Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effet du sel des cendres brutes de la jacinthe d’eau (Eichhornia crassipes, Solms) sur la réaction du sol et la dynamique des nutriments d’un sol ferrallitique très altéré sous culture du maïs (Zea mays L.)

Ferralsols in advanced deterioration cause significant cultures yield’s falls because of their high acidity and their low-grade nutriments. This research want to raise these constraints to agriculture production by using the aqueous extract of water hyacinth like mineral manure. Thus increasing amounts were applied on soil and were compared about their effects to corn yield, potassium content and soil pH. Results obtained show that corn yield increases with amount of aqueous extract applied. By another way, the manure used has at the same an effect of amendment and an effect of fertilizer. Indeed, our results indicates that it raises soil pH (from 4.5 under T0 to 4.8 under T3) and increases the available potassium soil’s content (2.5; 4.5 and 6.5 times respectively under T1, T2 and T3) and undoubtedly of other nutriments which we did not titrate in soil. The fertility of these soils can be improved by application of the water hyacinth’s extract and at the same time as a reduction of soil acidity would be obtained. The use of this vegetal species as manure would offer an alternative of fight against its nuisance in rivers without major ecological damage and with less expenses
Dissecting causal asymmetries in inductive generalization

Suppose we observe something happen in an interaction be-tween two objects A and B. Can we then predict what will happen in an interaction between A and C, or between B and C? Recent research, inspired by work on the “causal asymmetry”, suggests that people use cues to causal agency to guide object-based generalization decisions, even in relatively abstract settings. When object A possesses cues to causal agency (e.g. it moves, remains stable throughout the interaction), people tend to predict that what happened will probably also occur in an interaction between A and C, but not between B and C. Here we replicate and extend this work, with the goal of identifying the cues that people use to determine that an object is a causal agent. In four experiments, we manipulate three properties of the agent and recipient objects. We find that people anchor their inductive generalizations around the agent object when that object possesses all three cues to causal agency, but removing either cue abolishes the asymmetry.
University of Birmingham Long-term impact of irritable bowel syndrome: a qualitative study

Aim: To explore how irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) impacts on patients’ lives in order to explain the reported reduction in quality of life (QOL). Background: IBS affects 10–20% of the population and over half of the people with the condition consult in primary care, with many consultations ending unsatisfactorily. IBS is known to have a detrimental effect on the QOL, though the mechanisms through which this is affected are poorly understood. A greater understanding of the patient experience of IBS would facilitate better healthcare provision. Methods: Eighteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews were undertaken in the West Midlands, United Kingdom from August 2006 to March 2008. Interviews were carried out until data saturation was achieved. All interviewees had previously taken part in one of the two recent primary care-based IBS studies and were long-term sufferers of IBS. Participants were purposively sampled to capture a range of experiences and included both genders, a range of ages, symptom severity scores and IBS sub-types. Findings: In contrast to the previously reported ‘worried well’ label, participants reported integration of the disease into their lives to the extent that it became a part of their identity. Even so, IBS did at times prevent their participation in everyday activities. Strategies used by participants to manage symptoms were an integral part of daily living and events which threatened routine coping strategies caused stress and exacerbated symptoms. Both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies were identiﬁed. These were in part patient created, but for many incorporated advice or medication provided by their doctor. The ﬁndings not only conﬁrm the extensive impact of IBS on daily living but also expose the additional impacts of IBS on emotional well-being and self-identity. The reduced QOL reported in previous studies may be an underestimate of the impact of IBS on patients’ lives as patients integrate coping mechanisms completely into daily living.
Plate Tectonics and the Structural Evolution of the Aleutian–Bering Sea Region

