Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An event-based approach for the "intermediate step" in process studies of IT-related organizational change

In order to understand and explain IT-related organizational change, information systems researchers have adopted several practice-oriented theories from sociology, and science and technology studies. These "grand theories" are often complex and operate on a high level of abstraction, thus, making them suitable for collecting rich process data while following multi- faceted empirical phenomena over time. As a consequence, it may be challenging to organize and analyse the abundant process data in order to create a foundation for theory building, while also being loyal to the "grand theory" as well as to the logic of process research. The purpose of this paper is to propose a systematic approach in order to facilitate this "intermedi- ate step" of sensemaking between data collection and theory building. The suggested approach comprises three interrelated and iterative processes for organiz- ing and analysing process data in order to build a foundation for theorizing: process data are chronologically organized and a thick case history is written; the case history is interpreted as a narrative informed by the "grand theory" and coded as events; chains of events are bracketed together and graphically represented in terms of episodes, separated by critical events that challenge the path forward. In this way, comparable units of analysis are created facilitating the analysis of patterns within and among episode, as well as the identification of underlying mechanisms. By making explicit the "intermediate step", the approach bridges the gap between data collection and theory building in a way that is substantiated by empirical data, the "grand theory", and the logic of process research. The paper demonstrates how the approach can be employed by examples from an in-depth longitudinal case study.
Interaction modeling and simulation of a flexible needle insertion into soft tissues

Needle puncture is irreplaceable for some percutaneous therapies, like biopsy, brachytherapy treatment, neurosurgery, etc. But needle insertion force deforms soft tissue, making accurate targeting difficult. It thus emerges as an important issue to model the interaction force raised during needle insertion. In this paper, we establish the force model with data acquired from the simulation of a flexible needle insertion into a liver of human being. First, high-quality tetrahedral meshes of the flexible needle and the liver are generated using an adaptive constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization algorithm. Then, the tetrahedral mesh data is integrated into SOFA, an open-source framework, to dynamically simulate the interactive behaviours of the flexible needle insertion into the liver. Finally, interactive force data acquired from the simulations is identified and modelled in three parts, namely, stiffness, friction, and cutting forces. The models established may be used in robotic needle steering and insertion training with computer simulator.
Randomized Control Trials: Limitations for Explaining and Improving Learning Outcomes

Studies that use Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to assess impact have been framed and sold to governments as the only reliable tool that allows for evidence-based decision-making. This chapter provides a critique of the claim that RCTs provide “gold standard” evidence for policymakers. The central argument is that RCTs frame out too much of what is important about, and for, education system-wide reforms and thus are of limited value for policy-making. Instead, there is a need to turn to political economy approaches that focus on institutions and political structures.
The relation between cough sound characteristics and lung function

Rationale: Amongst Dutch children, 7-10% suffers from asthma. To obtain an objective measurement of asthma, this study explores the feasibility of measuring coughs as an indication of the Forced Expiratory Volume in 1 second (FEV1). Objective: To investigate the relation between cough sound characteristics and the Exercise Challenge Test (ECT) induced changes in the FEV1. Method: Patients who were scheduled for an ECT were recruited to take part in this study. Coughs were measured with an accelerometer and smart phone. Lung function was measured with spirometry. Several parameters were derived, such as the dominant frequency, in all phases of the cough. Results: Sixteen children were included, of who 5 experienced a decrease in FEV1 during the ECT >10%. A broader interquartile range was found of the higher dominant frequency in the second phase of the cough, measured after exercise. This dominant frequency was significantly higher in comparison to the baseline measurement (p <0.05). Discussion: Measuring more patients could reveal trends in asthmatic patients' coughs. Future work should focus on if cough parameters are an indication of a decrease in FEV1. Conclusion: In this study, no relation between cough sound parameters and FEV1 was found.
Effects of probiotic soy milk on lipid panel in type 2 diabetic patients with nephropathy: A double-blind randomized clinical trial

