Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antimicrobial Resistance, Serologic and Molecular Characterization of E. coli Isolated from Calves with Severe or Fatal Enteritis in Bavaria, Germany

Worldwide, enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) cause neonatal diarrhea and high mortality rates in newborn calves, leading to great economic losses. In Bavaria, Germany, no recent facts are available regarding the prevalence of virulence factors or antimicrobial resistance of ETEC in calves. Antimicrobial susceptibility of 8713 E. coli isolates obtained from 7358 samples of diseased or deceased diarrheic calves were investigated between 2015 to 2019. Considerably high rates of 84.2% multidrug-resistant and 15.8% extensively drug-resistant isolates were detected. The resistance situation of the first, second and third line antimicrobials for the treatment, here amoxicillin-clavulanate, enrofloxacin and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, is currently acceptable with mean non-susceptibility rates of 28.1%, 37.9% and 50.0% over the investigated 5-year period. Furthermore, the ETEC serotypes O101:K28, O9:K35, O101:K30, O101:K32, O78:K80, O139:K82, O8:K87, O141:K85 and O147:K89, as well as the virulence factors F17, F41, F5, ST-I and stx1 were identified in a subset of samples collected in 2019 and 2020. The substantially high rates of multi- and extensively drug-resistant isolates underline the necessity of continuous monitoring regarding antimicrobial resistance to provide reliable prognoses and adjust recommendations for the treatment of bacterial infections in animals.
Family Incivility and Cyberbullying Perpetration Among College Students: Negative Affect as a Mediator and Dispositional Mindfulness as a Moderator

Although family factors are associated with cyberbullying, few studies have investigated the relationship between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration. The current study aimed to examine the associations between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration among college students, and further investigate the underlying moderated mediation mechanism. Study 1 was a cross-sectional survey among 640 Chinese undergraduate students (Mage = 20.29 years, SD = 1.38). Demographics, family incivility, cyberbullying perpetration, and negative affect were assessed. The results supported the idea that negative affect plays a role in mediating the relationship between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration. Study 2 used a two-wave longitudinal design, aiming to examine both the mediating role of negative affect and the moderating role of dispositional mindfulness (represented through five facets—observing, describing, acting with awareness, nonjudging, and nonreacting—each of which were analyzed separately). The data were collected from 200 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students (Mage = 22.18, SD = 2.56). Negative affect was also found to play a mediation effect in this study. Furthermore, the results found that acting with awareness and nonjudging weakened the relationship between family incivility and negative affect, whereas observing exacerbated it. Moreover, nonjudging exacerbated the relationship between negative affect and cyberbullying perpetration. The present findings indicate that negative affect may play a role in explaining the association between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration. Furthermore, acting with awareness and nonjudging could buffer the relationship between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration via negative affect, which provides a new insight for the prevention of and intervention on cyberbullying perpetration.
An investigation of turn-off performance of planar and trench gate IGBTs under soft and hard switching

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the turn-off performance of planar and trench gate IGBTs under conditions of soft and hard switching topologies. Voltage and current waveforms, power losses, electric field distributions, and carrier behaviors inside the chips are studied through simulation and experiment. It is noted that the trench gate IGBT has advantage over the planar gate IGBT for hard switching application. On the other hand, the turn-off loss of the planar gate IGBT under soft switching application is slightly lower than that of the trench gate IGBT.
User oriented Virtual Network Management based on dvNOC Environment

Distributed Virtual Network Operations Center (dvNOC) presents virtualized network management framework on hybrid research networks for both network operators and end- users (e.g. researchers) to monitor and manage their own virtual networks. Another purpose of dvNOC is to meet the network demands of advanced applications on hybrid research networks, e.g. very high bandwidth, no datagram loss, almost zero jitter with strict traffic isolation. Based on hierarchical architecture consisting of dNOC (distributed NOC) and vNOC (virtual NOC), users can acquire three functionalities, multi-domain network awareness, efficient NOC-to-NOC cooperation, and user-oriented virtual network management, which are essential elements to achieve automated and virtual network management based on users, over multi-national and inter-domain hybrid research networks.
Validation of an Image Analysis Method for Evaluating the Chemical Resistance of Glass Fibers to Alkaline Environments

