Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
OF SWIMMING CRAWL-STROKE USING HAND PADDLES , FINS AND SNORKEL IN SWIMMING FLUME : A PILOT STUDY

We evaluated the effect on front-crawl during a 5 minutes effort in a swimming flume, at a speed 95% of 400m wearing swimming paddles, fins or frontal snorkel. It was evaluated measuring changes on stroke frequency, stroke length, ERP, lactate concentration and pulse rate post-effort. An one-way repeated measures ANOVA showed the stroke frequency was significantly affected F(2.3, 27.6) = 20.69 p<0.01, the stroke length F(2.67, 32.23) = 21.56 p<0.01, the RPE F(25.5, 36.0) = 14.87 p<0.01, the lactate on 3’ F(2.3, 27.8) = 11.30 p<0.01, the lactate on 5’ F(2.8, 33.5) = 12.80 p<0.01 and the pulse rate F(3, 30) = 4.73 p<0.01. The use of swimming paddles and fins increases the stroke efficiency and reduce the load of the exercise while the use of snorkel did not differ from normal crawl-stroke.
Illusory line motion and perceptual latency priming : Two alternative measures for attentional facilitation

Attention may decrease the perceptual latency of an attended as compared to a non-attended stimulus. In recent years, this assumption has been studied within two independent experimental paradigms, illusory line motion (ILM) and perceptual latency priming (PLP). In ILM, a line appears to develop from an attended end [1]. PLP is the temporal advantage of a visual stimulus that is preceded by a masked peripheral cue [2]. Although both are ascribed to the same mechanism – the facilitating influence of attention –, ILM and PLP have never been directly compared. I propose an experimental design which allows to study them in identical stimulus displays. The results of the two tasks are very similar. The experiment thus corroborates the usefulness of latency measures such as ILM and PLP in the study of visual perception and attention.
Evaluation of histomorphological findings and malignancies in postmenopausal bleeding

Introduction: In this era, as the life expectancy is increasing, women are experiencing a long postmenopausal phase. Postmenopausal bleeding (PMB) is a sinister complaint and accounts for about 10% of postmenopausal complaints. Being a symptom of varied etiologies and its strong association with malignancy, it should be diligently evaluated. Aims and Objectives: 1. To evaluate the histopathological spectrum of lesions presenting as PMB. 2. To estimate the incidence of premalignant, and malignant lesions presenting as PMB. 3. To confirm the benign nature of the lesions to prevent unnecessary radical treatment. Materials and Methods: This prospective study done from January 2016 to September 2017 and included the endometrial biopsies/curettages and cervical biopsies sent for histopathological examination from clinically diagnosed cases of postmenopausal bleeding. Results: Out of all the samples majority were benign lesions (44%), followed by premalignant (25.7%), malignant lesions (18.3%). Conclusion: A variety of histopathological findings are seen in PMB. Benign pathologies were more common in our study but the collective proportion of premalignant and malignant lesions is considerably higher in this study. Accurate diagnosis makes it much easier to counsel the patient about further course of management, prevent unnecessary radical treatment for benign conditions, prompt treatment, and vigilant follow up for malignant lesions.
Sustainable Tourism: A Hope or a Necessity? The Case of Tofino, British Columbia, Canada

With many communities now dependent on tourism for their economic livelihood, long-term sustainability through a local, multi-stakeholder process is becoming key for destination management. Tofino, which was originally a remote, fishing village, has repositioned itself as an international tourism destination. Home to approximately 1,655 full-time residents, the town now attracts over 750,000 tourists per year. With the contentious Clayoquot Sound Land Use Decision in 1995 that aimed to disrupt the logging industry, this saw the beginning of a major increase in tourism demand in the area. Businesses developed focusing on adventure and ecotourism and restaurants, coffee shops, retail opportunities and accommodations are now plentiful. Although tourism has brought many benefits, challenges such as infrastructure, resource management, cost of living and social issues have now come to the forefront. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to assess different stakeholders in Tofino to understand impacts of tourism development in Tofino as well as to identify possible solutions for long-term sustainable development through a multi-stakeholder assessment. Research was conducted with 38 key stakeholders in the summer of 2009 to help the community understand key issues facing their future.
Race', Ethnicity And Adoption

