Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fetal Origin of Cardiovascular Disease : A review of mechanisms

Non-communicable diseases are the major cause of morbidity and mortality globally. Studies have shown that cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of lost hours from work globally and that the prevalence of cardiovascular disease is rising in populations without the traditional risk factors for developing cardiovascular disease. This rise in prevalence has been shown to have a close association with the intrauterine milieu of the affected persons which back then turned out to be appropriate adaptive responses. From the epidemiological studies and hypothesis formulated by Dr. Barker 2 decades ago about Developmental Origin of Health and Disease (Fetal programming), these adaptive responses may help explain the increasing prevalence of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in such populations. Experimental studies in animals have tried to elucidate the mechanisms involved in fetal programming of cardiovascular disease. This article seeks to review the mechanisms implicated in fetal programming of cardiovascular disease. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date of Submission: 02-04-2019 Date of acceptance: 17-04-2019 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies Earnings management and macroeconomic crises : Evidences from Brazil and USA capital markets

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether macroeconomic crises are a motivational factor for earnings management practices by the companies listed in the capital markets of Brazil and the USA. Design/methodology/approach – The sample consisted of 7,932 firm-quarter observations from listed Brazilian companies and 99,931 from listed US companies, covering a 13-year period (1998-2010). The authors developed regression models for the panel data, taking into account discretionary accruals as an earnings management proxy (dependent variable), while crises were regarded as a macroeconomic factor (dummy variable of interest). Also considered were return on assets, market-to-book ratio, size, leverage, foreign direct investment, income taxes, quarters, and sectors, which were treated as control variables. Findings – The results corroborate the conceptual issues involved in undertaking this study, and they demonstrate that in periods of macroeconomic crises, companies are more motivated to employ earnings management practices both in Brazil and in the USA. Originality/value – Unlike previous studies, the model developed in our research includes multiple macroeconomic crises simultaneously. Furthermore, it was applied in two markets at different stages of development and operating in distinct institutional contexts, which indicates its viability for replication for a large number of countries.
Probiotic use in an infectious disease setting

The increased reliance on antibiotics over the past decades has left us vulnerable for its shortcomings. Not only is the use of antibiotics associated with considerable side effects, such as antibiotic associated infections, but due to the versatile and adaptable nature of microbes, antibiotic resistance is increasing rapidly. With the rate of new antibiotics being discovered decreasing, this leaves us in need of alternative treatments. Although vaccines are available for more and more highly contagious diseases, it is unlikely that they will be available for all infectious diseases currently treated with antibiotics. Although thirty years ago research into probiotics was unpopular, many researchers now argue in favour of the use of probiotics to prevent or cure infectious diseases. Amongst them is Dr. Gregor Reid, a highly respected expert on microbiology and immunology.
Small Business and Enterprise Development Motivation of female entrepreneurs : a cross-national study

Purpose – This paper focuses on the motivation of females to start businesses in developed and emerging economies. Although the issues related to the motivation of entrepreneurs have been widely studied, there are a few studies focusing on the differences in women’s entrepreneurial motivation in countries with different levels of market economy development. Furthermore, existing studies on female founders mainly adapt the concepts that have often been developed in male-dominated paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth motivations of female entrepreneurs in different contexts and discover the dissimilarities in women’s entrepreneurial motivations in countries with different levels of economic development. Design/methodology/approach – The qualitative research approach is applied in this study to explore the social-driven and profit-drivenmotives of female entrepreneurs. The authors have employed purposeful sampling to select cases. The authors investigated the motivations of 45 female entrepreneurs in Norway (12), Russia (21) and Ukraine (12). Semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data. The authors have also triangulated the data collected from interviews with the data available on the internet, company reports and newspaper publications. Findings – The findings indicate that women often pursuit business opportunities to satisfy social needs, rather than focusing on traditional business outcomes such as growth or profit. However, different contexts – the emerging economies context of Russia and Ukraine and the developed one of Norway – seem to influence the motivation to establish new ventures differently. The study found a stronger desire to contribute to a society’s needs among female founders in Norway compared to their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine. This indicates that cultural and social context in developed countries, such as in Norway, probably provides more possibilities for female entrepreneurs for self-realisation elsewhere leaving more room for focusing on societal issues in business in comparison with emerging countries contexts. Originality/value – A novel conceptual contribution is the exploration of links between the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs in emerging and developed economises. The study also adds to debates relating to context embeddedness of smaller firms.
“Facebooking” across Asia – Learning English along the Way?