Background: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are among the most common complications of diabetes. Lipid abnormalities in diabetic patients are not only related to higher risk of CVD, but also accelerate the progression of diabetic nephropathy. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study that has assessed the effects of probiotic soy milk on lipid profile in type 2 diabetic patients with nephropathy. Objective: The current study was designed to examine the effects of consumption of soy milk containing lactobacillus plantarum A7 compared with conventional soy milk on lipid panel in type 2 diabetic patients with nephropathy. Methods: A total of 44 type 2 diabetic patients with nephropathy were randomly assigned to receive 200 ml/day of either probiotic soy milk (n=22) or conventional soy milk (n=22) for eight weeks, in this randomized double-blind clinical trial. Fasting blood samples were taken at the beginning and after eight weeks of the intervention for analysis of lipid profile and other relevant variables. P values < 0.05 were considered as statistically significant. Results: Consumption of probiotic soy milk for 8 weeks led to an increase in serum genistein (17.6±15.3 vs. 4.5±2.3, p=0.002) and eGFR (15.9±10.8 vs. 3.2±8.4, p<0.001) compared with conventional soy milk. Additionally probiotic soy milk resulted in decreased LDL-cholesterol (-9.2±10.4 vs. -2.2±5.2, p=0.01), total cholesterol (-12.4±4.8 vs. -4.87±14.7, p=0.04), non-HDL cholesterol (-15.3±4.5 vs. -5.9±14.7, p=0.01) and serum TG (-14.6±12.5 vs. -3.9±9.3, p=0.007) compared with control group. We did not detect any significant effect of probiotic soy milk on serum HDL-cholestrol (1.11±3.38 vs. 0.90±2.7, p=0.8) and serum phosphorus (-0.14±0.10 vs. 0.05±0.5, p=0.1). Conclusion: Administration of soy milk containing lactobacillus plantarum A7 in type 2 diabetic patients with nephropathy had beneficial effects on lipid profile and glomerular function, but did not affect HDL-cholesterol. In addition probiotic soy milk did not result in a significant elevation in the serum phosphorus concentration. This trial was registered at http://www.irct. ir as IRCT201601027479N2.
Comparisons of Physical and Chemical Characteristics of Eggs Obtained using Hens Reared in Deep Litter and Free-Range Systems

This study was designed to compare the physical and chemical qualities of eggs obtained using hens reared in free-range and deep-litter systems. A total of 300 Lohmann Brown hens (150 for each housing system) were used. In the free-range system, 4 m2 grazing area was allocated for each hen. The hens were taken into layer house at 16 weeks of age. Hen egg production reached up to 50%, produced eggs were randomly sampled once every 4 weeks until 52 weeks of age and physical characteristics of eggs from each housing system were measured. Results revealed that there was no significant difference in egg shell color, egg weight, breaking strength, shell thickness, shape index, specific gravity, yolk color, albumen index, haugh unit, meat and blood spots of eggs from two housing systems. However, there was a significant difference in yolk index. It was determined that housing systems effected the chemical content of the egg and the eggs obtained from free-range system were significantly richer in essential amino acids, vitamin D3 and biotin.
Analysis of the functional and radiological outcome of unstable intertrochanteric femur fractures treated with the proximal femoral nail or the dynamic hip screw

The incidence of intertrochanteric fractures is increasing in frequency in proportion to the increasing life expectancy of the general population. Intertrochanteric fractures are more commonly encountered in elderly osteoporotic patients. Both proximal femoral nailing (PFN) and the dynamic hip screw (DHS) are standard procedures which are being used in the management of unstable intertrochanteric fractures till date. In this study, we analyzed the functional and radiological outcome of treatment of unstable inter trochanteric fractures managed with internal fixation using either the proximal femoral nail or the dynamic hip screw. In our study, we included a total of 35 unstable intertrochanteric fractures (AO-A2 and A3) among which 19 patients were operated with the proximal femoral nail and 16 patients with the dynamic hip screw. It was found that the PFN group faired better than the DHS group, by having lesser time duration of surgery, lower intraoperative blood loss, lower duration of hospital stay, and lower incidence of complications as well. The functional outcome determined by the Modified Harris hip score was also found to be better in the PFN group in the initial post-operative period; however, at the end of one year it was found to be similar in both the groups. There was no statistically significant difference in the radiological outcome determined by the RUSH score (Radiological union score of hip) between the two groups at any point of time from the immediate post-operative period till the entire follow up.
Designing and implementing peer formative feedback within online learning environments

