the course of the evolution of a control structure was examined. This method was compared to the method of ‘fine tuning’ in a physical environment a control structure that has evolved in complete simulation. Interleaving physical and simulated environments improves performance of the eventual control structure. Possibly, this method allows for the evolved control structure to incorporate and retain advantageous behavioural patterns from both environments.
Fibers and conductive films using silver nanoparticles and nanowires by near-field electrospinning process

The silver nanowires (AgNWs) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were synthesized. With near-field electrospinning (NFES) process, fibers and thin films with AgNPs and AgNWs were fabricated. In the NFES process, 10 k voltage was applied and the AgNPs and AgNWs fibers can be directly orderly collected without breaking and bending. Then, the characteristics of the fibers were analyzed by four-point probe and EDS. The conductive film was analyzed. When the thickness of films with AgNWs and AgNPs was 1.6 µm, the sheet resistance of films was 0. 032Ω/sq which was superior to that of the commercial ITO. The transmissivity of films was analyzed. The transmissivity was inversely proportional to sheet resistance of the films. In the future, the fibers and films can be used as transparent conductive electrodes.
A survey on data mining techniques applied to energy time series forecasting

Data mining has become an essential tool during the last decade to analyze large 1 sets of data. The variety of techniques it includes and the successful results obtained in 2 many application fields, make this family of approaches powerful and widely used. In 3 particular, this work explores the application of these techniques to time series forecasting. 4 Although classical statistical-based methods provides reasonably good results, the result of 5 the application of data mining outperforms those of classical ones. Hence, this work faces 6 two main challenges: i) to provide a compact mathematical formulation of the mainly used 7 techniques, ii) to review the latest works of time series forecasting and, as case study, those 8 related to electricity price and demand markets. 9
Pseudotensor Applied to Numerical Relativity in Calculating Global Quantities

In this work we apply the Landau-Lifshitz pseudotensor flux formalism to the calculation of the total mass and the total angular momentum during the evolution of a binary black hole system. We also compare its performance with the traditional integrations for the global quantities. The results show that the advantage of the pseudotensor flux formalism is the smoothness of the numerical value of the global quantities, especially of the total angular momentum. Although the convergence behavior of the global quantities with the pseudotensor flux method is only comparable with that of the traditional method, the smoothness of its numerical value allows using a larger radius for the surface integration to obtain a more accurate result.
IMPROVING ACCESS LATENCY OF WEB BROWSER BY USING CONTENT ALIASING IN PROXY CACHE SERVER

The web community is growing so quickly that the number of clients accessing web servers is increasing nearly tremendously. This rapid increase of web clients affected several aspects and characteristics of web such as reduced network bandwidth, increased latency, and higher response time for users who require large scale web services. This paper considers different types of proxy actions and proposes a novel design and methodology to address these issues. Focused on studies in what way they influence the browser display time. It discusses also acceptable loading times and the scope of cacheable objects. The methodology works by analysing content in the proxy cache, identifying content aliasing, duplicate suppression and by the creation of the respective soft links. The present solution makes intelligent use of the proxy cache server to overcome these problems. In this study proxies were designed to enable network administrators to control internet access from within intranet. But when proxy cache is used, there develops the problem of Aliasing. Aliasing in proxy server caches occurs when the same content is stored in the cache several times. The present methodology improves performance in case of access latency and browser response time at the same time it avoids storing the same content in cache multiple times those results in wastage of storage space.
Measuring the quality of allied health services in Australia: is it a case of “the more we learn, the less we know?”

Correspondence: Karen GrimmerSomers University of South Australia, City East Campus, North Tce, Adelaide 5000, Australia Email karen.grimmer-somers@unisa. edu.au Background: Sensitive and reliable measurement of allied health (AH) service quality is in its infancy. This is largely related to the complexity of the AH discipline-mix, the services these disciplines provide, and the locations in which services are provided. AH is variably described, with up to 49 disciplines being listed in the literature. These disciplines often undertake a range of interlinked activities such as assessment and diagnosis, counseling, therapy and rehabilitation, manufacture, education, and service organization. AH disciplines work in a range of roles in a range of public and private sector organizations, and often consult with their patients/ clients a number of times for the management of one condition. They operate under a variety of funding models, and often within service delivery constraints. This evidence-informed analytical review outlines factors which should be considered by allied health leaders, reflecting clinicians, policy-makers, managers, and academics, in regards to making an informed choice of sensitive and reliable measures of AH service quality. Strong, visionary, and collaborative leadership is required to ensure that allied health activities and outcomes are measured and reported effectively and efficiently.
Prevention Program for Young Squash Players - Impacts on Physical Performance and Hamstring Injuries