Facebook (FB) is the most popular social networking sites (SNS) in the world at the moment. This factor alone has prompted many educational researchers to investigate how Facebook can be utilized for educational purposes, focusing on the social interaction between users, particularly in the higher education contexts. In terms of language teaching, researchers are also beginning to be aware of Facebook’s potential to enhance and enrich English language teaching and learning at all levels since the written language is the main implications on the use of Facebook for English language teaching and learning in higher education are also discussed.
Semantic interoperability between SKOS concept schemes using metadata

The SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) Core is is a model for representing thesauri and similar types of knowledge organization systems as RDF graphs. Although it provides a basic framework for building concept schemes, it does not carry the strictly defined semantics of ontology languages and thus has a number of shortcomings to fully port existing schemes to the Semantic Web. This paper introduces a mapping of SKOS metadata to an ontology-based intermediate model which includes terms from upper ontologies, whose main aim is to foster the semantic interoperability of different concept schemes. It has been achieved through the introduction of a common ground for the definition of concepts, based on the use of shared definitions already included in widely-used upper ontologies. This effort makes use of OpenCyc, the open source version of Cyc, which is currently the world’s largest and most complete general knowledge base.
Image Processing for Pomegranate Disease Detection : A Survey 1

In India, agricultural field plays vital role in the development of India. Smart farming is about empowering today’s farmers with the decision tools and automation technologies that seamlessly integrate products, knowledge and services for better productivity, quality and profit. Fruit crops are being affected by uneven climatic conditions leading to decreased agricultural yield. This affects global agricultural economy. Moreover, condition becomes even worst when the crops are infected by any disease. Also, increasing population burdens farmers to increase yield. This is where modern agricultural techniques and systems are needed to detect and prevent the crops from being effected by different diseases. This paper is a review of various methods and techniques, which is used to detect the disease of fruit crops and grading. The methods requires input image of a fruit and gives output that fruit is infected or not. Currently there are many different methods available for it. In this paper, different disease detection methods with their prospects are reviewed.
Acute and Chronic Heart Dilation Model-Induced in Goats by Carotid Jugular AV Shunt

Congestive heart failure is characterized by impaired quality of life and markedly shortened life expectancy. There are currently many medical and surgical modalities that aim to treat patients with heart failure, which implies the need for an animal heart failure model for the development and testing of these therapeutic modalities. A variety of animal heart failure models have been developed, including those in which heart failure is induced via drugs, rapid ventricular pacing, genetic alteration, viral sources, idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, coronary arteries’ embolization, pressure overload, and volume overload by arteriovenous (A-V) shunt. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the acute and chronic effect of carotid-jugular A-V shunt in goat model of heart dilation. After cross clamping of the left carotid artery, an end-to-side anastomosis of 10 mm in diameter was performed between the free end of the vein and the side of the artery. A dual-micromanometer transducer conductance catheter was used to determine the volume of the ventricle on-line, by measuring the time-varying electrical conductance of the segments of intraventricular blood. During and at the end of the eight weeks none of the animals showed signs of heart failure or distress. The acute and chronic hemodynamic changes were demonstrated by pressure-volume loops at baseline, immediately after the shunt, and after 8 weeks. There was an immediate rise in the LVEDV (104±27 ml) compared to the baseline volume (75±26 ml), and eight weeks later the LVEDV reached 111±22 ml. None of the eight goats demonstrated clinical signs of pulmonary congestion. The Swan-Ganz and the conductance catheters that were used to monitor the heart hemodynamic changes immediately after the creation of the A-V shunt revealed interesting results. Another advantage of the shunt model is that it is possible to evaluate the patency of the shunt by palpating blood thrill in the neck. The carotid jugular A-V shunt in goats causes significant left heart dilation without signs of heart failure, and is reproducible with low animal mortality. The study ended 8 weeks after the creation of the A-V shunt, leaving unanswered the question of possible heart failure development in this model after a longer follow up period.
Model predictive control–based approach for assist wheel control of a multi-axle crane to improve steering efficiency and dynamic stability

