bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Screening tropical and sub-tropical maize germplasm for resistance to Striga hermonthica and S. asiatica and yield-related traits
Authors: Dossa Emeline N. , Shimelis Hussein , Shayanowako Admire I. T. , Laing Mark D. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractIdentification of maize germplasm with dual resistance to Striga hermonthica (Sh) and S. asiatica (Sa), could lead to the development of cultivars with stable resistance. 130 tropical and sub-tropical maize germplasms, including checks, were evaluated in a controlled environment for their reaction to Sh and Sa infestations using a 13 × 10 alpha lattice design with two replications over two seasons. Significant differences (P < 0.05) were detected among the assessed genotypes for all the recorded traits in Sh and Sa-infested treatments. Under Sa-infested conditions, mean Striga emergence counts 8 weeks after planting (SEC8) and 10 weeks after planting (SEC10) were 5.00 and 45.50, respectively, while the mean Striga damage rate 8 weeks after planting (SDR8) and 10 weeks after planting (SDR10) were 3.35 and 3.07, respectively. Under Sh-infested conditions, SEC8 and SEC10 mean values were 3.66 and 3.77, respectively, while the SDR8 and SDR10 values were 5.25 and 2.75 respectively. Positive and significant (P < 0.05) correlations were found between anthesis-silking interval (ASI) and SDR8 (r = 0.18) and SDR10 (0.32) under Sa-infested conditions. Negative and significant correlations were recorded between ear per plant (EPP) and SEC8, SDR8, and SDR10, with r = − 0.18, r = − 0.27, and r = − 0.24, respectively. Under Sh-infested conditions, significant and negative correlations were recorded between SDR8 and EPP (r = − 0. 20), EHT and SEC8 (r = − 0.22), EHT and SDR8 (r = − 0.36), PLHT and SDR8 (− 0.48), and PLHT and SDR10 (− 0.22). The results suggest that dual resistance to the two Striga species exists in some tropical and sub-tropical maize lines. The following genotypes have dual resistance to Sa and Sh: CML440, CML566, CML540, CML539, CLHP0343, CLHP0326, TZISTR1248, TZSTRI115, TZISTR25, TZISTR1205, TZSTRI113, TZISTR1119, TZISTR1174 and the OPVs B.King/1421, Shesha/1421, ZM1421, DTSTR-W SYN13, DTSTR-Y SYN14, and 2*TZECOMP3DT/WhiteDTSTRSYN) C2. The identified genotypes are suitable for use as parents in developing high-performing maize varieties with Striga resistance and improved grain yield.
On approximating dependence function and its derivatives
Authors: Tajvidi Nader 
Published: March 2024

AbstractBivariate extreme value distributions can be used to model dependence of observations from random variables in extreme levels. There is no finite dimensional parametric family for these distributions, but they can be characterized by a certain one-dimensional function which is known as Pickands dependence function. In many applications the general approach is to estimate the dependence function with a non-parametric method and then conduct further analysis based on the estimate. Although this approach is flexible in the sense that it does not impose any special structure on the dependence function, its main drawback is that the estimate is not available in a closed form. This paper provides some theoretical results which can be used to find a closed form approximation for an exact or an estimate of a twice differentiable dependence function and its derivatives. We demonstrate the methodology by calculating approximations for symmetric and asymmetric logistic dependence functions and their second derivatives. We show that the theory can be even applied to approximating a non-parametric estimate of dependence function using a convex optimization algorithm. Other discussed applications include a procedure for testing whether an estimate of dependence function can be assumed to be symmetric and estimation of the concordance measures of a bivariate extreme value distribution. Finally, an Australian annual maximum temperature dataset is used to illustrate how the theory can be used to build semi-infinite and compact predictions regions.
SAT Meets Tableaux for Linear Temporal Logic Satisfiability
Authors: Geatti Luca , Gigante Nicola , Montanari Angelo , Venturato Gabriele 
Published: March 2024