This article is focused on the comparison of the reliability of the results obtained by image analysis (newly proposed evaluation method) with well-known methods of evaluation of long-term corrosion resistance of glass fibers in an alkaline environment (pH > 12). The developed method is based on the analysis of scanning electron microscopy images (diameter and structures on the fiber surface). An experiment (52 weeks) was performed to evaluate two types of glass fibers: anticorrosive glass fibers (ARGFs) and E-glass fibers (EGFs). Three media were used to treat the fibers (23 ± 2 °C): H2O, Ca(OH)2, and K2SiO3. The ARGFs’ tensile strength did not reduce; a decrease by 68% was observed for EGFs in H2O. Tensile strength decreased by 32% and 85–95% in K2SiO3; by 50% and 64% in Ca(OH)2 for the ARGF and EGF, respectively. Statistical analysis was performed to validate the reliability and plausibility of the developed method. ARGFs and EGFs did not show any relationship between the fiber diameter and weight in H2O; however, the linear trends may predict this relationship in Ca(OH)2 and K2SiO3. For the ARGF and EGF, the cubic trend was suitable for predicting the change in fiber weight and diameter over time in Ca(OH)2 and K2SiO3.
Adaptive lattice filters for narrowband interference rejection in DS spread spectrum systems

In the presence of narrowband interference, the performance of direct sequence (DS) spread spectrum communication systems can be improved by using various types of interference rejection filters. The performance of a DS spread spectrum receiver employing a lattice filter for interference rejection is analysed. The filter parameters are adjusted using the stochastic gradient lattice algorithm. For ease of analysis, the adaptive lattice filter is modelled as an optimal Wiener filter followed by an additive misadjustment noise. Analytical expressions for the reflection coefficients and general expressions for the minimum mean square error and the variance of the misadjustment noise are presented. An expression for the system bit error rare, which takes into account, the filter misadjustment noise is derived and numerical results are presented.
High Throughput Small Molecule Screen for Reactivation of FMR1 in Fragile X Syndrome Human Neural Cells

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common inherited cause of autism and intellectual disability. The majority of FXS cases are caused by transcriptional repression of the FMR1 gene due to epigenetic changes that are not recapitulated in current animal disease models. FXS patient induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived gene edited reporter cell lines enable novel strategies to discover reactivators of FMR1 expression in human cells on a much larger scale than previously possible. Here, we describe the workflow using FXS iPSC-derived neural cell lines to conduct a massive, unbiased screen for small molecule activators of the FMR1 gene. The proof-of-principle methodology demonstrates the utility of human stem-cell-based methodology for the untargeted discovery of reactivators of the human FMR1 gene that can be applied to other diseases.
The Passive Microwave Water Cycle Product

The purpose of this technical report is to document the methodology we use for producing the Passive Microwave Water Cycle (PMWC) product. The PMWC product provides a full characterization of the atmospheric branch of the water cycle over the ocean, and it includes the parameters: water vapor, water vapor transport (speed and direction), water vapor transport divergence, evaporation, and precipitation. This product was developed for the NASA Energy and Water Cycle Study (NEWS) and is an extension of the work by Wentz et al. (2007). This report specifically describes the methodology used in producing the Version-1b PMWC product. The product has a spatial resolution of 0.25-degrees, a temporal resolution of one month, a time period from July 1987 through December 2006, and coverage over the global oceans observed by the SSM/I sensors (F08, F10, F11, F13, F14, and F15).
Spectral-Warping Based Noise-Robust Enhanced Children ASR System

In real-life applications, noise originating from different sound sources modifies the characteristics of an input signal which affects the development of an enhanced ASR system. This contamination degrades the quality and comprehension of speech variables while impacting the performance of human-machine communication systems. This paper aims to minimise noise challenges by using a robust feature extraction methodology through introduction of an optimised filtering technique. Initially, the evaluations for enhancing input signals are constructed by using state transformation matrix and minimising a mean square error based upon the linear time variance techniques of Kalman and Adaptive Wiener Filtering. Consequently, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficient (LPCC), RelAtive SpecTrAl-Perceptual Linear Prediction (RASTA-PLP) and Gammatone Frequency cepstral coefficient (GFCC) based feature extraction methods have been synthesised with their comparable efficiency in order to derive the adequate characteristics of a signal. It also handle the large-scale training complexities lies among the training and testing dataset. Consequently, the acoustic mismatch and linguistic complexity of large-scale variations lies within small set of speakers have been handle by utilising the Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN) based warping of the test utterances. Furthermore, the spectral warping approach has been used by time reversing the samples inside a frame and passing them into the filter network corresponding to each frame. Finally, the overall Relative Improvement (RI) of 16.13% on 5-way perturbed spectral warped based noise augmented dataset through Wiener Filtering in comparison to other systems respectively.
Communication Risks and Best Practices in Global Software Development during Requirements Change Management: A Systematic Literature Review Protocol