This research deals with assist wheel control to improve the steering efficiency and dynamic stability of the multi-axle crane based on model predictive control. Since multi-axle crane has relatively high inertia and long distance between the axles, it has slow dynamic response, and thus, different steering strategies according to driving speed intervals are required. Specifically, the steering strategy is that the number of wheels fixed mechanically increases to secure dynamic stability as the driving speed increases. However, although this strategy enables to secure stability by slowing down the dynamic response, it also has a weakness to decrease the steering efficiency. If the steering efficiency is decreased, it may result in augmenting an accident rate due to an increase in driver’s fatigue. Therefore, this study suggests a new steering strategy to improve the steering efficiency by simultaneously guaranteeing dynamic stability. The suggested steering control algorithm can enhance both steering efficiency and stability by deriving an assist wheel control input based on model predictive control using a variable weighting factor derived from the driver’s steering input (steering angle on the first axle). Development and performance evaluation of the suggested algorithm were conducted in the MATLAB/Simulink environment, and evaluation results confirmed that the developed algorithm could both enhance the driver’s steering efficiency and secure dynamic stability.
CORRIDOR FOLLOWING BASED ON THE FUSION OF REDUNDANT CONTROL SIGNALS

 This work presents a control strategy for mobile robots navigating in corridors, using the fusion of the control signals from two instances of the same controller: one is based on the perspective lines of the corridor (the projection of lines formed by the intersection of the walls and the floor) and the other is based on distance measurements performed by ultrasonic sensors. Both controllers generate angular velocity commands to keep the robot navigating along the corridor, and compensate for the dynamics of the robot. The fusion of both control signals is made using a Decentralized Information Filter DIF. Experiments on a laboratory robot are presented to show the feasibility and performance of the proposed controller. Keywords Control Fusion, Corridor Navigation, Stability, Redundant Controllers.
Corporate Governance and Cross-listing : New Evidence from Cross-Listed Companies ’ Investments

We study the impact of cross-listing on the investment decisions of foreign firms to explore the channels through which cross-listing may improve firm’s corporate governance and increase firm value. We find that while cross-listing increases firms’ capital expenditure and M&A activities, cross-listed firms also make better acquisition decisions, have higher profitability, and invest more in R&D spending compared to non-cross-listed firms. We also find that cross-listing is associated with better cash utilization for investments by foreign firms. The improvements in investments and cash utilization is more pronounced for firms cross-listed on major US exchanges, and for firms from countries with weak investor protection laws. This evidence is consistent with the bonding hypothesis, which suggests that cross-listing improves the corporate governance of foreign firms from poor investor protection countries.
Sociophonetic factors of speakers ’ sex differences in Voice Onset Time : A Florentine case study

The paper shows the results of a sociophonetic analysis of the so-called gorgia enfatica (Castellani, 1960), i.e. the allophonic presence of voiceless aspirated plosives in strong positions attested in the vernacular variety of the city of Florence. 24 native speakers were involved in a production test (read speech) followed by a perceptional counterpart (matchedguise and open-ended interview). A statistically significant relationship between male speakers and longer Voice Onset Times emerged from our quantitative analysis of production. This distribution was recognized by the speakers, that evaluated the trait using comments fit for a tentative reconstruction of an indexical field (Eckert, 2008). Our data corroborate the need for a sociophonetic shift in the research methods concerning the relation between speakers’ sex and VOT production (Oh, 2011).
Burrow Morphology of the Ocypodid Crab Ocypode ceratophthalma at Chandipur Coast, Eastern India and its Implications

Several burrow morphological features of crab Ocypode ceratophthalma including burrow diameter, orientation, inclination, branching and volume were studied from Chandipur, a sedimentologically and biologically diverse beach on the eastern Indian coast. Burrow morphologies (e.g. I, J, Y) were independent of their positions with respect to the coast line. In addition, no correlation between burrow morphology and burrow diameter was observed; however, diameter of burrow appeared to be a good proxy of the total amount of sediment excavated. Burrow diameters are significantly smaller in the foreshore compared to that of the backshore, suggesting that larger individuals reside along the backshore, where they excavate deeper and large-diameter burrows to minimize chances of desiccation. Smaller burrows are more or less vertical, whereas larger burrows are inclined towards the land, probably to stabilize their domicile from tidal activities, as well as to minimize energy required to excavate sediments. All these suggest that different types of abiotic factors determine the Ocypode burrow morphology and their habitat segregation.
FeedbackPassivation of Linear Systemswith Fixed-StructuredControllers ?