The general aspects of the structural evolution of the Aleutian-Bering Sea region can be described in terms of plate tectonics. Involved in this model is the formation of the Aleutian Ridge in latest Cretaceous or earliest Tertiary time. The ridge is presumed to have formed in response to a southward relocation in the convergence zone of the Pacific oceanic plate, a shift away from the Beringian continental margin connecting Alaska and Siberia to an oceanic location at the Aleutian Trench. Prior to the formation of the ridge, Pacific crust is presumed to have directly underthrust the northeast-trending Koryak-Kamchatka coast. The middle and late Mesozoic eugeosynclinal or thalassogeosynclinal masses that underlie this segment of the Pacific fold belt are highly deformed, thrust faulted, and intruded by ultramafic bodies-characteristics that can be ascribed to the mechanical and magmatic consequence of plate underthrusting. This model implies a similar orogenic process for the formation of the stratigraphically and structurally similar Mesozoic rocks underlying the northeast-trending continental margin of southern Alaska. Less intense underthrusting may have occurred along the northwest-trending Pribilof segment of the Beringian margin connecting Alaska and Siberia. This margin may have been more parallel to the approximate direction of relative motion between the oceanic and continental plates. Nonetheless, fold belts, possibly intruded by ultramafic masses, formed along this segment of the Beringian continental margin in Late Cretaceous and perhaps earliest Tertiary time. The folds have since subsided below sea level-their eroded tops presently underlying as much as 3 km of virtually undeformed Cenozoic deposits. Our model relates pre- and postorogenic deposits underlying the Beringian margin and adjacent coast to the time of formation of the Aleutian Ridge, which marked the cessation of continental underthrusting and the beginning of island-arc underthrusting. Our model also implies that the ridge formed near or at its present location and that oceanic crust of late Mesozoic age underlies the Aleutian Basin of the Bering Sea. Since formation of the ridge this basin has received from 2 to 10 km of sedimentary fill. Although the model we suggest broadly explains the observed changes in tectonic style, magmatic history, and sedimentation for the Aleutian-Bering Sea region, it also implies that thousands of kilometers of oceanic crust underthrust the Kamchatka, Beringian, and Alaskan margins between Late Triassic and Late Cretaceous time, and hundreds of kilometers underthrust the Aleutian Ridge in Cenozoic time. The enormous masses of pelagic and volcanic offscrapings that would be indicative of extensive or long-term crustal underthrusting are not apparent as mappable units. Thus, while our model may be stylistically adequate, it paradoxically predicts quantities of rocks and structures that we are not able to find. Presumably they have been subducted.
Crossing borders, crossing seas: The Philippines and continuities in migration

This study assesses how the composition of migrant workers from the Philippines varies with migration prevalence within Filipino communities. In doing so, this st udy tests the hypothesis of past cumulative causation scholars that increased migr ation prevalence results in a decline in migrant selectivity. The Philippines has a social, political and geographic context different from that of many other countries c haracterized by high migration. This study considers whether these different contexts and contingencies might alter the process by which the social phenomenon of cumulative causation occurs. Multiple fixed effects models were constructed at the muni cipality level with the dependent variable in each model relating to individuals’ ability to se cure a job or to ties and responsibilities that individuals have to their origin community (ma rital status, age, sex, years of education). This study finds that consistent with cumula tive causation theory as posited by Douglas S. Massey, increased prevalence did y ield a decline in selectivity for education and marital status. However, migration pre valence had no effect on the gender composition of migrants, while time did impact the gender composition, suggesting sustained selectivity by gender.
URBAN GROWTH MODELLING WITH ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK AND LOGISTIC REGRESSION. CASE STUDY: SANANDAJ CITY, IRAN

