Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-Perceived Stress During the Quarantine of COVID-19 Pandemic in Paraguay: An Exploratory Survey

Introduction: Any viral pandemic is a global health and mental health issue. The World Health Organization and mental health associations have warned that the current COVID-19 pandemic will lead to a drastic increase of stress-related conditions and mental health issues globally. Materials and Methods: An online web-based survey has been launched from 10 to 15 April 2020 in Paraguay in order to collect information regarding the stress related to the quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been spread through social media (“WhatsApp,” “Twitter,” and “Facebook”). Two thousand two hundred and six Paraguayan citizens, over 18 years of age, completed the survey voluntarily. Socio-demographics as well as ratings at Self-perceived Stress Scale have been collected and analyzed. Results: Two thousand two hundred and six subjects (74.12% men) aged between 18 and 75 with an average of 34 ± 11 years old completed the survey. 12.42% (276 subjects) of sample reported a preexisting diagnosis of mental disorder, and 175 participants (7.93%) reported an increase of preexisting symptoms with the onset of COVID-19 quarantine. 41.97% of them had anxiety and 54.38% did not receive any specific treatment. The general population rated 18.10 ± 5.99 at Self-perceived Stress Scale, which indicates a moderate level of self-perceived stress. Significant association was found between higher levels of stress and female sex, being single, or reporting preexisting mental disorder, above all anxiety and depression (p < 0.01). In fact, in 63.87% of mentally ill subjects (n = 175), the quarantine has worsened symptoms of preexisting mental disorders. Conclusion: This study suggests a stressful impact of COVID-19 pandemic, with the majority of participants reporting a moderate level of self-perceived stress. We suggest mental health services to provide a phone-based or web-based support to the general population in order to contrast the psychological impact of the pandemic. This approach may improve the accessibility to mental healthcare services in Paraguay, especially in times of social distancing.
New Insights Into the Skin Microbial Communities and Skin Aging

Although it is well-known that human skin aging is accompanied by an alteration in the skin microbiota, we know little about how the composition of these changes during the course of aging and the effects of age-related skin microbes on aging. Using 16S ribosomal DNA and internal transcribed spacer ribosomal DNA sequencing to profile the microbiomes of 160 skin samples from two anatomical sites, the cheek and the abdomen, on 80 individuals of varying ages, we developed age-related microbiota profiles for both intrinsic skin aging and photoaging to provide an improved understanding of the age-dependent variation in skin microbial composition. According to the landscape, the microbial composition in the Children group was significantly different from that in the other age groups. Further correlation analysis with clinical parameters and functional prediction in each group revealed that high enrichment of nine microbial communities (i.e., Cyanobacteria, Staphylococcus, Cutibacterium, Lactobacillus, Corynebacterium, Streptococcus, Neisseria, Candida, and Malassezia) and 18 pathways (such as biosynthesis of antibiotics) potentially affected skin aging, implying that skin microbiomes may perform key functions in skin aging by regulating the immune response, resistance to ultraviolet light, and biosynthesis and metabolism of age-related substances. Our work re-establishes that skin microbiomes play an important regulatory role in the aging process and opens a new approach for targeted microbial therapy for skin aging.
Bacterial Spore mRNA – What’s Up With That?

Bacteria belonging to the orders Bacillales and Clostridiales form spores in response to nutrient starvation. From a simplified morphological perspective, the spore can be considered as comprising a central protoplast or core, that is, enveloped sequentially by an inner membrane (IM), a peptidoglycan cortex, an outer membrane, and a proteinaceous coat. All of these structures are characterized by unique morphological and/or structural features, which collectively confer metabolic dormancy and properties of environmental resistance to the quiescent spore. These properties are maintained until the spore is stimulated to germinate, outgrow and form a new vegetative cell. Spore germination comprises a series of partially overlapping biochemical and biophysical events – efflux of ions from the core, rehydration and IM reorganization, disassembly of cortex and coat – all of which appear to take place in the absence of de novo ATP and protein synthesis. If the latter points are correct, why then do spores of all species examined to date contain a diverse range of mRNA molecules deposited within the spore core? Are some of these molecules “functional,” serving as translationally active units that are required for efficient spore germination and outgrowth, or are they just remnants from sporulation whose sole purpose is to provide a reservoir of ribonucleotides for the newly outgrowing cell? What is the fate of these molecules during spore senescence, and indeed, are conditions within the spore core likely to provide any opportunity for changes in the transcriptional profile of the spore during dormancy? This review encompasses a historical perspective of spore ribonucleotide biology, from the earliest biochemical led analyses – some of which in hindsight have proved to be remarkably prescient – through the transcriptomic era at the turn of this century, to the latest next generation sequencing derived insights. We provide an overview of the key literature to facilitate reasoned responses to the aforementioned questions, and many others, prior to concluding by identifying the major outstanding issues in this crucial area of spore biology.
Color Naming and Communication of Color Appearance: Is it Different for Native Georgian Speakers?