With increasing need to achieve appropriate balance between learning support and self-regulation within the context of online learning, formative feedback has been identified as a viable means to achieve meaningful engagement. Specifically, this study sought to establish how peer–peer formative feedback was facilitated in an online course and to what extent this engaged students in meaningful learning experiences. This case study entailed an in-depth investigation into the design and implementation of an online course in a New Zealand university. The studied course was part of a postgraduate programme in continuing (in-service) teacher education. The study adopted a case study methodology with a bias on qualitative techniques. Online observations, analysis of the archived course discourse and interviews were utilised as sources of data. The data from multiple sources were subsequently triangulated to corroborate the evidence. The findings indicate that peer formative feedback promoted active learners’ participation and meaningful engagement. The findings further showed that opportunities for dialogic peer formative feedback promoted learning support and self-regulation.
Unstructured Computations on Emerging Architectures

Unstructured Computations on Emerging Architectures Mohammed A. Al Farhan T his dissertation describes detailed performance engineering and optimization of an unstructured computational aerodynamics software system with irregular memory accesses on various multiand many-core emerging high performance computing scalable architectures, which are expected to be the building blocks of energy-austere exascale systems, and on which algorithmicand architecture-oriented optimizations are essential for achieving worthy performance. We investigate several state-of-the-practice shared-memory optimization techniques applied to key kernels for the important problem class of unstructured meshes. We illustrate for a broad spectrum of emerging microprocessor architectures as representatives of the compute units in contemporary leading supercomputers, identifying and addressing performance challenges without compromising the floating-point numerics of the original code. While the linear algebraic kernels are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth for even modest numbers of hardware cores sharing a common address space, the edge-based loop kernels, which arise in the control volume discretization of the conservation law residuals and in the formation of the preconditioner for the Jacobian by finite-differencing the conservation law residuals, are compute-intensive and effectively exploit contemporary multiand many-core processing hardware. We therefore employ lowand high-level algorithmicand architecture-specific code optimizations and tuning in light of threadand data-level parallelism, with a focus on 5 strong thread scaling at the node-level. Our approaches are based upon novel multilevel hierarchical workload distribution mechanisms of data across different compute units (from the address space down to the registers) within every hardware core. We analyze the demonstrated aerodynamics application on specific computing architectures to develop certain performance metrics and models to bespeak the upper and lower bounds of the performance. We present significant full application speedup relative to the baseline code, on a succession of many-core processor architectures, i.e., Intel Xeon Phi Knights Corner (5.0x) and Knights Landing (2.9x). In addition, the performance of Knights Landing outperforms, at significantly lower power consumption, Intel Xeon Skylake with nearly twofold speedup. These optimizations are expected to be of value for many other unstructured mesh partial differential equation-based scientific applications as multiand manycore architecture evolves. To my family My parents – Aminah and Ahmed My fiancée – Wijdan My siblings – Riyadh, Huda, Adi, Iman, Zahra, and Qassim For their constant love and support For enduring my absence while working on my PhD research For always believing in me even when I do not I LOVE YOU!
The rapid divergence of the Antarctic crinoid species Promachocrinus kerguelensis

