Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lamb tail docking: a controlled field study of the effects of tail amputation on health and productivity

A detailed study of the effects of tail docking on lamb health and productivity was prompted by current concern about the welfare aspects of lamb tail amputation. Using a controlled field trial, comparing over 3000 docked and undocked lambs on seven farms, the effects of tail docking on mortality, blowfly strike and production variables were examined. The incidence of blowfly strike was strongly and consistently higher in undocked than docked lambs (rate ratio 6.03, 95 per cent confidence interval (CI) 2.99 to 12.19 for male lambs and 4.25, 95 per cent CI 2.25 to 8.01 for female lambs). The incidence of faecal soiling of the breech was slightly higher in undocked lambs and was identified as an important independent risk factor for blowfly strike. Both the mortality and production parameters were similar for docked and undocked lambs. It was concluded that tail docking protected against blowfly strike, with little evidence of any detrimental effect on lamb mortality and production.
Patient value co-creation in online health communities

Purpose – Patient value co-creation represents a key research priority and an essential determinant of health care service outcomes. Yet few studies empirically examine the factors that motivate patients to participate actively in value co-creation. The purpose of this paper is to seek to identify the motivators of such activities in online health communities (OHC) and examine their specific and unique effects. Design/methodology/approach – A netnographic study helps identify the motivators that drive patients’ value co-creation activities in OHCs. The combination of these results with social identity theories suggest the hypotheses; mediation analyses test the hypothesized model with data collected from eight OHCs that address both life-threatening and non-life-threatening illnesses. Findings – The netnographic results show that social identity drives patients’ value co-creation activities. Interactions among OHC members and the cognitive resources of the OHC both contribute to the development of its soc.
PHYSICAL AND PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCES AMONG FORWARDS,DEFENSEMEN, AND GOALIES IN ELITE WOMEN'S ICE HOCKEY

Positional differences have been examined in women's basketball, field hockey, netball, and volleyball, but not in elite women's ice hockey. Our purpose was to describe and compare physical, fitness, and skating performance characteristics of forwards (F), defensemen (D), and goalies (G). Subjects were 112 University of Alberta women players (21.4 ± 2.9 years of age). A full anthropometric battery was conducted on each player. Heath-Carter anthropometric somatotypes were calculated. Percent body fat (%fat) was estimated from both general and population-specific equations. Subjects performed off-ice fitness tests (vertical jump, 40-yd dash, Leger test for predicting &OV0312;O2max) and on-ice fitness (Modified 3-Repeat Sprint Skate Test—MRSS, blood lactate after sprint test) and skating performance tests (6.10-m acceleration test, Cornering S-Turn Agility Test). Descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses of variance were run using SPSS (Version 10.0) for the MacIntosh, with a significance level set a priori at p> 0.05. Significant positional differences were found for bicristal breadths (D > G, F > G); relaxed arm circumference (D > F, G > F); supraspinale and biceps skinfolds (G > D, G > F); and endomorphy (G > F). Significant differences among positions were also found for the MRSS (G > D > F) and agility tests (G > D, G > F). D tended to have the most robust build overall. F were leaner than D and G, and their smaller relaxed arm circumference measurements most likely reflect less subcutaneous fat on the upper arm. F had greater anaerobic power than D, followed by G, and they tended to have greater aerobic capacity. F and D were more agile than G. Performance demands appear to be position specific. F need to be the most versatile and fit because of a greater amount and variety of work performed both during practices and games; their required degrees of versatility and fitness are followed by those required of D and G.
A new block algorithm for generalized Sylvester-observer equation and application to state estimation of vibrating systems