Color is one of the most prominent appearance attributes. The terms used by humans to communicate color appearance and to set categorical boundaries in the color space have long been a point of scholarly interest. Two conflicting theories of universal and culture-relative color naming have been addressed by numerous studies. While the characteristics of color naming have been studied in considerable number of languages, the quantity of basic color terms and the variation of color categories across the languages is still a matter of an ongoing debate. Color naming in English is widely explored and compared with numerous languages, including the languages of non-industrialized societies. Being the unrelated languages, we hypothesize that the basic color terms and the categorical boundaries vary between the English and Georgian languages. To test this hypothesis, we conducted experiments with native Georgian speakers and compared the results with the state-of-the-art in context of English. The results have revealed interesting differences as well as similarities that are worth exploring further.
Accident Localization at the District Heating Network of Kaunas Region using Machine Learning

Machine learning is constantly gaining popularity in real life applications. And one of them is prediction of various real-life events that depend on a huge number of factors that are hard to evaluate. In this article we describe the process of applying XGBoost — one of supervised machine learning methods — to help in prediction and localization of accidents in the district heating network of Kaunas region. We also investigate the importance of the different factors for these events.
Detecting Aggressiveness in Mexican Spanish Social Media Content by Fine-Tuning Transformer-Based Models

Aggressiveness and several other related problems, such as hate speech, offensive language, or harassment, are experiencing a growing online presence in the context of contemporary social media platforms. The research efforts towards detecting, isolating, and stopping these disturbing behaviors have intensified, in tight relation with the increasing performance of deep learning techniques applied in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This study presents our NLP architectures for tackling the problem of aggressiveness detection in the context of the MEX-A3T@IberLEF2020 shared task. We experimented with several pre-trained Transformer-based models, fine-tuned on various combinations of task-specific datasets. Our best model on the MEX-A3T dataset achieves an offensive F1-score of 79.69% on the test dataset, the third in the competition; nevertheless, the difference between the winning solu-tion versus our model is marginal, of only 0.29%. This result argues that Transformer-based models can be successfully used to detect aggressiveness in Mexican Spanish tweets.
The Invisible Leash: The Impact of Organizational Expectations for Email Monitoring After-Hours on Employee Resources, Well-Being, and Turnover Intentions

Emerging research demonstrates detrimental effects of work-related email use after-hours on employee emotions and well-being. This article extends existing literature by examining organizational expectations for email monitoring (OEEM) during nonwork hours as an antecedent of employee low work detachment, emotional exhaustion, diminished work–life balance, and increased turnover intentions. Adapting the conservation of resources perspective, we theorize that OEEM leads to negative individual and organizational outcomes via two different paths: lack of work detachment, and emotional depletion. The findings of a study with time-separated data collected from a large sample of 570 working adults support our predictions that OEEM decreases employee work–life balance through both low work detachment and emotional exhaustion, while the indirect effect of OEEM on employee turnover intentions is mediated by employee emotional exhaustion, and by work detachment through emotional exhaustion. We also find that decrease in work–life balance is negatively correlated with employee intentions to leave the company, but that this direct effect is not significant in the full model. Finally, we demonstrate that the time employees spend on work-related emails after-hours is not the main driver of negative outcomes. Taken together, our findings highlight deleterious implications of OEEM on employee resources and subsequent organization-related outcomes.
Probing plasmonic excitation mechanisms and far-field radiation of single-crystalline gold tapers with electrons