This important study provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of research into the development of adoption policy and practice regarding black and minority ethnic children in the care of local authorities.I found this book intellectually stimulating and often provocative - it does not make comfortable reading but in the final analysis the case for retaining a commitment to placing children in families which reflect their ethnicity is strongly made? i? i? ' - Felicity Collier, the Director of British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering. What are the needs of adopted minority ethnic children? To what extent can white families meet these needs? Should the emphasis on ethnic matching of children and families in adoption be relaxed? This book reviews the long running and often fierce controversy surrounding the adoption of black and minority ethnic children, either transracially into white families or into matched 'same race' placements. Through analysis of research and the writings of protagonists, the core concepts - namely the nature and salience of racial/ethnic identity, cultural heritage and dealing with racism - are explored and located within broader debates on 'race' and the family. The history of the controversy is set out in terms of the competing paradigms offered by liberalism and black radicalism, and more recent 'post-structuralist' influences. The author argues the need to see adoption (and especially that of black children) as inherently political and contested. While broadly supporting the case for 'same race' adoption, it is suggested that this must rest on acknowledgement of, and engagement with, social and psychological complexities, rather than their suppression beneath doctrinaire formulae. i? 'Race', Ethnicity and Adoption? i? sets the issues in the wider context of a multiracial society and its politics, and will be of particular interest to social workers and child care professionals, but will also appeal more widely to students of sociology, and social and public policy.
IFQ-Net: Integrated Fixed-Point Quantization Networks for Embedded Vision

Deploying deep models on embedded devices has been a challenging problem since the great success of deep learning based networks. Fixed-point networks, which represent their data with low bits fixed-point and thus give remarkable savings on memory usage, are generally preferred. Even though current fixed-point networks employ relative low bits (e.g. 8-bits), the memory saving is far from enough for the embedded devices. On the other hand, quantization deep networks, for example XNOR-Net and HWGQ-Net, quantize the data into 1 or 2 bits resulting in more significant memory savings but still contain lots of floating-point data. In this paper, we propose a fixed-point network for embedded vision tasks through converting the floating-point data in a quantization network into fixed-point. Furthermore, to overcome the data loss caused by the conversion, we propose to compose floating-point data operations across multiple layers (e.g. convolution, batch normalization and quantization layers) and convert them into fixed-point. We name the fixed-point network obtained through such integrated conversion as Integrated Fixed-point Quantization Networks (IFQ-Net). We demonstrate that our IFQ-Net gives 2.16× and 18× more savings on model size and runtime feature map memory respectively with similar accuracy on ImageNet. Furthermore, based on YOLOv2, we design IFQ-Tinier-YOLO face detector which is a fixed-point network with 256× reduction in model size (246k Bytes) than Tiny-YOLO. We illustrate the promising performance of our face detector in terms of detection rate on Face Detection Data Set and Bencmark (FDDB) and qualitative results of detecting small faces of Wider Face dataset.
Ten Ways to Restrict Children's Freedom to Play: The Problem of Surplus Safety

Play and playgrounds provide essential experiences for young children's growth, development and enjoyment of life. However, such play experiences are now limited for many children due to excessive fear of risk, or ‘surplus safety’. In this article, the authors examine the pervasiveness of surplus safety in the lives of young children. They argue that restrictions now imposed on children's play to promote safety may, paradoxically, expose children to more serious short and longer term threats of illness and limit children's life opportunities. By comparing experiences from Australia and Norway, the authors demonstrate that surplus safety is not a necessary outcome of living in a modern Western society.
Maternal punitive reactions to children ’ s negative emotions and young adult anger : The effect of gender and emotional closeness By :

The current study tested whether young adult's recollected reports of their mother's punitive reactions to their negative emotions in childhood predicted anger expression in young adulthood and whether emotional closeness weakens this association. Further, a three-way interaction was tested to examine whether emotional closeness is a stronger protective factor for young women than for young men. Results revealed a significant three-way interaction (gender × emotional closeness × maternal punitive reactions). For young men, maternal punitive reactions to negative emotions were directly associated with increased anger expressions. Maternal punitive reactions to young women's negative emotions in childhood were associated with increased anger in adulthood only when they reported low maternal emotional closeness. Findings suggest that maternal emotional closeness may serve as a buffer against the negative effects of maternal punitive reactions for women's anger expression in young adulthood.
Influenza Associated Comorbidities

Influenza, one of the most common infectious diseases, is a highly contagious airborne disease that occurs in seasonal epidemics and manifests as an acute febrile illness with variable degrees of systemic symptoms, ranging from mild fatigue to respiratory failure and death. The aim of the study was to highlight the associated comorbidities of influenza. This is a retrospective study of patients admitted during the influenza season 2015-2016 at the Infectious diseases hospital at University Hospital Centre “Mother Teresa”, in Tirana, Albania. Overall, among the <65-years and 65-years-and-older age groups, hypertension and diabetes, respectively, were observed with the highest frequency. Heart failure was the second most frequent comorbidity in these two age groups. Prevention of influenza in the elderly is of utmost importance for mitigating its impact on this high-risk population. The main components of prevention are measures that avoid transmission, prophylaxis with antiviral drugs, and vaccination.
Analysis of the technical efficiency of rice farms in Ijesha Land of Osun State, Nigeria