We propose a new block algorithm for the generalized Sylvester-observer equation : XA - FXE = GC, where the matrices A, E, and C are given, the matrices X, F, and G need to be computed, and matrix E could be singular. The algorithm is based on an orthogonal decomposition of the triplet (A, E, C) to observer-Hessenberg-triangular form. It is a natural generalization of the widely-known observer-Hessenberg algorithm for the Sylvester-observer equation XA - FX = GC, which arises in state estimation of a standard first-order state-space control system. An application of the proposed algorithm is made to state estimation of second order control systems modeling a wide variety of vibrating structures. For dense un-structured data, the algorithm is more efficient than the recently proposed SVD-based algorithm of the authors, numerically reliable and heavily composed of Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms -Level 3 (BLAS 3) operations, which make it an ideal candidate for high-performance computing.
Compaction in preimplantation mouse embryos is regulated by a cytoplasmic regulatory factor that alters between 1- and 2-cell stages in a concentration-dependent manner.

Present studies were performed to investigate what factors affect the morphogenesis of preimplantation mouse embryos, and to find the action mechanism of that factor by using cytoplasm removal and its reconstitution from a different developmental stage embryo. Half (HP group) or one-third of cytoplasm (TP group) was removed from 1-cell mouse embryos by micromanipulation, and their morphogenesis and genome expression were compared with sham-operated embryos (SP group). The compaction and blastocoel formation of embryos in both the HP and TP groups were accelerated in time and cell stage when compared with those of the SP group. However, the total activity and time of RNA synthesis, and gene expression of ZO-1alpha+ isoform were not different. To change the cytoplasm composition without altering the nucleus/cytoplasmic ratio, half a 1-cell embryo with both pronuclei was reconstituted with the half enucleated cytoplasm of 1-cell embryo (P + P group), 2-cell (P + 2 group) or 4-cell (P + 4 group) by electrofusion. Embryonic compaction, timing of RNA synthesis, and stage-specific gene expression of the ZO-1alpha(+) isoform in the P + 2 and P + 4 groups were accelerated in time and cell stage than that in the P + P group, but not different between the P + 2 and P + 4 groups. In addition, a blastomere of 2-cell embryo was reconstituted with the enucleated cytoplasm of 1-cell embryo (2 + P group) or 2-cell (2 + 2 group) in equal volume by electrofusion. Also, the karyoplast of 2-cell was fused with the enucleated 1-cell embryo (2 + PP group). Embryonic development, total activity of RNA synthesis, and gene expression of the ZO-1alpha(+) isoform of embryos in the 2 + P and 2 + PP groups were delayed when compared with those of the 2 + 2 group. Also, the phenomena of compaction and blastocoel formation were delayed in the development time and cell stage. From these results, the nucleus/cytoplasm ratio was found to have no direct effect on the regulation of embryonic morphogenesis, although it accelerated compaction and blastocoel formation. However, cytoplasmic factors that altered between 1- and 2-cell stages regulate embryonic morphogenesis, especially compaction, of preimplantation mouse embryos in concentration-dependent manner.
Bagassosis: An Epidemiological, Environmental, and Clinical Survey

An epidemiological and environmental survey of 170 bagasse workers employed by a raw sugar producing company in Trinidad was carried out in order to assess the prevalence of respiratory symptoms and to determine if exposure to bagasse was associated with alterations in ventilatory capacity. The epidemiological survey failed to reveal a significantly increased prevalence of respiratory symptoms in the more exposed group but showed that the group of Indian workers who were regularly and continuously exposed to bagasse had a significantly lower ventilatory capacity than the control group. This diminished ventilatory capacity was demonstrated despite negligible dust concentrations in the plant. However, the possibility that persistent exposure to low concentrations of bagasse may be the cause must be considered. During a five-year period, 17 patients with bagassosis were seen, the clinical picture being similar to that described in extrinsic allergic alveolitis from other causes. The systematic variations demonstrated in some indices of ventilatory function in different racial groups are discussed.
STUDIES ON BACTERIAL UTILIZATION OF URONIC ACIDS