AbstractLinear temporal logic($$\textsf{LTL}\,$$LTL) and its variant interpreted onfinite traces($$\textsf{LTL}_{\textsf{f}\,}$$LTLf) are among the most popular specification languages in the fields of formal verification, artificial intelligence, and others. In this paper, we focus on the satisfiability problem for$$\textsf{LTL}\,$$LTLand$$\textsf{LTL}_{\textsf{f}\,}$$LTLfformulas, for which many techniques have been devised during the last decades. Among these aretableau systems, of which the most recent is Reynolds’ tree-shaped tableau. We provide a SAT-based algorithm for$$\textsf{LTL}\,$$LTLand$$\textsf{LTL}_{\textsf{f}\,}$$LTLfsatisfiability checking based on Reynolds’ tableau, proving its correctness and discussing experimental results obtained through its implementation in the BLACK satisfiability checker.
Regulating Autonomy in Civilian Drones: Towards a Spectral Approach
Authors: Nawaz Samar Abbas 
Published: March 2024

AbstractCivilian drones are becoming more functionally independent from human involvement which sets them on a path towards “autonomous” status. When defining “autonomy,” the European Union (EU) regulations, among other jurisdictions, employ an all-or-nothing approach, according to which a drone is either able to operate fully autonomously or not at all. This dichotomous approach disregards the various levels of drone autonomy and fails to capture the complexity of civilian drone operation. Within the EU, this has regulatory implications, such as regulatory lag, hindrance in better safety regulation, and incoherence with the Union’s regulatory approach towards Artificial Intelligence (AI). This article argues that understanding autonomy as a spectrum, rather than in a dichotomous way, would be more coherent with the technical functioning of drone and would avoid potential regulatory problems caused by the current dichotomous approach. In delineating this spectral approach, this article (1) analyses manifestations of autonomy in drone operations, (2) delineates efforts in the technical literatures and drone standardization to conceptualize “autonomy”, and (3) explores definitional attempts for autonomy made in three other technologies: self-driving cars, autonomous weapon systems, and autonomous maritime ships.
Nonsingular Hierarchical Approach for Trajectory Tracking Control of Miniature Helicopter with Model Uncertainties
Authors: Liu Ce 
Published: March 2024

AbstractBased on hierarchical inner-outer loop strategy, the tracking control for the helicopter system could be designed individually for the position loop and for the attitude loop, thus simplifying the underactuated control problem. However, due to the nonlinear coupling between the position dynamics and rotation dynamics, the performance of the position control is affected by attitude errors, especially when the attitude control can not tracks the reference attitude instantaneously. This work provides a hierarchical trajectory tracking control design for the helicopter with model uncertainties, ensuring the stability of the overall system considering the perturbation caused by attitude tracking errors and the nonlinear coupling. The attitude of the helicopter is descried by unit-quaternion, for which anti-unwinding control design is presented. Besides, the criteria for avoidance of singularity in generation of the reference attitude is derived. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the design.
Current-Dependent Resistance in TES Wiring Superimposed Nb Striplines
Authors: Ferrari Barusso Lorenzo , Celasco Edvige , Gallucci Giovanni , Grosso Daniele , Repetto Luca , Rigano Manuela , D’Andrea Matteo , Macculi Claudio , Torrioli Guido , Gatti Flavio 
Published: March 2024