Currently, software systems are becoming an essential part of business in the world. The majority of the software production companies are adopting Global Software Development (GSD) and it is incessantly getting faster. Most of the software development organisations are trying to globalize their study worldwide in order to get the different benefits. However, GSD is not a simple task and the organizations face various challenges. But communication is a major issue and it becomes more complicated during the Requirements Change Management (RCM) in the context of GSD. This research will explore communication risks, their causes, negative effects and those mitigation practices which can be used to allay communication risks during the RCM process. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol has been developed and the implementation of the protocol is in process. The SLR protocol provides in depth and more comprehensive results than common literature review.
Two-dimensional simulation of thermal runaway in a nonplanar GTO-thyristor

The problem of electrothermal stability due to different cooling conditions has been investigated by computing the thermal transients in a nonplanar GTO-thyristor. In the first simulation, a steady state occurs with a heat sink removing all the dissipated power. In the second simulation severe thermal runaway is induced due to bad cooling conditions, allowing the analysis of destructive electrothermal interaction. The simulations are based on an advanced model for self-heating effects in silicon devices derived from first principles of irreversible thermodynamics. Self-consistently incorporating a phenomenological model of band gap narrowing in order to take account of heavy doping effects. The system of governing equations is valid in both the steady state and the transient regimes. Four characteristic effects contributing to the heat generation can be identified: Joule heating, recombination heating, Thomson heating, and carrier source heating. Thermal runaway is significantly accelerated in the simulations based on the thermodynamic model of thermoelectric transport compared to a conventional heuristic theory of thermoelectricity. The importance of the entropy balance equation is emphasized in order to derive the mathematical form of the heat flux and the current relations for electrons and holes. Limitations of underlying assumptions are discussed. It is shown that the heat generation implies the Thomson relations.
Mutual coupling suppression in microstrip array using defected ground structure

A defected ground structure (DGS) is used to suppress mutual coupling between elements in a microstrip array and eliminate the scan blindness in an infinite phased array. Two kinds of DGSs, namely back-to-back U-shaped and dumbbell-shaped DGSs, are analysed and compared. The analysis indicates that the back-to-back U-shaped DGS is better at suppressing propagation of surface waves in microstrip substrate. A two-element microstrip array with back-to-back U-shaped DGS is designed and the array characteristics against different element distances are studied. The results show that the degree of the mutual coupling suppression is increased when the element distance is reduced. However, compared with the traditional array, a higher gain and lower side lobes are obtained when a larger element spacing is selected. The scan blindness of an infinite microstrip phased array in E-plane is studied by simulation, and the calculation demonstrates that the scan blindness can be eliminated by applying a back-to-back U-shaped DGS to the infinite phased array.
A Newly Discovered Forest of the Whip Coral Viminella flagellum (Anthozoa, Alcyonacea) in the Mediterranean Sea: A Non-Invasive Method to Assess Its Population Structure

Simple Summary Some corals belonging to the orders Alcyonacea and Antipatharia have elongated, unbranched shapes, and are generally addressed as sea whips. The octocorals Viminella flagellum are the main sea whip species inhabiting the Mediterranean Sea, where they can form large colony aggregations known as coral forests. These habitats are of great conservation importance; they provide a suite of ecosystem goods and services, and their monitoring is essential to plan appropriate conservation strategies. One of the most important indicators on the status of a coral forest is its population structure, such as the frequency of different size classes within the coral population. This is very difficult to assess in sea whips because of the length and high flexibility. Here, we report on the findings of a newly discovered, monospecific forest of V. flagellum in Aeolian Archipelago (Mediterranean Sea), and we present a new method to study its population structure using video analysis. The results of the survey indicate that the Aeolian coral population was in good condition, without significant anthropogenic impacts. The new method presented here proved to be an effective and promising tool for the monitoring of this vulnerable marine ecosystem. It can be applied to every known population of V. flagellum as well as adapted to other sea-whip species. Abstract Coral forests are vulnerable marine ecosystems formed by arborescent corals (e.g., Anthozoa of the orders Alcyonacea and Antipatharia). The population structure of the habitat-forming corals can inform on the status of the habitat, representing an essential aspect to monitor. Most Mediterranean corals live in the mesophotic and aphotic zones, and their population structures can be assessed by analyzing images collected by underwater vehicles. This is still not possible in whip-like corals, whose colony lengths and flexibilities impede the taking of direct length measurements from images. This study reports on the occurrence of a monospecific forest, of the whip coral Viminella flagellum in the Aeolian Archipelago (Southern Tyrrhenian Sea; 149 m depth), and the assessment of its population structure through an ad-hoc, non-invasive method to estimate a colony height based on its width. The forest of V. flagellum showed a mean density of 19.4 ± 0.2 colonies m−2 (up to 44.8 colonies m−2) and no signs of anthropogenic impacts. The population was dominated by young colonies, with the presence of large adults and active recruitment. The new model proved to be effective for non-invasive monitoring of this near threatened species, representing a needed step towards appropriate conservation actions.
The Effect of Yeast and Roughage Concentrate Ratio on Ruminal pH and Protozoal Population in Thai Native Beef Cattle