MacLeod et al. (1954) noted that a number of strains of bacteria from the marine environment which can not grow on fresh water media are dependent upon Na+, K+, and Mg++, whereas several similar isolates capable of growth on fresh water media have no Na+ dependence. A subsequent investigation of the effect of these metal ions on the viability in storage and the activity of oxidative systems of a Na+ dependent strain (Tomlinson and MacLeod, 1957) showed a definite requirement for the three ions for storage and for Na+ and K+ for the oxidation of succinate and alanine. In this laboratory a marine bacterium capable of forming induced enzymes for the oxidation of uronic acids has been isolated from glucuronate enriched marsh mud from Sapelo Island, Georgia. This paper represents a study of the effects of substrate, sea salt, and Na, K, and Mg salts on the induction of the oxidative system.
El por qué, el qué y el cómo de la innovación de gestión

Para organizaciones como GE, PG que sea sistemica, involucrando una gama de procesos y metodos; y que sea parte de un programa de invencion, en el que el progreso se acumula con el tiempo. Hasta ahora, la gestion en este siglo no es muy diferente de la gestion en el siglo pasado, dice Hamel. Y es alli donde radica la oportunidad. Usted puede esperar a que un competidor desarrolle el proximo gran proceso de gestion y lo deje fuera del negocio, o puede convertirse ahora mismo en un innovador de gestion.
Updating Activities of Older Professionals

The 21 st Century American workforce will include a larger proportion of older workers, as well as other demographic groups currently under-represented in the IT workforce. Surprisingly, some older IT professionals report problems landing a job in an era when government and private organizations are proclaiming a shortage of IT workers. Apparently, there’s a disconnect between the skill sets of these experienced professionals and the skills being sought by contemporary organizations. This study provides a preliminary view regarding the updating efforts of IT professionals by age category, and then elaborates by examining self-reported professional competency motivation and perceived organizational outcomes commonly associated with demonstrated professional abilities. Overall, the study finds that older IT professionals participate less in formal updating activities, and perceive less value in maintaining professional competency. Decreased competency motivation may be related to pessimism regarding the probability of receiving organizational rewards when professional ability is maintained.
Industrial structure, technology intensity and growth: issues for policy

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some relationships between innovation, industrial structure and economic growth. The basic argument of the paper is that what we might call 'high-technology' models of growth misrepresent the nature of the growth process in advanced economies, especially in smaller economies. It is often argued, in the Kuznets-Schumpeter tradition, that economic growth depends on the creation of new industries, involving major new technologies, and that the latter are in some sense clustered together. At the present time these are often held to be a group of allegedly 'knowledge intensive' high-technology industries, such as ITC, biotechnology and so on. However from a conceptual point of view, in a multi-sectoral economy, the growth rate is a weighted average of the growth of the sectors which comprise the economy (where the weights are shares in output). An empirical examination of the sectoral structure of growth for Europe suggests that growth has a widely-distributed sectoral basis, and that many of the significant sectors are in what are often referred to as 'low-tech' industries. These sectors are typically also large, and thus contribute strongly to overall growth. How does this square with the idea that growth depends on innovation? The paper uses Community Innovation Survey data to show that innovation also is a sectorally-distributed process. How, then, does this pervasive innovation in 'low tech' sectors relate to the creation and use of knowledge? Here the paper uses material from empirical studies of industry-level knowledge bases in the Norwegian economy to suggest that the knowledge bases of apparently low and medium technology industries such as food processing, chemicals, oil and gas, publishing and so on, are in fact deep, complex, science-based and above all systemic (in the sense of involving complex and sustained institutional interactions). The policy point of this is that policy-makers ought to be aware of the industrial structures and the associated technological knowledge bases on which growth actually rests, and that this requires a deeper understanding ot the specificity of innovation systems. 1 A previous version of this paper was presented to the conference on Innovation systems: Growth Engines for the 21 Century. , Sydney, November 19-2
Empirical evidence on OCL formal specification-based metrics as a predictor of fault-proneness

OCL formal specification has been widely used for precise software modeling. In general, it is used to express constraints on design documents. As a novel approach, its usage can be extended to support effective testing, such as testing fault-prone components to improve software quality. In this paper, CK (Chidamber and Kemerer) metrics that can be extracted from OCL expressions are validated against module complexity. Moreover, our study proposes a new metric suite that can be directly extracted from OCL expressions to quantify module complexity. A weight has been assigned to each metric to reflect its importance in fault-prone component identification. Our study shows that metrics collected from OCL specifications are good predictors of the fault-prone components of a system during design time. An early knowledge of fault-prone components of the system can be useful to distribute efforts required for software development and testing activities.
[Victims of violence in urban secondary schools in Sousse (Tunisia)].