AbstractDuring the characterization of the demonstration model of the Cryogenic AntiCoincidence (CryoAC) Detector (ACS-10), a current-dependent parasitic resistance was found in series with the TES network on board the detector. Analysis was possible because the resistance rises for currents above 11 $$\mu$$
μ
A, and is therefore not observed at low bias excitation. A comparison of measurements of the TES across its Nb wiring at different temperatures suggested that the source of resistance was in the wiring and not in the TES network. After several analysis of the wiring fabrication steps, FIB-FE-SEM studies of film sections and tests of niobium film quality, we understood that the parasitic resistance was due to point contact in the Nb step coverage caused by film cracks. The fracture was due to the wall steepness and thickness of the films, since rapid step coverage is less mechanically stable and the stress on the films is proportional to the fourth power of the thickness. Therefore, all thicknesses in the wiring were reduced to the minimum optimum step coverage values and the first negative lithography parameters were optimized to reduce the wall film angle. The samples after this optimization showed no current-dependent series resistance to TES.
Sex, Gender, and Devotional Desire: Refiguring Bodily Identities in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Discourse
Authors: Holdrege Barbara A. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractMany of the debates among theorists of the body in feminist and gender studies center on the gendered body and its relation to the sexed body, with the validity of the sex/gender distinction itself a topic of contention. On the one hand, feminist advocates of social constructionism tend to distinguish between sex and gender, in which sex (male or female) is identified with the biological body as a “natural” datum and gender (masculine or feminine) is a second-order sociocultural construction that is superimposed as an ideological superstructure on this “natural” base. On the other hand, feminist advocates of sexual difference such as Judith Butler call into question the sex/gender distinction and insist that the sexed body, like gender, is socially constructed. This article brings these contemporary feminist interlocutors into conversation with sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authorities who developed a distinctive discourse of embodiment in which they frame the categories of sex and gender in relation to devotional desire in their ontological theories of bodily identities. The Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment explodes notions of the relationship between embodiment, personhood, materiality, and gender on both the human and divine planes and challenges prevailing body theories by positing bodies beyond matter, personhood beyond matter, and gender beyond sex.
Anatomical attention can help to segment the dilated pancreatic duct in abdominal CT
Authors: Shen Chen , Roth Holger R. , Hayashi Yuichiro , Oda Masahiro , Sato Gen , Miyamoto Tadaaki , Rueckert Daniel , Mori Kensaku 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Purpose
Pancreatic duct dilation is associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer, the most lethal malignancy with the lowest 5-year relative survival rate. Automatic segmentation of the dilated pancreatic duct from contrast-enhanced CT scans would facilitate early diagnosis. However, pancreatic duct segmentation poses challenges due to its small anatomical structure and poor contrast in abdominal CT. In this work, we investigate an anatomical attention strategy to address this issue.

Methods
Our proposed anatomical attention strategy consists of two steps: pancreas localization and pancreatic duct segmentation. The coarse pancreatic mask segmentation is used to guide the fully convolutional networks (FCNs) to concentrate on the pancreas’ anatomy and disregard unnecessary features. We further apply a multi-scale aggregation scheme to leverage the information from different scales. Moreover, we integrate the tubular structure enhancement as an additional input channel of FCN.

Results
We performed extensive experiments on 30 cases of contrast-enhanced abdominal CT volumes. To evaluate the pancreatic duct segmentation performance, we employed four measurements, including the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), sensitivity, normalized surface distance, and 95 percentile Hausdorff distance. The average DSC achieves 55.7%, surpassing other pancreatic duct segmentation methods on single-phase CT scans only.

Conclusions
We proposed an anatomical attention-based strategy for the dilated pancreatic duct segmentation. Our proposed strategy significantly outperforms earlier approaches. The attention mechanism helps to focus on the pancreas region, while the enhancement of the tubular structure enables FCNs to capture the vessel-like structure. The proposed technique might be applied to other tube-like structure segmentation tasks within targeted anatomies.
Lehrpersonen- und Elternurteile über sozial-emotionale Kompetenzen von Kindern mit Verhaltensauffälligkeiten
Authors: Neuenschwander Markus P. , Rösti Ilona , Prieth Vanessa , Zavery Alafia 
Published: March 2024

