nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
A century of pollen foraging by the endangered rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis): inferences from molecular sequencing of museum specimens

In 2017 the rusty patched bumble bee ( Bombus affinis ) became the first bee listed under the Endangered Species Act in the continental United States due to population declines and an 87% reduction in the species’ distribution. Bombus affinis decline began in the 1990s, predating modern bee surveying initiatives, and obfuscating drivers of decline. While understood to be a highly generalist forager, little is known about the role that resource limitation or shifting floral community composition could have played in B. affinis decline. Determining which floral species support B. affinis could assist conservation efforts where B. affinis persists and identify floral species for restoration efforts. We constructed a historical foraging profile of B. affinis via DNA sequencing of pollen from museum specimens spanning seven states collected from 1913 to 2013. Molecular analysis revealed no temporal changes in the floral richness or composition of B. affinis pollen samples across our sampling period. Likewise, we found no temporal changes in the presence or proportion of native vs. introduced species in pollen samples, though we observed much greater use of introduced floral species than previously determined for B. affinis . Floral community composition was regionally dissimilar, inconsistent with patterns of B. affinis decline by state. Our results suggest B. affinis decline was unlikely to have been driven by spatial or temporal limitations of specific floral species. This work greatly expands the known forage of B. affinis and will provide managers with insight to aid the conservation of B. affinis .

Field of study: Environmental science
The study of hydrogen peroxide oxidize chitosan under the neutral condition

In order to investigate the producing method for chitosan with different molecular weight.  The hydrogen peroxide was added into the chitosan water solution, heated and stirred for some time.  The molecular weight of the chitosan decreased from 1.03 to 0.05-0.94 million, and the factors such as reaction time, the quality percentage of hydrogen peroxide , reaction temperature and so on affected it.  This method has low cost, mild reaction condition, easy treatment and high output, and it can get the expected chitosan. The factors which may affect the results during degradation are as follows: quality percentage of hydrogen peroxide reaction temperature reaction time.

Field of study: Medicine
Sitruspulp verminder antibiotikagebruik : tegnologie

Nuwe Amerikaanse navorsing het getoon dat die inname van sitrusskille skadelike bakteriee in die rumen van beeste verminder. Die oogmerk met die navorsing is om alternatiewe maniere te vind om diere teen siektes te beskerm eerder as om antibiotika te gebruik.

Field of study: Agricultural and Food sciences
Consider the Source

The long history of persuasion research shows how to change explicit, self-reported evaluations through direct appeals. At the same time, research on how to change implicit evaluations has focused almost entirely on techniques of retraining existing evaluations or manipulating contexts. In five studies, we examined whether direct appeals can change implicit evaluations in the same way as they do explicit evaluations. In five studies, both explicit and implicit evaluations showed greater evidence of persuasion following information presented by a highly credible source than a source low in credibility. Whereas cognitive load did not alter the effect of source credibility on explicit evaluations, source credibility had an effect on the persuasion of implicit evaluations only when participants were encouraged and able to consider information about the source. Our findings reveal the relevance of persuasion research for changing implicit evaluations and provide new ideas about the processes underlying both types of evaluation.

Field of study: Psychology
High-resolution magnetic susceptibility and geochemistry for the Cenomanian/Turonian boundary GSSP with correlation to time equivalent core

boundary represents the most significant thermal climatic event in the Mesozoic, and it has been well-studied. Here we present a relatively new approach for providing both independent, climate-based cyclostratigraphic analysis and correlation among C/T sections. We have collected samples for bulk (initial) low-field magnetic susceptibility (MS) measurement and high-resolution inorganic geochemical analyses from two C/T sequences: (1) the well-defined, C/T Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) located at Lake Pueblo, Colorado, and deposited in the Upper Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway of North America, and (2) the well-studied marlstone and limestone USGS#1 Portland Core, drilled at Portland, Colorado, ∼ 40 km to the west of the C/T GSSP. Comparing the lithostratigraphy, chemostratigraphy, and magnetostratigraphic susceptibility (developed from magnetic susceptibility (MS) data) indicates that the USGS#1 Portland Core closely compares with the C/T GSSP sequence using any of the three measures, demonstrating that intervals collected and sampled from these two sequences are highly correlated. A preliminary magnetostratigraphic susceptibility zonation for the C/T boundary is presented to which other MS work can be compared. Fourier Transform (FT) analysis of the MS data from the GSSP, when compared with previous FT work using geochemical analysis of Portland core samples shows close similarities to the GSSP, with Milankovitch eccentricity, obliquity and precession bands well-defined in both data sets. Using this result, we assign relative ages to the intervals sampled and evaluate changes in absolute sediment accumulation rates through the C/T boundary interval. We show that while sediment accumulation rate is relatively high in the upper Cenomanian, a change toward lower accumulation rates in the GSSP section at the C/T boundary is due to reduced productivity following the C/T extinction events that resulted from global warming associated with Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE2) that began in the uppermost Cenomanian.