Cities have shown remarkable growth due to attraction, economic, social and facilities centralization in the past few decades. Population and urban expansion especially in developing countries, led to lack of resources, land use change from appropriate agricultural land to urban land use and marginalization. Under these circumstances, land use activity is a major issue and challenge for town and country planners. Different approaches have been attempted in urban expansion modelling. Artificial Neural network (ANN) models are among knowledge-based models which have been used for urban growth modelling. ANNs are powerful tools that use a machine learning approach to quantify and model complex behaviour and patterns. In this research, ANN and logistic regression have been employed for interpreting urban growth modelling. Our case study is Sanandaj city and we used Landsat TM and ETM + imageries acquired at 2000 and 2006. The dataset used includes distance to main roads, distance to the residence region, elevation, slope, and distance to green space. Percent Area Match (PAM) obtained from modelling of these changes with ANN is equal to 90.47% and the accuracy achieved for urban growth modelling with Logistic Regression (LR) is equal to 88.91%. Percent Correct Match (PCM) and Figure of Merit for ANN method were 91.33% and 59.07% and then for LR were 90.84% and 57.07%, respectively.
The trace of the Pacific‐Cocos‐Nazca triple junction in the Central Pacific and the formation of an overlapping spreading centre

The `plate tectonic mirror image' to the region of the Cocos and Nazca plates, which are currently being subducted beneath Central America, is preserved in the Central Pacific around 120°W just south of the equator. Cruise SO‐180 investigated this remote area during project CENTRAL and acquired new magnetic and bathymetric data. A plate tectonic model for the ‘mirror image’ is presented based on the newly acquired as well as reprocessed existing data. Discordant magnetic anomaly patterns and bathymetric structures indicate at least two major reorganization events (19.5 and 14.7 Myr), which can be detected both in the Cocos‐Nazca spreading system and in the East Pacific Rise. Irregularities in the anomaly pattern and curvilinear structures on the sea floor of the survey area are interpreted in terms of a fossil overlapping spreading centre at the location where the Farallon break‐up originated.
Automatic Paraphrasing via Sentence Reconstruction and Back-translation

Paraphrase generation plays key roles in NLP tasks such as question answering, machine translation, and information retrieval. In this paper, we pro-pose a novel framework for paraphrase generation. It simultaneously decodes the output sentence us-ing a pretrained wordset-to-sequence model and a back-translation model. We evaluate this framework on Quora, WikiAnswers, MSCOCO and Twitter, and show its advantage over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and distantly-supervised methods by signiﬁcant margins on all datasets. For Quora and WikiAnswers, our framework even performs better than some strongly supervised methods with domain adaptation. Further, we show that the generated paraphrases can be used to augment the training data for machine translation to achieve substantial improvements.
Measurement of Exhaled Breath Condensate in the Diagnosis and Management of Respiratory Disorders

IMPORTANT REMINDER Medical Policies are developed to provide guidance for members and providers regarding coverage in accordance with contract terms. Benefit determinations are based in all cases on the applicable contract language. To the extent there may be any conflict between the Medical Policy and contract language, the contract language takes precedence. PLEASE NOTE: Contracts exclude from coverage, among other things, services or procedures that are considered investigational or cosmetic. Providers may bill members for services or procedures that are considered investigational or cosmetic. Providers are encouraged to inform members before rendering such services that the members are likely to be financially responsible for the cost of these services.
Investigating Impacts of Wind Power Development in the M-KMA - An Over view Suitability Analysis of the Potential Impacts of Wind Power Development

i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii LIST OF TABLES . iv LIST OF FIGURES . v INTRODUCTION . 1 STUDY AREA . 2 METHODS . 4 Spatial Analyses . 4 Bayesian Belief Networks . 6 RESULTS . 9 Spatial Analyses . 9 Bayesian Belief Networks . 17 DISCUSSION . 26 IMPLICATIONS . 28 A CONCLUSION . 30 LITERATURE CITED . 31 APPENDICES . 33 A: Codes and Watershed names. 33 B: Additional Figures. 34
The role of biosphere-atmosphere-ocean interactions in the climate of West Africa during the Middle Holocene