ZusammenfassungDie Urteile über die sozial-emotionalen Kompetenzen von Kindern mit Verhaltensauffälligkeiten unterscheiden sich zwischen Eltern und Lehrpersonen. Die Ursachen für die Urteilsunterschiede wurden bisher wenig untersucht. Verschiedene Studien zeigen, dass die Urteile mit den Ergebnissen von standardisierten Entwicklungstests schwach korrelieren. Zusätzlich besteht ein Zusammenhang zwischen den sozial-emotionalen Kompetenzen der Kinder und der Lehrperson-Schüler:in-Beziehung bzw. der Empathie der Eltern. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie übereinstimmend Eltern und Lehrpersonen die sozial-emotionalen Kompetenzen beurteilen und wie die Lehrperson-Schüler:in-Beziehung bzw. die Empathie der Eltern diese Urteilsunterschiede erklären. Ausgewertet wurden querschnittliche Fragebogendaten, welche die Einschätzungen von Eltern und Lehrpersonen zu N = 158 Kindern mit Verhaltensauffälligkeiten aus dem Kindergarten sowie der Grundschule enthielten. Alle Urteile der Lehrpersonen korrelierten mit den Ergebnissen des Entwicklungstests, während nur ein Teil der Urteile der Eltern damit zusammenhing. Moderierte Regressionsanalysen zeigen, dass Eltern die sozial-emotionalen Kompetenzen der Kinder mit Verhaltensauffälligkeiten höher einschätzten als Lehrpersonen. Mit einer besseren Lehrperson-Schüler:in-Beziehung näherten sich die Urteile von Eltern und Lehrpersonen an, mit einer höheren Empathie der Eltern wurden die Urteilsunterschiede grösser. Die Ergebnisse widerspiegeln die Wichtigkeit, die Beurteilung von sozial-emotionalen Kompetenzen in der Aus- und Weiterbildung von Lehrpersonen zu thematisieren.
Factors triggering familial mediterranean fever attacks, do they really exist?
Authors: Parlar Kerem , Ates Muhammed Bahaddin , Onal Mehmet Erinc , Bostancı Ece , Azman Feyza Nur , Uğurlu Serdal 
Published: March 2024

AbstractSeveral possible factors are hypothesized to trigger familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) attacks; however, there is no consensus on this matter. We aimed to identify these triggering factors and analyze their relationship with the Mediterranean fever gene mutation status. We prepared a questionnaire that included the most commonly mentioned possible trigger factors of familial Mediterranean fever. We administered a questionnaire to 882 patients. We used a questionnaire assessing the following: psychological stress, consumption of tea and coffee, relationship with menses, menopause and post-menopausal alleviation, seasonal changes, traveling for long durations, relocation, starvation, sleeplessness, cold exposure, fatigue, wind exposure, and humidity. The most frequent triggering factor for familial Mediterranean fever attacks was psychological stress (75.2%). Cold exposure was a statistically significant trigger in patients with exon 10 mutations. Humidity was a statistically significant trigger in patients with exon 2 mutations. Seasonal changes, traveling for long durations, relocation, and cold exposure were statistically significant triggers of familial Mediterranean fever attacks in patients with homozygous M694V mutations. Identifying trigger factors can lead to better preventive measures and personalized therapies to decrease familial Mediterranean fever attacks. Patients can significantly decrease the number of familial Mediterranean fever attacks they experience by managing psychological stress and avoiding physical factors such as cold exposure and fatigue. Determining the relationship between trigger factors and patients' Mediterranean fever gene mutation status can lead to personalized therapy for the prevention of familial Mediterranean fever attacks.
Adaptation to sea level rise in France
Authors: Le Cozannet Gonéri , Cazenave Anny 
Published: March 2024