Field of study: Environmental science, Geography
[Posture disorders in patients with multiple sclerosis].

Impairment of stability in the vertical posture is one of the most common or, sometimes, a key symptom in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Reduction of postural control is often correlated with the severity of neurological deficit and is thought to be a leading factor that impacts on social and working activities of the patient with MS. We studied disturbances of postural control depending on the lesion of a functional system and evaluated the involvement of a corresponding system in the functions of postural control in 61 patients with confirmed MS. Patients were stratified into five groups according to lesion location: visual, motor, sensory, cerebellar or spine stem systems. The maximal impairment of static postural control corresponded to the maximal lesion of the sensory system. Compensatory mechanisms of the activation of central and neuromuscular.

Field of study: Medicine, Psychology
Additively Manufactured NiTi and NiTiHf Alloys: Estimating Service Life in High-Temperature Oxidation

In this study, the effect of the addition of Hf on the oxidation behavior of NiTi alloy, which was processed using additive manufacturing and casting, is studied. Thermogravimetric analyses (TGA) were performed at the temperature of 500, 800, and 900 °C to assess the isothermal and dynamic oxidation behavior of the Ni50.4Ti29.6Hf20 at.% alloys for 75 h in dry air. After oxidation, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy were used to analyze the oxide scale formed on the surface of the samples during the high-temperature oxidation. Two stages of oxidation were observed for the NiTiHf samples, an increasing oxidation rate during the early stage of oxidation followed by a lower oxidation rate after approximately 10 h. The isothermal oxidation curves were well matched with a logarithmic rate law in the initial stage and then by parabolic rate law for the next stage. The formation of multi-layered oxide was observed for NiTiHf, which consists of Ti oxide, Hf oxide, and NiTiO3. For the binary alloys, results show that by increasing the temperature, the oxidation rate increased significantly and fitted with parabolic rate law. Activation energy of 175.25 kJ/mol for additively manufactured (AM) NiTi and 60.634 kJ/mol for AM NiTiHf was obtained.

Field of study: Materials science
Non-locally sensing the spin states of individual atomic-scale nanomagnets

Quantum spin systems can provide unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity compared to classically-based sensors. Here we used a quantum spin sensor consisting of three Fe atoms on a monolayer copper nitride surface to probe the magnetic states of nearby nanomagnets. We detect minute magnetic interactions by measuring variations in the spin relaxation time of the spin sensor. The distance between the nanomagnets and the sensor can be changed discretely by atom manipulation using a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope. We can sense nanomagnets as far away as 3 nanometers, that couple to the sensor with interaction strengths as low as 6 micro-electron volts. By making use of weak inter-atomic exchange interaction the Fe-atom-based sensor can detect nanomagnets possessing no net spin. This scheme permits simultaneously sensing the magnetic states of multiple nanomagnets with a single quantum spin sensor.

Field of study: Physics
On generalized local Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting iterative method for block two-by-two linear systems

For large sparse saddle point problems whose (1, 2) and (2, 1)-blocks are the transpose of each other, Zhu studied a generalized local Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting (GLHSS) iterative method (see Zhu (2012)). In this paper, the GLHSS method is extended to the block 2 × 2 linear system, which allows that the (1, 2)-block is not equal to the transpose of the (2, 1)-block or the (2, 2)-block is non-zero. With different choices of the parameter matrices, the existing methods are included and the new algorithms for solving the block 2 × 2 linear system are obtained. The conditions for guaranteeing the convergence of the new iterative method are studied and the correctness of the existing corollaries are questioned. Numerical experiments are provided to show that the proposed method is feasible and effective, and it is not necessary to introduce some parameter matrices in some cases.

Field of study: Mathematics
The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing . By Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 392. $94.95 cloth; $25.95 paper.

The Lettered Mountain explores the “way with writing” of the people of Tupicocha, a village located about 100 km (a full day’s bus ride) east of Lima, in the storied highland province of Huarochirı́. Its title is a homage to Ángel Rama’s hugely influential The Lettered City, which argued that hierarchical practices of alphabetic writing shaped the colonial origins of Latin American societies. A number of recent books have built on Rama’s emphasis on writing as a constitutive social practice while challenging his assumptions that it was restricted to Hispanic bastions (the lettered cities) and that it operated in a vacuum. This The Lettered Mountain also does, but it is unique in a number of respects.