Abstract This study estimated technical efficiencies on rice farms in Osun State, Nigeria, and identified some socioeconomic factors, which influence productive efficiency. These technical efficiencies were estimated using the stochastic frontier production function approach applied to primary data. A translog production function was used to represent the production frontier of the rice farms. The study showed that the levels of technical efficiency ranged from 29.4% to 98.2% with a mean of 86.6%, which suggests that average rice output falls 13.4% short of the maximum possible level. Therefore in the short run there is scope to increase technical efficiencies on rice farms in the study area. The study also showed that these efficiencies are positively and significantly correlated with the application of traditional preparation methods, and with off-farm income.
Exploring Predictors of Relapse and Maintenance Among Smokers

Little is known about the mechanisms behind relapse to different pre-Action stages of the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change (TTM) among ex-smokers. This study provides a preliminary investigation of the possible role static and dynamic variables, including demographic characteristics, smoking behavior and severity, and TTM effort variables, have in two ways: 1) As potential predictors of relapse to Precontemplation/Contemplation stages vs. Preparation; and 2) as potential predictors of relapse to any pre-Action stage vs. maintenance at follow-up. The study sample was derived from an integrated dataset of four TTM population-based smoking cessation interventions conducted in the United States. Unlike forward movement between adjacent stages, participants appeared to be equally likely to relapse to all three preAction stages. Being part of a treatment group was a salient predictor of being a maintainer at follow-up. Scoring higher on certain components of the Situational Temptations and Processes of Change measures differentiated those who relapsed from those who maintained at follow-up. Implications towards improving interventions and research concerning backward stage transitions are discussed.
Detecting Out-Of-Distribution Samples Using Low-Order Deep Features Statistics

The ability to detect when an input sample was not drawn from the training distribution is an important desirable property of deep neural networks. In this paper, we show that a simple ensembling of first and second order deep feature statistics can be exploited to effectively differentiate in-distribution and out-of-distribution samples. Specifically, we observe that the mean and standard deviation within feature maps differs greatly between in-distribution and out-of-distribution samples. Based on this observation, we propose a simple and efficient plug-and-play detection procedure that does not require re-training, pre-processing or changes to the model. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin in all standard benchmarking tasks, while being much simpler to implement and execute. Notably, our method improves the true negative rate from 39.6% to 95.3% when 95% of in-distribution (CIFAR-100) are correctly detected using a DenseNet and the out-of-distribution dataset is TinyImageNet resize. The source code of our method will be made publicly available.
Analyzing The Link between Financial Development and Foreign Direct Investment among D-8 Group of Countries

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether foreign direct investment (FDI) can stimulate financial development or not. Financial markets have not been expanded in many developing countries despite their proven positive effect on economic growth. Although the impact of financial markets and FDI on economic growth has been investigated in three voluminous and parallel lines of studies, no research has examined the combined effect of foreign investment on financial development up to now. This study investigates the causal links between FDI and financial development using annual data for a panel of eight developing countries and vector autoregressive (VAR) model for 8 countries of D-8 group, during the period of 1976-2005.
Plasma oscillations in Hall thrusters

The nature of oscillations in the 1 kHz–60 MHz frequency range that have been observed during operation of Hall thrusters is quantitatively discussed. Contours of various plasma parameters measured inside the accelerating channel of a typical Hall thruster are used to evaluate the various stability criteria and dispersion relations of oscillations that are suspected to occur. A band by band up-to-date overview of the oscillations is carried out with a description of their observed behavior and a discussion of their nature and dependencies through comparison of the calculated contours to reported observations. The discussion encompasses the excitation of low frequency azimuthal drift waves that can form a rotating spoke, axially propagating “transit-time” oscillations, azimuthal drift waves, ionization instability-type waves, and wave emission peculiar to weakly ionized inhomogeneous plasmas in crossed electric and magnetic fields.
On the existence of dead cores for degenerate Lotka—Volterra models

In this work we study the existence and qualitative properties of non-negative solutions of the Lotka—Volterra models with nonlinear diffusion under homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. We consider the three typical interactions: prey—predator, competition and symbiosis. Unlike the linear diffusion models, non-trivial non-negative solutions can exist which are not strictly positive. Sufficient conditions in terms of the coefficients involved in the setting of the models are given, assuring that one species (or both) does not survive on a set of its habitat (called ‘dead core’) of positive measure.
Past and Present Distribution of Walruses in Svalbard