Climatic oscillations in Antarctica caused a succession of expansion and reduction of the ice sheets covering the continental shelf of the Southern Ocean. For marine invertebrates, these successions are suspected to have driven allopatric speciation, endemism and the prevalence of cryptic species, leading to the so-called Antarctic ‘biodiversity pump’ hypothesis. Here we took advantage of the recent sampling effort influenced by the International Polar Year (2007-8) to test for the validity of this hypothesis for 1,797 samples of two recognized crinoid species: Promachocrinus kerguelensis and Florometra mawsoni. Species delimitation analysis identified seven phylogroups. As previously suggested, Promachocrinus kerguelensis forms a complex of six cryptic species. Conversely, despite the morphological differences, our results show that Florometra mawsoni is a lineage nested within Promachocrinus kerguelensis. It suggests that Florometra mawsoni and Promachocrinus kerguelensis belong to the same complex of species. Furthermore, this study indicates that over time and space the different sectors of the Southern Ocean show a remarkable rapid turn-over in term of phylogroups composition and also of genetic variants within phylogroups. We argue that strong “apparent” genetic drift causes this rapid genetic turn-over. Finally, we dated the last common ancestor of all phylogroups at less than 1,000 years, raising doubts on the relevance of the Antarctic “biodiversity pump” for this complex of species. This work is a first step towards a better understanding of how life is diversifying in the Southern Ocean.
Category-Level Adversaries for Semantic Domain Adaptation

Recent advances in deep learning, especially deep convolutional neural networks, have led to great performance improvement over semantic segmentation systems. Unfortunately, training deep neural networks (DNNs) requires a humongous amount of labeled data, which is laborious and costly to collect and annotate. Thus, plenty of works have proposed an alternative solution to ease the training set creation by using synthetic data. However, models trained on these kinds of data usually under-perform on real images due to the well-known issue of domain shift. To address it, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based framework called category-level adversarial adaptation networks (CAA-Nets) for domain adaptation in the context of semantic segmentation. Considering semantic predictions that contain spatial and structure information of images, our idea is to make use of this character by imposing discriminators on the semantic predictions. Different from existing works, the proposed framework utilizes a category-level discriminator in the output space to shrink the gap between real and synthetic images. Similar to reinforcement learning, we take final results as a guide to update parameters in the right direction by use of the output-based discriminator. Moreover, to further enhance the performance, we construct an image-based generator and discriminator pair to distill the feature representations obtained by a DNN. Taking advantage of these modules, our model can achieve competitive performance compared with some existing methods. To showcase the generality and scalability of our approach, we evaluate the proposed method on the Cityscapes dataset by adapting from GTAV and SYNTHIA datasets, where the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Measuring and simulating pH buffer capacity of calcareous soils using empirical and mechanistic models

ABSTRACT We studied (i) the pH buffer capacity (pHBC) of calcareous soils varied widely in calcite and texture, (ii) the contribution of soil properties to pHBC and (iii) the significance of using a model based on calcite dissolution to estimate the pHBC of calcareous soils. The pHBC of soils was measured by adding several rates of HCl to soils (100–6500 mM H+ kg–1), in a 0.01 M CaCl2 background and an equilibration time of 24 h. The pHBC (mM H+ kg–1 pH−1) varied from 55 to 3383, with the mean of 1073. The pHBC of the soils was strongly correlated with soil CaCO3 equivalent (calcite) (r = 0.94), sand (r = −0.72), silt (r = 0.60), EC (r = 0.63), pH (r = 0.55), and weakly (r = 0.37) but significantly with clay content. The attained pHBC values indicated that calcite was probably the main buffer system in these soils. The chemical equilibrium model successfully predicted pH titration curves based on calcite dissolution, indicating buffering of acid inputs in the calcareous soils is dominated by calcite dissolution. The model can be used to simulate acidification of calcareous soils and to provide information for making environmental management decisions.
AdScope : intelligent scoping of paid search campaigns using relevance feedback