Field of study: History
Verification and validation of declarative model-to-model transformations through invariants

In this paper we propose a method to derive OCL invariants from declarative model-to-model transformations in order to enable their verification and analysis. For this purpose we have defined a number of invariant-based verification properties which provide increasing degrees of confidence about transformation correctness, such as whether a rule (or the whole transformation) is satisfiable by some model, executable or total. We also provide some heuristics for generating meaningful scenarios that can be used to semi-automatically validate the transformations. As a proof of concept, the method is instantiated for two prominent model-to-model transformation languages: Triple Graph Grammars and QVT.

Field of study: Computer science, Engineering
Study on biogeographical divisions of China

On the basis of comprehensive natural factors (including altitude, landform, climate, vegetation, water system, farm belt, and so on), we first divide China's territory into 124 basic units by applying GIS techniques. Then 171 species of mammals and 509 of plants are selected for analysis on the basis of taxa with many representative species, wide distributions across China or thought to reveal biogeographic divisions in less well known parts of the country. We collected distribution data of these species through the China Species Information System, and utilized the GIS technique to identify in which of the 124 units each species has been recorded. The resulting data matrix was then arranged into dendrograms, aggregating the units at various levels on the basis of the mammal and plant distributions by application of similarity cluster analysis using both the Sørensen comparability index formula, and the Ward method to calculate correlation matrices. Finally, we summarize the different distribution characteristics of the aggregated units and their reasons of the two categories from these cluster dendrograms, and reach some important conclusions on the biogeographical regionalization of China. This research adopts a study method of starting from minimal basic units and then aggregating up to higher-level divisions, which is a new methodological attempt in the biogeographic division research field within China. By this method, the division boundaries can be determined by the cluster results of species distribution comparability rather than the limited species and ecology knowledge of an individual researcher as has been done in the past. This makes the resulting classification more objective and broader based. This method is also applicable to other biological taxa.

Field of study: Environmental science
Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America. Edgar Peters Bowron, ed. The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. xvi + 186 pp. $69.95.

place and patronage. While each chapter merits study, general and specialized readers alike might gain from an exploration of the open-access website that houses the database connected to the volume: http://continentallegories.univie.ac.at. The database, a necessary supplement to the overall topics and a few individual chapters, is well organized and contains excellent, high-resolution color photographs that supplement the research in the volume. This provides the added benefit of expanding beyond the confines of a work published in a traditional manner with a necessarily limited number of reproductions; it does not include all material represented in the volume (e.g., East-Central European examples). Searchable via place, a timeline, and index (using Iconclass codes for standardization), the database allows the reader to compare multiple images at the same site, or more than one artist active at a given site. It is a useful vehicle for connecting spatialtemporal material to narrative, with the caveat that the data presentation in the volume sometimes weighs the discussion down and subsumes the main ideas; at other times it provides insight into time-space phemonena. One of the main contributions of this well-researched volume is the editors’ participation in the further refinement of these useful and often groundbreaking methodologies.

Field of study: History
A Machine Learning Method for Drug Combination Prediction

Drug combination is now a hot research topic in the pharmaceutical industry, but experiment-based methodologies are extremely costly in time and money. Many computational methods have been proposed to address these problems by starting from existing drug combinations. However, in most cases, only molecular structure information is included, which covers too limited a set of drug characteristics to efficiently screen drug combinations. Here, we integrated similarity-based multifeature drug data to improve the prediction accuracy by using the neighbor recommender method combined with ensemble learning algorithms. By conducting feature assessment analysis, we selected the most useful drug features and achieved 0.964 AUC in the ensemble models. The comparison results showed that the ensemble models outperform traditional machine learning algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM), naïve Bayes (NB), and logistic regression (GLM). Furthermore, we predicted 7 candidate drug combinations for a specific drug, paclitaxel, and successfully verified that the two of the predicted combinations have promising effects.

Field of study: Biology
Strategic Approach for Developing World-Class Universities in Egypt

In the past decade, the term “world-class university” “WCU” - also called “globally competitive universities”, “world-class”, “elite”, or “flagship” universities- has become a catch phrase, not simply for improving the quality of learning and research in higher education but also, more important, for developing the capacity to compete in the global higher education marketplace through the acquisition and creation of advanced knowledge. The main objectives of paper is to propose a strategic approach for developing world-class universities in Egypt, to achieve this objective the paper starts by attempting to construct an operational definition of a world class university. It then outlines the features of world class University, the requirements of the transformation into a world-class universities, the challenges involved in achieving world class universities, and the key problems and challenges of the Egyptian higher education system. Finally. The selected statistical population of the research are Higher Education experts [N=57], and a mix methods of conducting a questionnaire and interviews are used. The research questions are: 1- What does it mean to be a world-class university? 2-What are the essential features and characteristics of world-class university?3-How does the ecosystem influence the performance of universities?4-What are the present performance, problems and challenges of the Egyptian higher education system ? 5-What are the higher education reform initiatives in Egypt? 6-What are the requirements that could upgrade public Egyptian universities to world class universities? 7- What are the existing challenges of developing world-class universities?8-What Strategic approach is developed for Egypt to develop its world-class universities ? One-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test is used to analyze the data.  The result obtained in the study is to use the collaborative approach rather than to upgrade the present universities or create or merge.