Most often epidemiologic studies of violence during adolescence focus on aspects related to the perpetrator. The adolescent victims of violence are certainly at least as numerous, but too little is known about them. Our aim was to estimate the extent of this social phenomenon and to identify its various forms, through a descriptive, cross-sectional study of a sample of 685 teenagers (409 girls and 276 boys) from six public high schools in Sousse in 1999. A school physician conducted structured interviews to collect the data, recorded in compliance with the ethical rules of confidentiality and anonymity. The results indicate that 36.9% of the adolescents (54% of the boys and 24% of the girls) reported experiencing violence. Within the group of victims, physical violence was reported by 78% of the boys and 63% of the girls, verbal violence by 51% and 63%, respectively. We conclude that experiencing violence is far from uncommon and that it causes acute suffering for youngsters during an important phase of their emotional development and exposes them to the risk of becoming violent as adults. School medical staff can play a crucial role in the prevention and the management of this mistreatment.
A Novel Strategy for the 2005 Penn-Lehman Automated Trading Competition

The Penn-Lehman Automated Trading (PLAT) project is a broad investigation of al- gorithms and strategies for automated trading in financial markets. It is centered on the Penn Exchange Simulator, which simulates an electronic crossing network. The simulator realistically mixes bids from automated stock trading agents with bids from the real stock market. The partici- pants in the project develop automated trading agents that are entered in formal automated trading competitions. This paper concerns the 2005 PLAT competition. Unlike previous years, this com- petition was run with automated agents only, and no real-time stock market data. This allowed the authors' winning strategy, Jump & Dump, to exploit a basic, but easily overlooked, flaw in the other agents. We outline Jump & Dump and explain how and why it won.
Investigating the Efficiency of Blowfish and Rejindael (AES) Algorithms

The growth rate of the internet exceeds than any other technology which is measured by users and bandwidth. Internet has been growing at a rapid rate since its conception, on a curve geometric and sometimes exponential. Today, the Internet is moving exponentially in three different directions such as size, processing power, and software sophistication making it the fastest growing technology humankind has ever created. With the rapid growth of internet, there is need to protect the sensitive data from unauthorized access. Cryptography plays a vital role in the field of network security. Currently many encryption algorithms are available to secure the data but these algorithms consume lot of computing resources such as battery and CPU time. This paper mainly focuses on two commonly used symmetric encryption algorithms such as Blowfish and Rejindael. These algorithms are compared and performance is evaluated. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the performance of these algorithms.
A Novel Contribution-Aware Neighbor-Assist Video Delivery Solution over Mobile Content-Centric Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel contribution-aware neighbor-assist video delivery solution over mobile content-centric network (CNVD). CNVD allows the nodes to build and maintain neighbor relationship with other nodes to share cached video resources and achieve unicast-based video lookup. CNVD constructs an estimation model of contribution of neighbor nodes by investigation of lookup delay, number of cached videos, lookup success rate, and geographical distance. CNVD designs the estimation methods of interest level and lookup capacity of nodes for video content, which enables the nodes to decide whether to build neighbor relationship with other nodes. A maintenance method of neighbor relationship between nodes is proposed, which enables the nodes to update valid time of neighbor relationship in terms of contribution of neighbor nodes and decide whether to remove neighbor relationship in terms of the current valid time of neighbor relationship. Further, CNVD designs a contribution-based video lookup algorithm, which reduces lookup delay and improves lookup success rate. Extensive tests show how CNVD achieves much better performance results in comparison with other state-of-the-art solutions.
Cyanogenesis in Plants