In previous studies, a zonally symmetric, synchronously coupled biosphereatmosphere model (ZonaIBAM), which includes explicit representation of ecosystem dynamics, has been developed and validated based on current forcings over the region of West Africa. Here, we use ZonalBAM to study the response of the coupled biosphere-atmosphere system to changes in the Earth's orbital forcing during the Middle Holocene (6K yrs BP) and the relative contribution of vegetation and ocean feedbacks. Simulations in which vegetation conditions were prescribed to the current distribution, show that an orbitally-induced increased seasonality in insolation for the Middle Holocene, by itself, results in a 1.1 northward shift in the location of the southern margin of the Sahara as compared to current solar forcings. When vegetation dynamics are allowed, a 2.4 northward shift is simulated. However, when dynamic vegetation is initialized according to Hoelzmann et al. 's [1998] map of palaeovegetation, a 5.1 0 northward shift is simulated, bringing results more consistent with palaeoevidence. Contrary to other studies, these results suggest that multiple climate equilibria could have coexisted over the region of West Africa during the Middle Holocene. Furthermore, based on previous studies on the current climate over the region [Wang and Eltahir, 2000b], we hypothesize that transitions between these different equilibria could have taken place during the Middle Holocene causing the southern desert margin to migrate between 18.1 Nand 21.4 N and shaping low frequency climate variability. In spite of a cold bias in the simulated sea surface temperature (SSTs) for the current climate, the addition of an interactive mixed layer ocean model (MLOM) to ZonalBAM provided some insight into how changes in the SSTs in the South Eastern Tropical Atlantic (SETA) could have resulted in enhancement of the monsoon circulation during the Middle Holocene. W~ hypothesize that the addition of an oceanic component into Mid-Holocene simulations could result in a more northward position of the southern desert margin, bringing our simulations in much better agreement with reconstructions. Thesis Supervisor: Elfatih A. B. Eltahir Title: Associate Professor
The Impact of Relaxing Liquidity Constraints on Small Firm Performance: Evidence from South Africa ∗

We examine the extent to which liquidity constraints are a barrier to firm growth in low-income countries, and study the role that credit policies can play in addressing them. We combine novel data on small business owners in South Africa’s informal minibus taxi industry with a program that provided immediate reduction in payments on the outstanding minibus loan. We find that relaxing liquidity constraints led to: (i) higher repayments and lower defaults on minibus loan; (ii) an increase in labor supply; and (iii) better overall financial health. We do not find any evidence of increase in firm misconduct or risk to passenger safety, suggesting an improvement in overall welfare. We rationalize these findings using a framework where penalties arising from late payments under liquidity constraints lead to future debt overhang, thereby, generating moral hazard in effort
An Interpretable Distance Measure for Multivariate Non-Stationary Physiological Signals

We introduce dsymb, a novel distance measure for comparing multivariate non-stationary physiological signals. Unlike most distance measures on multivariate signals such as variants of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), dsymb can take into account their non-stationarity thanks to a symbolization step. This step is based on a change-point detection procedure, that splits a non-stationary signal into several stationary segments, followed by quantization using K-means clustering. The proposed distance measure leverages the general edit distance that is applied to the symbolic sequences. The performance of dsymb compared to two commonly used DTW variants is illustrated by applying it to physiological signals recorded during walking protocols. In particular, dsymb is shown to be interpretable: its symbolization detects the segments that correspond to salient behaviors. An open source GitHub repository is made available to reproduce all the experiments in Python.
Unraveling the Trade Potential of BRIC: A Comprehensive Analysis of Global Value Chains and Intra-BRIC Trade in Value-Added

We analyze the BRIC countries' role in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their trade patterns in value-added and vertical specialization. Using the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) and a decomposition model of intermediate goods and trade flows, we measure the degree of vertical specialization for each BRIC member. Our findings reveal increased connectivity within global value chains, particularly for China and India. China shows significant advancement in GVCs and intra-BRIC trade, focusing on high and medium-high technology industries. Brazil and Russia, however, have limited participation in GVCs, mainly engaging in value-added trade for medium-low and low-technology industries. Our network analysis reveals an increasing number of connections between countries in global value chains, particularly for China and India. India excels in medium-technology goods and has increased its share in GVCs relative to Brazil and Russia. While India and China demonstrate strong vertical specialization, Brazil and Russia concentrate major component exports on domestic value-added. Our study emphasizes the importance of expanding cooperation among the BRIC countries to foster gains in value-added trade, technological absorption, and overall economic growth.
Genome-wide Association Study of Saturated, Mono-and Genome-wide Association Study of Saturated, Mono-and Polyunsaturated Red Blood Cell Fatty Acids in the Framingham Polyunsaturated Red Blood Cell Fatty Acids in the Framingham Heart Offspring Study Heart Offspring Study