Conical metallic tapers represent an intriguing subclass of metallic nanostructures, as their plasmonic properties show interesting characteristics in strong correlation to their geometrical properties. This is important for possible applications such as in the field of scanning optical microscopy, as favourable plasmonic resonance behaviour can be tailored by optimizing structural parameters like surface roughness or opening angle. Here, we review our recent studies, where single-crystalline gold tapers were investigated experimentally by means of electron energy-loss and cathodoluminescence spectroscopy techniques inside electron microscopes, supported by theoretical finite-difference time-domain calculations. Through the study of tapers with various opening angles, the underlying resonance mechanisms are discussed. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Dynamic in situ microscopy relating structure and function’.
On Measures of Visual Contrast and Their Use in Image Processing (invited paper)

Visual contrast is one of the most studied notions in the ﬁeld of Visual Neuroscience and Psychophysics. It is a measure associated with a psycho-physical sensation that is not easy to deﬁne in an objective and unique way. Indeed, the contrast as deﬁned through Weber’s famous experiment is associated with the subjective notion of just noticeable diﬀerence between a stimulus observed against an uniform background. In this paper a critical review of diﬀerent representative measures of visual contrast and their uses in various applications is presented. This study provides also some insights on how to deﬁne the contrast and how to chose the most appropriate measure for developing contrast based methods for visual information processing and analysis. Perspectives and challenges that remain to be addressed are also discussed in light of new trends in visual information processing. Through this study, it becomes clear that the concept of contrast and its use are highly application-dependent and that there is no universal contrast measure. It is also shown that, given the large number of psycho-physical parameters involved, it is not easy to deﬁne a contrast measure that is easy to use in the various methods of image processing and analysis. Simplifying contrast models without neglecting the most fundamental aspects seems to be the most pragmatic and practicable solution.
Extracting Neoplasms Morphology Mentions in Spanish Clinical Cases through Word Embeddings

Biomedicine is an ideal environment for the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), due to the huge amount of information processed and stored in electronic format. This information can be managed in different ways by NLP tasks such as the Named Entity Recognition (NER). To address this task, CAN-TEMIST is the first challenge specifically focusing on NER and named entity normalization of a critical type of concept related to cancer. For the entity standardization, the challenge proposes to use the ICD-O codes (International Classification of Diseases for Oncology, 3rd Edition – ICD-O-3). In this paper, we present an automated system based on neural networks for the extraction of tumor morphology mentions in Spanish clinical cases. In particular, we use a Bidirectional variant of Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network with a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) layer. The input tothisnetworkisacombination ofdifferentwordembeddings. IntheNERtaskweachievedencouraging results obtaining 85.5% of F1-score. Moreover, a dictionary-based system is used to subsequently assign an ICD-O code to each annotated entity. For this subtask our group achieved 75.9% of F1-score.
Determining Action Reversibility in STRIPS Using Epistemic Logic Programs

In planning and reasoning about action and change, reversibility of actions is the problem of deciding whether the eﬀects of an action can be reverted by applying other actions in order to return to the original state. While this problem has been studied for some time, recently there as been renewed interest in the context of the language PDDL. After reviewing the concepts, in this paper we propose a solution by leveraging an existing translation from PDDL to Answer Set Programming (ASP), which we then use to solve the problem via epistemic logic programs (ELPs). This work provides a sound and complete system for determining reversibility of PDDL actions (restricted to the STRIPS fragment), while also providing insight into the performance of state-of-the-art ELP solvers.
In the Blood: The Consequences of Naturalising Microsegregation in Workplace Social Networks

This study explored workplace social networks in order to understand practices of inclusion and exclusion in the context of an increasingly diverse workplace in post-apartheid South Africa. We found that the ways in which space is occupied shows marked continuities with the era of formalised segregation during the preceding periods of colonialism and apartheid. We contend that intergroup relations theory and homophily assist in providing a partial understanding of the pervasive microsegregation observed within a South African organisation. We offer that a historied account of the continuing race-based accounts of microsegregation is more productive for understanding this phenomenon in a country with a past that formalised segregation across all areas of social life. We explore the meanings that people assign to segregation patterns within the workplace based on data emerging out of 54 interviews, nine naturalistic observations and a group discussion conducted within the headquarters of a major bank in Johannesburg. Discourses of linguistic and cultural differences were used to rationalise segregation and naturalise racialised differences. The material effects of segregation were noted to be particularly onerous for Black bankers. As a capitalist class, we however found that Black bankers resist, adapt, subvert and reinscribe power relations in ways that simultaneously serve their interests while also potentially limiting their opportunities. We point to the agentic aspects of social networks for marginalised groups and contend that representation is not sufficient to ensure inclusion.
Comparative Analysis of Agro-Morphological and Molecular Variations in Huskless Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) under Central Agro-Climatic Zone of India