Abstract Hamstring injuries are more common among squash female players compared to male and also, more frequent in youths compared to older players. The aims of the present study were to investigate the effects of a prevention program on physical performance and hamstring injuries in youth female squash players between 16 and 18 years of age. Randomized controlled trial study. Seventeen girls from local squash club, were randomly assigned to either an experimental (EXP, n = 9) or control (CON, n = 8) group and assessed at baseline and 8 weeks on isokinetic and isometric strength protocols for the quadriceps and hamstrings, isometric hip adduction and abduction strength, countermovement jump (CMJ), and Illinois agility tests. The intervention is a 15-min program consisting of ten exercises for lower extremity strength, and core muscles, jumps and balance exercises and was performed 5 times a week for 8 weeks in connection with the warm-up before squash training. The control group performed its’ usual training. There was difference between the intervention and control groups in the change in physical performance from the pre-to post-test for all of the tests used. In addition, the hamstring injuries per 1000 hours of training and playing squash was 5.7 in the intervention group and 7.5 in the control group, which equates to 20% fewer injuries in the intervention group. The greatest effects were observed for mild injuries and injuries incurred during training. An injury prevention program that was performed five times a week in connection with the warm-up was improving squash specific performance and reduces hamstring injuries, especially in youth female squash players. Keywords: Physical performance, injury prevention, squash, youth, hamstrings injuries.
Health knowledge & health behavior outcomes in adolescents with elevated blood pressure

of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Associate Professor Patrice G. Saab. No. of pages in text. (86) The purpose of this current study was to examine the influence of cardiovascular health knowledge on dietary and physical activity changes in 15-17 year olds with elevated blood pressure. The sample consisted of 167 adolescents randomized into one of three treatment conditions (minimal, moderate, or intense). Each adolescent completed a fitness test (peak VO2), 24-hour dietary recall, 7 Day Activity Recall (kilocalories expended per day), Self-efficacy Questionnaire, and Stages of Change Questionnaire every three months. The Health Knowledge Assessment was given at baseline and at post-intervention. Classical test theory, confirmatory factor analysis, and item response theory frameworks were applied to examine psychometric properties of the Health Knowledge Assessment. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the change in health behaviors and the relationship with health knowledge, self-efficacy, and readiness for change. The 34-item Health Knowledge Assessment had good internal consistency and the items loaded onto a single factor at pretest and posttest. Furthermore, there was a good distribution of easy, moderate, and hard items at pretest, but additional hard items were needed at posttest. There were no treatment condition differences in level of health knowledge at pretest. The intense condition had significantly higher health knowledge than the minimal and moderate conditions at posttest; level of health knowledge for the moderate condition was significantly higher than the minimal condition at posttest. Level of nutrition knowledge at posttest was not associated with any of the dietary intake variables nor was level of exercise knowledge associated with the two physical activity variables at post-intervention. However, there was a marginally significant association between level of nutrition knowledge and nutrition self-efficacy at posttest. Nutrition self-efficacy and nutrition readiness for change at posttest were also associated with a decrease in sugar consumption at post-intervention. Implications of this study suggest that a cardiovascular health intervention for adolescents with elevated blood pressure, consisting of group sessions and/or individual sessions over the course of three to six months, was effective in terms of increasing cardiovascular health knowledge, self-efficacy, and readiness for change. Nonetheless, the role that health knowledge plays in health behavior change needs to be further examined.
Autophagy in Cystic Fibrosis Pathogenesis and Treatment

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a fatal, genetic disorder that critically affects the lungs and is directly caused by mutations in the CF transmembrane conductance regulator ( CFTR ) gene, resulting in defective CFTR function. In epithelial cells, the CFTR channel conducts anions and plays a critical role in regulating the volume and composition of airway surface liquid. This thin layer of aqueous fluid and mucus covering the airway surface facilitates mucociliary clearance, bacterial killing, and epithelial cell homeosta‐ sis. The importance of the CFTR channel in macrophages was revealed in recent work that demonstrated that defective CFTR function is accompanied by impaired innate immune responses to specific infections. Notably, most CF‐associated infections are caused by microbes that are cleared by autophagy in healthy cells. Autophagy is a highly regulated biological process that provides energy during periods of stress and starvation. Autophagy clears pathogens, inflammatory molecules, and dysfunctional protein aggregates within macrophages. However, this process is impaired in CF patients and CF mice, as their cells exhibit limited autophagy activity. The mechanisms linking a malfunctioning ion channel function to the defective autophagy remains unclear. In this chapter, we describe and discuss the recent findings indicating the presence of several mechanisms leading to defective autophagy in CF cells. Thus, these novel data advance our understanding of mechanisms underlying the pathobiology of CF and provide a new therapeutic platform for restoring CFTR function and autophagy in patients with CF.