AbstractSea level rise due to climate change is an ongoing process that will continue for centuries and millennia. In response to this, France is increasingly considering sea level rise in its coastal risks and land use policies. Here, we show that despite real progress in coastal adaptation policies made so far, major challenges remain. We report progress regarding the consideration of ongoing erosion and flooding during storms, in particular owing to an evolving national regulation increasingly supporting the implementation of a nationally defined integrated coastal zones management strategy. Yet, chronic flooding at high-tides in ports and cities expected to emerge in the 2030s, as well as permanent flooding and shoreline retreat projected to take place within centuries without major protection works remain largely unaddressed to date. Major questions remain in terms of adaptation finance and other measures supporting coastal adaptation such as climate services. Finally, the topic of coastal adaptation lacks connections with the broader context of transformations needed to address climate change, biodiversity losses, and meet the sustainable development goals. The case of France exemplifies how an evolving adaptation planning, which takes decades to implement, can ultimately fall short of effectively addressing major transformational challenges and achieving climate resilient development. We argue that a clear and transparent public debate on climate change and the nature of solutions could help bridge the gap between ongoing adaptation and transformative measures in line with the challenges.
Case-Based Review of Breast Lymphomas
Authors: Tran Michelle G. , Cortes Gillean , Choi Hyung Won , Young J. J. , Tsai I. S. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Purpose of Review
This article will review several cases of histologically-proven primary and secondary breast lymphomas to demonstrate the multimodal radiologic features, as well as to discuss the approach to diagnostic work up of lymphomas encountered during imaging of the breast and axilla.

Recent Findings
Imaging findings of breast lymphoma can overlap with those of primary breast cancer. When there is any clinical suspicion for lymphoma in indeterminate or suspicious breast or axillary findings, definitive tissue diagnosis should be pursued with flow cytometry in addition to routine histologic analysis.

Summary
Breast lymphomas can have varied clinical presentations and nonspecific mammographic and sonographic findings. It can be challenging to radiologically differentiate lymphomas seen in the breast and axilla from primary breast cancers or benign lesions. Without pathognomonic imaging features, tissue sampling via imaging guided biopsy is frequently required. Knowledge of the spectrum of imaging findings and clinical presentations are fundamental to ensure appropriate clinical management.
Activity of Bambusa vulgaris extract in reducing silver nanoparticles: evaluation against methylene blue organic pollutant and microbial agents
Authors: Prabula S. S. , Hentry C. , Al-Farraj Saleh , Ram Kumar P. , Sillanpää Mika , Aravind M. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThis article presents an investigation focusing on successfully synthesising silver nanoparticles with zero valences. The synthesis involves utilising an extract from bamboo leaves, specifically those obtained from the Bambusa vulgaris species. X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared, and ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy characterised the synthesised Ag nanomaterials. The X-ray diffraction pattern obtained from the collected samples confirms the presence of a face-centred cubic structure and a significant level of crystallinity. The studied materials had a spherical morphology, as determined by transmission electron microscopy analysis. The particle size was measured to be 22 nm. FT-IR analysis validates the presence of biomolecules in the leaf extract, which is accountable for the reduction of Ag+ ions and subsequent stabilisation of Ag nanoparticles. Without chemical agents, the reduction of Ag ions to Ag was confirmed using UV–Vis spectroscopy. This analytical technique revealed a peak at 450 nm, indicating surface plasmon resonance. Photogenerated electron carriers can be inferred from a distinct and diverse set of photoluminescence spectra. The study also includes an analysis of the photocatalytic effectiveness of the synthesised silver nanoparticles, specifically in the breakdown of methylene blue (MB) dye. The efficacy of the silver nanoparticle (Ag NP) photocatalyst was assessed by examining the degradation process of a methylene blue dye solution in an aqueous medium under direct sunlight exposure. The experiment also evaluated the impact of catalyst dosage and dye concentration on the efficient degradation of MB dye. The investigation findings indicate that the optimal catalyst dosage and dye concentration were determined to be 0.015 mg/mL and 10 µM, respectively. Notably, the photocatalytic degradation process exhibited remarkable efficacy, with a peak efficiency of 94% after 120 min under direct solar irradiation. The experimental results suggest that the synthesised particles demonstrate a disintegration rate of 96% over 120 min when exposed to visible light. The utilisation of bio-processed silver nanoparticles has exhibited the achievement of phase purity during the manufacturing process, as well as an enhancement in catalytic efficacy. It implies that the synthesised technique offers a more advantageous option for producing nanoparticles on a large scale, potentially applicable in wastewater treatment at a broad level.