Walruses were once very abundant in the Svalbard archipelago. However three and a half centuries of commercial exploitation had caused the walrus to be on the verge of extinction in this region when it finally was totally protected in 1952. Since the mid-1980s walruses have again been commonly seen in parts of Svalbard. Based on information from literature, interviews and field observations, we attempt to identify in which areas of Svalbard, both historically and presently, walruses most frequently are observed and indicate the presence of all known walrus haul-out sites in the archipelago. Our study shows that walruses most frequently have been encountered during summer in four main areas. The results further indicate that walruses in Svalbard are predominantly males. Females and calves are, when encountered, mostly found in the extreme northeast part of Svalbard, neighboring the Russian archipelago Franz Josef Land. We discuss the possibility of migrations occurring between these two geographical areas and suggest that walruses in these two archipelagos are part of one common stock.
Multimodal Analgesia : Outcomes in Ambulatory Surgical Patients

Pain is one of the main postoperative adverse outcomes. Single analgesics, either opioid or nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), are not able to provide effective pain relief without side effects such as nausea, vomiting, sedation, or bleeding. A majority of double or single-blind studies investigating the use of NSAIDs and opioid analgesics with or without local anesthetic infiltration showed that patients experience lower pain scores, need fewer analgesics, and have a prolonged time to requiring analgesics after surgery. This review focuses on multimodal analgesia, which is currently recommended for effective postoperative pain control. © 2001 by Elsevier Science Inc.
Nonparametric Active Learning , Part 1 : Smooth Regression Functions

Abstract: This article presents a general approach to noise-robust active learning for classification problems, based on performing sequential hypothesis tests, modified with an early cut-off stopping criterion. It also proposes a specific instantiation of this approach suitable for learning under a smooth regression function, and proves that this method is minimax optimal (up to logarithmic factors) in this setting, under Tsybakov’s noise assumption and a regularity assumption on the marginal density function. Furthermore, the achieved rates are strictly faster than the corresponding minimax rates for learning from random samples (passive learning).
Risk preferences as determinants of soil conservation decisions in Ethiopia

Soil degradation is one of the most serious environmental problems in the highlands of Ethiopia. The prevalence of traditional agricultural land use and the absence of appropriate resource management often result in the degradation of natural soil fertility. This has important implications for soil productivity, household food security, and poverty. Given the extreme vulnerability of farmers in this area, we hypothesized that farmers' risk preferences might affect the sustainability of resource use. This study presents experimental results on the willingness of farmers to take risks and relates the subjective risk preferences to actual soil conservation decisions. The study looked at a random sample of 143 households with 597 farming plots. We found that a high degree of risk aversion significantly decreases the probability of adopting soil conservation. This implies that reducing farmers' risk exposure could promote soil conservation practices and thus more sustainable natural resource management. This might be achieved by improving tenure security, promoting access to extension services and education, and developing income-generating off-farm activities.
Spectral Dimension Reduction of Complex Dynamical Networks

Dynamical networks are powerful tools for modeling a broad range of complex systems, including financial markets, brains, and ecosystems. They encode how the basic elements (nodes) of these systems interact altogether (via links) and evolve (nodes' dynamics). Despite substantial progress, little is known about why some subtle changes in the network structure, at the so-called critical points, can provoke drastic shifts in its dynamics. We tackle this challenging problem by introducing a method that reduces any network to a simplified low-dimensional version. It can then be used to describe the collective dynamics of the original system. This dimension reduction method relies on spectral graph theory and, more specifically, on the dominant eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the network adjacency matrix. Contrary to previous approaches, our method is able to predict the multiple activation of modular networks as well as the critical points of random networks with arbitrary degree distributions. Our results are of both fundamental and practical interest, as they offer a novel framework to relate the structure of networks to their dynamics and to study the resilience of complex systems.
Temperature Characterization of Solar Module Voltage Generation

The silicon solar module voltage generation at various periods of the day has been studied. Two mono-crystalline modules with and without cooling system have been designed and built. The experimental investigation performed on both modules under the same ambient conditions shows a significant performance variation both within the various periods of the day and between the cooled and uncooled modules. The voltage generation is found to be affected by changes in module surface temperature which is a function of the ambient temperature. It is thought that low module surface temperature aids the preservation of the orderliness of electron activities hence improved voltage generation.
Manufacturing Firms in Africa: Some Stylized Facts About Wages and Productivity

Why have so few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa been successful in export-oriented manufacturing? This paper uses firm-level data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys to discuss this. The paper shows that although firms in most African countries are relatively unproductive, they are more productive on average than firms in other countries at similar levels of development. Further, even though many Africans earn subsistence wages working for informal firms, formal firms have higher labor costs than firms in other low-income countries. The paper discusses several possible reasons for this including the effect of the poor institutional environment on profits and the effect of limited competition on productivity measurement.