Simple Summary As a result of the recent ban on antibiotics in feed, animal probiotics are becoming increasingly popular. Yeast is extensively used as both a probiotic and prebiotic in the gastrointestinal tracts of ruminants. The purpose of this study is to determine how adding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to the diet and changing the roughage-to-concentrate ratio (R:C ratio) affects nutrient consumption, rumen fermentation, microbial protein synthesis, and protozoal population in Thai native beef cattle. The roughage source was urea–calcium-hydroxide-treated rice straw. The findings suggest that supplementing with a R:C ratio of 40:60 and a LY of 4 g/hd/d boosted nutrient digestibility, volatile fatty acid (VFA) production, propionic acid (C3) in particular, and microbial protein synthesis while lowering protozoal population. Abstract The objective of this research is to investigate the effect of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) adding and roughage-to-concentrate ratio (R:C ratio) on nutrients utilization, rumen fermentation efficiency, microbial protein synthesis, and protozoal population in Thai native beef cattle. Four Thai native beef cattle, weighing an average of 120 ± 10 kg live weight, were randomly assigned to four dietary treatments using a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement in a 4 × 4 Latin square design. Factor A was the level of roughage-to-concentrate ratio (R:C ratio) at 60:40 and 40:60; factor B was the levels of live yeast (LY) supplementation at 0 and 4 g/hd/d; urea–calcium-hydroxide-treated rice straw were used as a roughage source. Findings revealed that total intake and digestibility of dry matter (DM), organic matter (OM), and crude protein (CP) were increased (p < 0.05) by both factors, being greater for steers fed a R:C ratio of 40:60 supplemented with 4 g LY/hd/d. Ruminal ammonia nitrogen, total volatile fatty acid (VFA), and propionate (C3) were increased (p < 0.05) at the R:C ratio of 40:60 with LY supplementation at 4 g/hd/d, whereas rumen acetate (C2) and the C2 to C3 ratio were decreased (p < 0.05). With a high level of concentrate, LY addition increased total bacterial direct counts and fungal zoospores (p < 0.05), but decreased protozoal populations (p < 0.05). High-concentrate diet and LY supplementation increased nitrogen absorption and the efficiency of microbial nitrogen protein production. In conclusion, feeding beef cattle with 4 g/hd/d LY at a R:C ratio of 40:60 increased C3 and nutritional digestibility while lowering protozoal population.
Netrin-1: A Modulator of Macrophage Driven Acute and Chronic Inflammation

Netrins belong to the family of laminin-like secreted proteins, which guide axonal migration and neuronal growth in the developing central nervous system. Over the last 20 years, it has been established that netrin-1 acts as a chemoattractive or chemorepulsive cue in diverse biological processes far beyond neuronal development. Netrin-1 has been shown to play a central role in cell adhesion, cell migration, proliferation, and cell survival in neuronal and non-neuronal tissue. In this context, netrin-1 was found to orchestrate organogenesis, angiogenesis, tumorigenesis, and inflammation. In inflammation, as in neuronal development, netrin-1 plays a dichotomous role directing the migration of leukocytes, especially monocytes in the inflamed tissue. Monocyte-derived macrophages have long been known for a similar dual role in inflammation. In response to pathogen-induced acute injury, monocytes are rapidly recruited to damaged tissue as the first line of immune defense to phagocyte pathogens, present antigens to initiate the adaptive immune response, and promote wound healing in the resolution phase. On the other hand, dysregulated macrophages with impaired phagocytosis and egress capacity accumulate in chronic inflammation sites and foster the maintenance—and even the progression—of chronic inflammation. In this review article, we will highlight the dichotomous roles of netrin-1 and its impact on acute and chronic inflammation.
Signing auditors’ experience and client investment efficiency

ABSTRACT This study explores the relationship between signing auditors’ experience and client investment efficiency in the Chinese stock market. After controlling for firm-level, audit firm-level, and other individual characteristics, results show that it is signing auditors’ industry experience, rather than total experience, that significantly restrains client investment inefficiency, including over- and under-investment. This means that industry-specific experience may be the important experience affecting client investment behavior. The mechanism test results also show that experienced auditors can enhance client investment efficiency not only by playing an information role, through which they reduce over- and under-investment, but also partly through a financing channel to mitigate under-investment and a monitoring channel to restrict over-investment, respectively. Further analyses suggest that the effect of signing auditors’ industry experience on client investment efficiency is more pronounced for firms audited by large audit firms, those audited by expertise audit firms, and those located in the region with higher level of marketization. Overall, this study provides evidence related to the economic consequences of auditor experience at the individual level, thus extending the related literature.