Abstract Most genome-wide association studies have explored relationships between genetic variants and plasma phospholipid fatty acid proportions, but few have examined apparent genetic influences on the membrane fatty acid profile of red blood cells (RBC). Using RBC fatty acid data from the Framingham Offspring Study, we analyzed over 2.5 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for association with 14 RBC fatty acids identifying 191 different SNPs associated with at least 1 fatty acid. Significant associations (p<1×10 −8 ) were located within five distinct 1 MB regions. Of particular interest were novel associations between (1) arachidonic acid and PCOLCE2 (regulates apoA-I maturation and modulates apoA-I levels), and (2) oleic and linoleic acid and LPCAT3 (mediates the transfer of fatty acids between glycerolipids). We also replicated previously identified strong associations between SNPs in the FADS (chromosome 11) and ELOVL (chromosome 6) regions. Multiple SNPs explained 8–14% of the variation in 3 high abundance (>11%) fatty acids, but only 1–3% in 4 low abundance (<3%) fatty acids, with the notable exception of dihomo-gamma linolenic acid with 53% of variance explained by SNPs. Further studies are needed to determine the extent to which variations in these genes influence tissue fatty acid content and pathways modulated by fatty acids.
CSR and logistics: A bibliometric and systematic review of SCOPUS database from 1997 to 2021

This bibliometric and systematic study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the link between CSR and Supply Chain. The objective is to analyze a large number of documents in a simple and reliable way by examining the relationship between articles, citations, and keywords, thus providing detailed scientific information. Through a preliminary study of the literature «scoping study», we developed the search query by juxtaposing the two terms «SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY» and «SUPPLY CHAIN». Following its deployment on the SCOPUS database chosen for its quality of coverage of the different research fields and after several manipulations of automatic and manual filters, we have kept 2950 documents. The data of the selected articles were exported in Bibtex format to be analyzed on the free software developed in the R environment bibliometrix. Thanks to its toolbox, we were able to generate visualizations of the annual evolution of scientific production, the most important journals, the most contributing authors, the most active countries, the most cited articles, and the leading themes. In addition to the visualizations, a systematic analysis of the 10 most cited articles was performed. The analysis of these documents allowed us to have an idea about the evolution of the research structure and to identify its tendencies. The results reflect a very important gain of interest and maturity in this field based on a deep theorization. The results also reflect the interest given to the economic and environmental aspects, unlike the social dimension which does not attract enough attention from the scientific community. Despite the methodological limitations that may impact our research, notably the risk of irrelevance in picking words for the query, and the risk of coverage related to the choice of the database. This study will allow the scientific community to clearly identify literature gaps that can be considered opportunities to deepen our thinking.
Employee share ownership in Germany: A cluster analysis of firms' aims

Politicians and scholars alike praise the significant benefits associated with employee share ownership (ESO). However, little is known about the concrete motives of firms to provide ESO to their employees. In particular, it is unknown how these motives correlate with firms’ contexts. Drawing on an institutional theoretical framework, this article examines what aims firms pursue through the provision of ESO. The data originate from a survey of firms in Germany. The cluster analytic findings indicate distinctive patterns of relationships between aims and firm characteristics. Aims related to employee performance are most important to foreign-owned firms, financial aims are most important to non-public small and medium-sized firms and aims related to corporate image are most important to big firms and to firms that do not provide profit sharing. Aims related to employee attraction and retention are almost equally important to all kinds of firms.