Barley has been used for various purposes, such as animal feed, malting and brewing, while huskless barley has been used as human food. Barley is one of the cereals with the most diversified genetic basis (Baik and Ullrich, 2008). Based on this knowledge, quantitative and qualitative gains might be obtained in a more effective way during genotype selection and evaluation through appropriate traits, for use in future parent hybridization (Valls, 2007). Knowing the genetic diversity of barley germplasm is necessary for identifying diverse parental combinations and also creating segregating progeny with high genetic variability for selection. Morphological traits and molecular markers that reveal polymorphism at the DNA level have been shown as a very powerful tool for genotype characterization and estimation of genetic diversity (Salem et al., 2008). Therefore, in the present investigation, accessions of hull-less barley received from ICARDA, were evaluated for agro-morphological and genetic diversity present among them and to classify them in Indian conditions at ICARDA-India Research International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 12 (2017) pp. 2821-2829 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
The hurdle effect of osmotic pretreatment and high‐pressure cold pasteurisation on the shelf‐life extension of fresh‐cut tomatoes

Tomatoes are perishable products due to the activity of microorganisms and endogenous enzymes. The objective was to produce cut tomatoes with extended shelf life, using the combined hurdle effect of osmotic pretreatment (OD) and high pressure (HP), instead of a conventional one-step thermal process. Samples were processed in a multicomponent osmotic solution at 35 °C, subsequently cold-pasteurised in pack at 600 MPa and stored at 5–15 °C. Quality deterioration during isothermal and nonisothermal storage was kinetically modelled. Both OD process and OD-HP combined process caused an increase in lycopene content that was well retained. Texture, colour and flavour of treated samples were evaluated as similar to fresh, with OD-HP samples showing better retention during storage. Being microbiologically stable, shelf life of OD-HP samples was limited by sensory deterioration, whereas OD samples were rejected due to eventual microbial growth. Shelf life of OD and OD-HP samples was estimated at 77 and 181 days, respectively, at 5 °C.
Size diversity and species diversity relationships in fish assemblages of Western Palearctic lakes

Body size, coupled with abundance and taxonomy, may help to understand the mechanisms shaping community structure. Since the body size of fish is closely related to their trophic niche, size diversity (based on individual body size) of fish communities may capture intraspecific variations in fish trophic niches that are not detected by species diversity. Thus, the relationship between size diversity and species diversity may help to integrate variation at both intraspecific and interspecific levels. We studied the relationship between species diversity and size diversity as a measure of the degree of overlap in size among species and thereby the potential overlap in niches in a community. We hypothesized that the relationship between size diversity and species would be different across the European continent due to different levels of size overlap in fish communities. The data were derived from samplings of fish communities using standardised benthic gill nets in 363 lakes. At the continental scale, size diversity increased with species diversity; at the ecoregion scale, the slope of the relation changed across the continent, with the greatest mismatch occurring in northern Europe where communities comprised only one or a few species, but each of which exhibited a great range in size. There was an increase in slope towards the south with significant relations for four out of six ecoregions. The steeper size diversity-species diversity slope at lower latitudes is attributable to a lower overlap in fish size and thus likely to finer niche separation. Our results also suggest that size diversity is not a strong surrogate for species diversity in European lake fish communities. Thus, particularly in fish communities composed of few species, measuring size diversity may help to detect potential functional variation which may be neglected by measuring species diversity alone.
The Impact of Social Stigmas on Sexual Health Seeking Behavior: A Review of Literature

Studies show a meaningful association between STI/HIV-related stigmas and low adherence to routine STI testing (Morris et al., 2014; Hull et al., 2017). These studies also show that healthcare workers help to facilitate a culture of stigmas among coworkers and patients. According to a national survey, only 16.6% of women and 6.1% of men who participated in the survey had been tested in the last 12 months (Cuffe et al., 2016). Low rates of STI testing contribute to the spread of chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV, and syphilis (Big-Ideas-HIV-STIs.pdf, n.d.). The motivation for this literature review is to examine how STI and HIV-related stigmas influence sexual health seeking behaviors and sexual health outcomes for patients aged 18 to 24. This paper also examines how healthcare providers and clinicians perpetuate stigmas among patient populations and what kinds of sex education programming have been effective in improving sexual health behavior.