Field of study: Education
A test for crossing receiver operating characteristic (roc) curves

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve gives a graphical representation of sensitivity and specificity of a prediction model when varying the decision treshold on a diagnostic criterion. A classical test for comparing the overall accuracies for two models -1 and 2- is based on the difference between ROC curves areas - related to its standard error. This test is designed for the situation where ROC curve 1 caps ROC curve 2. Often both curves cross :in this paper, a new test, based on the integrated difference between the curves, is proposed to deal with this situation. In a simulation experiment, the new test was less powerful than the old test for detecting an overall superiority, but much more powerfull against the crossing alternative.

Field of study: Mathematics
Removal of chlorpyrifos residue in Lentinus edodes by different washing ways

Samples of Lentinus edodes,a kind of mushroom,were exposed to insecticide chlorpyrifos to study the effects of washing methods on the removal of the residues.The results indicated that different washing ways led to 0.32%～100.00% removal of pesticide residues.In most cases,washing operations led to a gradual decrease in residue levels,particularly washing with detergents or running tap water.The results indicated that washing with detergents could remove 54.72%～56.69% of pesticide residues at level of 64.49 mg/kg.The chlorpyrifos at level of 0.39 mg?kg-1 was completely removed after washing with running tap water,detergents or mild water(below LOD of 0.0016 mg?kg-1).The effect of washing with running tap water was not good when initial residue of chlorpyrifos was more than 3.91 mg?kg-1,but it was better with salt solution.

Field of study: Agricultural and Food sciences
Control theory predictions of reproductive allocation in female dusky salamanders

A model of the reproductive ecology of female dusky salamanders was used to investigate the allocation scheme that a female might use to maximize her reproductive success. Analysis of the model with techniques of optimal control theory suggests that fecundity is maximized either by allocating food resources to reproduction for the entire time period prior to egg laying, or by growing first, then switching to reproduction later in the year. The analysis also indicates that egg mortality will be minimized if the female provides maternal care at the maximum level throughout egg brooding. These results are not specific to dusky salamanders, but can be extended to other organisms with similar reproductive characteristics.

Field of study: Biology, Mathematics
Neurolinguistics and second language teaching: A view from the crossroads

The topic of this article is the link between research on the neurocognition of the teaching–acquisition interface and research on second language teaching. This recent scientific enterprise investigates whether and how different aspects of second language instruction may change both the anatomy and the functioning of an adult learner’s brain even in a short period of time. In this article, I analyse how neurolinguists have operationalized three aspects specifically related to second language teaching: (1) learners’ proficiency; (2) the between-groups experimental design; (3) the implicit vs. explicit teaching dichotomy. I suggest that the degree of replicability of such neurolinguistics studies can be increased by adopting non-circular operational definitions. Such definitions should not be based on psycholinguistic or neurolinguistic metrics, but on standards that are commonly discussed in the literature on instructed second language acquisition, second language teaching, and assessment. Finally, I suggest that for future research neurolinguists should consider the advantages of welcoming on board more developmental linguists and teachers.

Field of study: Linguistics
Trigonal ice crystals in Earth’s atmosphere

AbstractWe are all familiar with the hexagonal shape of snow and ice crystals, and it is well established that their sixfold symmetry is derived from the arrangement of water molecules in a hexagonal crystal structure. However, atmospheric ice crystals with only threefold rotational symmetry are often observed, which is inconsistent with the hexagonal crystal structure of ordinary ice. These crystals are found in a wide range of different cloud types ranging from upper-tropospheric cirrus to contrails and diamond dust and they form at temperatures ranging from about −84° to −5°C. Recent experimental studies of ice crystal structures have shown that ice under a wide range of atmospheric conditions does not always conform to the standard hexagonal crystal structure. Instead, sequences of the hexagonal structure can be interlaced with cubic sequences to create stacking-disordered ice. This degrades the symmetry of the crystal structure so that, instead of having a hexagonal structure, they have a trigonal st...

Field of study: Environmental science