The spores, scattered profusely over the limbs, germinate as soon as enough rain has fallen to wet them up thoroughly, usually in December or January. Spores lying on the green bark of new shoots penetrate the tissue and cause the characteristic spotting. Spores lying about the bud scales produce a mycelium which penetrates and kills outright both the bud and quite an area of surrounding bark, the spot extending from one-fourth to one inch in length. On the spots spore pustules are developed.
Small Businesses’ Acceptance and Adoption of e‐Commerce in the Western‐Cape Province of South‐Africa

This paper reports on research that was undertaken in Information Systems at the University of Cape Town on the acceptance and adoption of e‐commerce amongst small businesses in the manufacturing sector. It addresses how these small businesses in a developing country perceive the potential benefits of e‐commerce and looks at their consequent adoption of e‐commerce activities in their own organisations. This includes the businesses’ perception of the benefits and opportunities of e‐commerce activities and to determine whether these businesses have the necessary technological capabilities for e‐commerce adoption in place. A secondary aim of this research was to determine the current level of e‐commerce adoption by small manufacturing businesses in the Western Cape. This was achieved by circulating a questionnaire to test the perception of e‐commerce benefits and e‐commerce adoption levels amongst small manufacturing businesses in the Western Cape. If the global usage of the Internet for electronic commerce by SME's is compared with the South African case, this research clearly indicates that the available technologies are not adopted to the extent that is necessary for survival in a rapidly changing environment.
Characterization of streptococcal bacteriophage c6A.

Bacteriophage c6A is a lytic phage that infects strains of Streptococcus lactis. Infection of S. lactis C6 under standard conditions yielded 124 +/- 8 p.f. u. per infected cell after a latent period of 25 min at 30 degrees C. The virion of c6A was shown to contain at least 12 polypeptides and a 21.9 kilobase double-stranded, linear DNA genome with complementary 5'-protruding single-stranded termini. The (G + C) content of this DNA was estimated to be 36.7%. A restriction map was constructed which indicates that a number of restriction endonucleases did not digest the DNA and that others cleaved with a much lower frequency than expected.
International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs): Überblick über den finalen Standard des IASB

Am 9. 7. 2009 hat das IASB den IFRS for SMEs veroffentlicht. Der Standard ist das Resultat eines langjahrigen Entwicklungsprozesses und stellt eine entscheidende Entwicklungsstufe auf dem Weg zu einer internationalen Angleichung der Rechnungslegung von nicht-kapitalmarktorientierten Unternehmen dar. Intensive Diskussionen, z. B. des im Februar 2007 veroffentlichten Entwurfs oder der Ergebnisse von Feldstudien zur praktischen Anwendbarkeit der IASB-Vorschlage und empirischen Studien, begleiteten die Entwicklung des Standards. Gegenuber dem stark kritisierten Entwurf hat das IASB nun weitreichende Anderungen beschlossen. Der Beitrag gibt einen Uberblick uber die Konzeption und den Inhalt des finalen Standards und geht dabei insbesondere auf die wesentlichen Anderungen im Vergleich zum Entwurf sowie bedeutsame Erleichterungen im Vergleich zu den full IFRS ein.
DNA fingerprinting by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis is more effective than ribotyping in distinguishing among methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates

Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) after SmaI restriction of DNA from 239 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates (from 142 patients) produced 26 different fingerprints. The deduced chromosome sizes ranged from 2,200 to 3,100 kb (+/- 100 kb). A total of 81 isolates taken from 65 patients were then typed by PFGE and ribotyping with ClaI, EcoRI, and HindIII. Ribotypes were less discriminating than PFGE. Ribotyping did not discriminate isolates from a given PFGE fingerprint into different subsets. PFGE may be a more effective epidemiological tool than ribotyping for the typing of methicillin-resistant S. aureus strains.