In this thesis, we propose a semi-supervised online tool called AdScope for search engine marketing. AdScope can be used for filtering out unprofitable user queries from the search campaign while at the same time allowing profitable queries only. AdScope uses relevance feedback for classifying user queries broadly into two categories as relevant or non-relevant. All queries labeled as non-relevant are excluded from the search campaign; no ad is shown to a user posing an excluded query in the future. All queries labeled as relevant are included in the search campaign as regular campaign keywords. In order to label queries, two sources of relevance feedback are used: user feedback comes in the form of clicks and conversions which are available in the search query log provided by ad broker. Advertiser feedback is collected interactively. For this purpose, we designed an active learning step where advertiser is asked to label a selected set of unlabeled queries. The feedback received is incorporated into the classification model in real time using Bayesian update. In performance tests, we observed that AdScope had the highest classification accuracy of 89.25% for queries that contain at least two terms. Furthermore, three domain experts agreed substantially with a Fleiss’ agreement score of 0.79 on the selections made by our actively learning system.
Breakfast Intake and Factors Associated with Adherence to the Mediterranean Diet among Lebanese High School Adolescents

The Mediterranean diet has shown to have positive health impacts on metabolic diseases and cognitive performance. However, Mediterranean countries have witnessed a decreased adherence during the past years and the adoption of a more westernized dietary pattern. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association of Mediterranean diet adherence with sociodemographic, lifestyle, and anthropometric factors among Lebanese high school adolescents. Specifically, we aimed to analyse in this group the association between low adherence and breakfast intake. A cross-sectional survey was carried out on randomly selected students (268 boys and 332 girls), aged between 15 and 18 years old, from private and public schools in Beirut and Mount Lebanon. Data were obtained from self-administered questionnaires and anthropometric measurements. The Mediterranean Diet Quality Index for children and adolescents was used to assess the adherence to the Mediterranean diet. The results showed a high percentage of adolescents having a low adherence (43%), with girls (64.2%) having a significant (p < 0.001) higher adherence than boys (35.8%). Furthermore, the study proved that a lower adherence to the Mediterranean diet was significantly associated with a higher risk of obesity (15.5%), breakfast skipping (69.4%), and an unhealthy breakfast options (17.4%). Younger adolescents (47.4%), students from public schools (92.6%), and students with the highest grades (25.3%) had a significantly higher adherence to the Mediterranean diet than those from private schools (7.4%) and older adolescents (18.9%). In conclusion, results should plead for an increased awareness in Lebanese schools, supporting students to be more adherent to the Mediterranean diet, in order to prevent a further increase in metabolic diseases later in adulthood.
Keanekaragaman semut dan pola keberadaannya pada daerah urban di Palu, Sulawesi Tengah

Konversi habitat dari hutan menjadi area pertanian atau kawasan permukiman, disamping menyebabkan penurunan keanekaragaman hayati juga menimbulkan permasalahan baru, seperti kehadiran hama. Di kawasan permukiman, salah satu hama urban yang cukup mengganggu adalah semut. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mempelajari pola keberadaan semut urban pada permukiman di Palu, Sulawesi Tengah. Penelitian dilaksanakan pada berbagai tipe habitat meliputi perumahan, kebun, taman, semak, pertanian hingga pinggiran hutan. Semut dikoleksi dengan menggunakan perangkap umpan berupa ikan tuna dan gula. Sebanyak 38 spesies semut ditemukan pada keseluruhan gradien habitat di daerah urban di Palu. Keanekaragaman semut memiliki hubungan erat dengan kondisi habitat. Kekayaan dan komposisi spesies semut cenderung meningkat dengan penurunan tingkat gangguan manusia (dari habitat perumahan ke hutan). Semut yang paling dominan dan ditemukan pada keseluruhan habitat adalah Anoplolepis gracilipes , Solenopsis geminata dan Paratrechina longicornis. Ketiga spesies semut ini merupakan spesies semut tramp yang biasa berasosiasi dengan manusia dan bersifat invasif yang berpengaruh negatif tidak hanya bagi keanekaragaman hayati tapi juga bagi manusia. Urbanisasi dan keberadaan manusia memfasilitasi keberadaan semut invasif di daerah urban di Palu.