This paper addresses the problem of designing an optimal output feedback controller with a specified controller structure for linear time-invariant (LTI) systems to maximize the passivity level for the closed-loop system, in both continuous-time (CT) and discrete-time (DT). Specifically, the set of controllers under consideration is linearly parameterized with constrained parameters. Both input feedforward passivity (IFP) and output feedback passivity (OFP) indices are used to capture the level of passivity. Given a set of stabilizing controllers, a necessary and sufficient condition is proposed for the existence of such fixed-structured output feedback controllers that can passivate the closed-loop system. Moreover, it is shown that the condition can be used to obtain the controller that maximizes the IFP or the OFP index by solving a convex optimization problem.
Preference for Vibrational over Translational Energy in a Gas-Surface Reaction

Porous Solids, F. Schüth, K. S. W. Sing, J. Weitkamp, Eds. (Wiley, Weinheim, Germany, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 815–876. 4. P. Caullet, J.-L. Guth, J. Hazm, J.-M. Lamblin, H. Gies, Eur. J. Solid State Inorg. Chem. 28, 345 (1991). 5. A. Corma, M. Puche, F. Rey, G. Sankar, S. J. Teat, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 42, 1156 (2003). 6. E. Aubert, F. Porcher, M. Souhassou, V. Petrıcek, C. Lecomte, J. Phys. Chem. B 106, 1110 (2002). 7. P. A. Barrett et al., Chem. Commun. 2003, 2114 (2003). 8. A. Corma, M. T. Navarro, F. Rey, J. Rius, S. Valencia, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 40, 2277 (2001). 9. A. Corma, M. J. Diaz-Cabanas, J. Martinez-Triguero, F. Rey, J. Rius, Nature 418, 514 (2002). 10. A. Corma, F. Rey, S. Valencia, J. L. Jorda, J. Rius, Nature Mater. 2, 493 (2003). 11. A. Corma, M. Navarro, F. Rey, S. Valencia, Chem. Commun. 2001, 1486 (2001). 12. A. Corma, M. J. Diaz-Cabanas, F. Rey, Chem. Commun. 2003, 1050 (2003). 13. M. O’Keeffe, O. M. Yaghi, Chem. Eur. J. 5, 2796 (1999). 14. T. Blasco et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 106, 2634 (2002). 15. J. A. Vidal-Moya, T. Blasco, F. Rey, A. Corma, M. Puche, Chem. Mater. 15, 3921 (2003). 16. Y. Wang, J. Song, H. Gies, Solid State Sci. 5, 1421 (2003). 17. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online. 18. All framework type codes are derived from the names of the type materials and consist of three capital Roman letters. For more information, see Ch. Baerlocher, W. M. Meier, D. H. Olson, Atlas of Zeolite Framework Types (Elsevier, Amsterdam, ed. 5, 2001); also available at www.iza-structure.org/databases. 19. C. C. Freyhardt, M. Tsapatsis, R. F. Lobo, K. J. Balkus, M. E. Davis, Nature 381, 295 (1996). 20. M. Yoshikawa et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 102, 7139 (1998). 21. A. Burton et al., Chem. Eur. J. 9, 5737 (2003). 22. K. G. Strohmaier, D. E. W. Vaughan, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 125, 16035 (2003). 23. We thank the Institut Français du Pétrole for providing the germanium source. B.H. thanks the Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de la Recherche et de la Technologie for financial support.
AUDIO TAGGING WITH CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS TRAINED WITH NOISY DATA Technical Report

This report is a description of our submission to the 2019 DCASE Challenge, Task 2. The task at hand is to predict one or more audiotags, out of the 80 available tags, for the audio clips of different lengths, originating from two different datasets. For training, a total number of 4970 audio clips is provided with trustworthy labels, whereas 19815 samples contain a substantial amount of label noise with unknown noise ratio. To tackle this task, we propose two different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures trained on different features to capture different aspects of the data. Stochastic Weight Averaging is used in order to improve generalisation. By averaging over the predictions of all five networks, we obtain an ensemble that provides us with the likelihood of 80 different labels being present in an input audio clip. On the unseen data of the Public Kaggle Leaderboard, our system reaches a Label Weighted Label Ranking Average Precision (Lwlrap) of 0.722.