Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cognition and social functioning in first episode psychosis: A systematic review of longitudinal studies

Introduction This systematic review aimed to answer whether we can predict subsequent social functioning in first episode psychosis (FEP) by means of an initial cognitive examination. In order to do this, we gathered longitudinal studies which evaluated neurocognition and/or social cognition regarding their impact on long-term social functioning of FEP patients. Methods The MOOSE method was employed and 28 studies covering data from a total of 2572 patients with longitudinal trajectories from 2 months to 5 years were reviewed. Results In general, cognitive deficits impacted on the social functioning of the FEP patients across the time. The neurocognitive domains which most closely predicted social functioning were processing speed, sustained attention and working memory. An overall cognitive dysfunction, low IQ and the academic trajectory were also found predictive. Regarding social cognition, the findings were not unanimous. Discussion In addition of the impact of each variable, several of the articles found a complex relationship between social cognition, neurocognition, social functioning and negative symptoms, pointing social cognition as a modulator of neurocognition but being modulated as well by negative symptoms. The principal clinical implication of this review is that the initial assessment of FEP patients and their rehabilitation must take cognition into account.
High-power operation of a wide-striped InGaN laser diode array

We successfully demonstrated a multi-striped InGaN-based laser diode (LD) array with an optical output power of 6.3 W under continuous wave operation. The LD array was operated on a conventional metal package without any cooling system. The world highest power operation as InGaN LD array is attributed to thermally optimized layout design taking advantage of highly efficient wide-striped emitters.
Congenital Myasthenic Syndrome Associated With SLC25A1 Gene Variant: The First Reported Case in Saudi Arabia

We report the case of a two-year-old full-term girl of consanguineous Saudi parents, who had a history of poor sucking, hypotonia, and bilateral ptosis, as well as recurrent pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) admissions with apnea and global developmental delay and unremarkable family history. A genetic study was conducted and whole exome sequencing (WES) identified a likely pathogenic homozygous variant c.842C>T p.(Ala281Val) in the SLC25A1 gene. This finding is consistent with the genetic diagnosis of autosomal recessive combined D-2- and L-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria (D/L-2-HGA). Genetic testing results suggested a diagnosis of congenital myasthenic syndrome (CMS) type 23 [Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) #618197]. CMS is a highly heterogeneous group of neuromuscular junction (NMJ) disorders clinically and genetically and compromises the safety margin required for reliable neuromuscular transmission. Fortunately, we suspected a CMS in our patient, and the initiation of management with pyridostigmine has substantially improved the patient's condition.
The critical exponents of parabolic equations and blow-up in Rn

In this paper we study the Cauchy problem in Rn of general parabolic equations which take the form ut = Δum + ts|x|σup with non-negative initial value. Here s ≧ 0, m > (n − 2)+/n, p > max (1, m) and σ > − 1 if n = 1 or σ > − 2 if n ≧ 2. We prove, among other things, that for p ≦ pc, where pc ≡ m + s(m − 1) + (2 + 2s + σ)/n > 1, every nontrivial solution blows up in finite time. But for p > pc a positive global solution exists.
Blow-up analysis in degenerate parabolic systems coupled via norm-type reactions

This paper deals with a class of degenerate parabolic equations coupled via nonlinear reactions in -norm type, subject to null Dirichlet boundary conditions. Firstly, we give the existence and uniqueness of local classical solutions and the comparison principle. Secondly, we determine the critical exponents for the blow-up solutions. Thirdly, all of the uniform blow-up profiles are obtained for simultaneous blow-up solutions.
Sample Size Determination for Robust Bayesian Analysis

This article considers a robust Bayesian approach to the sample size determination problem. We focus on global Bayesian robustness that studies lower bound (Ln), upper bound (Un), and range (Rn) of posterior quantities of interest, obtained as the prior varies in a class of distributions. Specifically, we are interested in the selection of an appropriate sample size that gives guarantees to the researcher of observing a small value of the range and, depending on the problems, either a sufficiently large lower bound or a sufficiently small upper bound. Toward this end, we approach the problem as a design issue and provide new sample size determination criteria based on summaries of the predictive distributions of Ln, Un, and Rn, such as expectations and tail probabilities. Relationships and comparison to standard classical and (nonrobust) Bayesian methods are discussed. The proposed methods are studied for the normal model with conjugate priors and used for choosing the size of a clinical trial.
Comparison of Metastatic Patterns Among Neuroendocrine Tumors, Neuroendocrine Carcinomas, and Nonneuroendocrine Carcinomas of Various Primary Organs

Background Both neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) and neuroendocrine carcinomas (NECs) exhibit neuroendocrine differentiation and are classified as neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs). NECs and nonneuroendocrine neoplasms (non-NENs), such as adenocarcinoma, have similar mutational profiles. The purpose of this study was to identify differences in metastatic patterns and to identify the key factor causing these differences by simultaneously comparing the metastatic patterns of NETs, NECs and non-NENs from various primary organs. Methods We retrieved data for 4,223 patients with NENs and 41,637 patients with non-NENs arising at various primary sites from an institutional database and then compared NET, NEC, and non-NEN metastatic patterns. Results NETs and NECs showed generally similar metastatic patterns. Most NEN patients had a higher liver organotrophic metastasis rate, lower lung organotrophic metastasis rate, and lower pleural/peritoneal organotrophic metastasis rate than non-NEN patients. Some differences were characteristics of specific organs. Some of these site-specific differences were not caused by NENs but by non-NENs, including a higher bone organotrophic metastasis rate for medullary thyroid carcinoma and a lower bone organotrophic metastasis rate for pulmonary NEN. Other differences were probably caused by NENs, including a higher bone organotrophic metastasis rate for colorectal NETs. Uterine cervical NEC showed unique patterns of metastasis compared to NEN from other sites. Conclusion Significant differences between the metastatic patterns of NENs and non-NENs were detected. The multigene program that causes neuroendocrine differentiation might be associated with organotropic metastasis.
Determinants of e-Learning Services: Indonesian Open University

Abstract The Internet has been massively utilized for educational purposes during the last ten years with many platforms, including e-Learning Services (e-LS). This survey study aimed to report factors affecting the intention to use e-LS in the Indonesian Open University (OU) context. The original technology acceptance model (TAM) was extended, involving seven variables: facilitating conditions, perceived enjoyment, subjective norms, perceived ease of use, usefulness, attitudes, and intention to use. The survey questionnaire was piloted prior to the main data collection. Through random sampling, 2787 out of 341,956 Indonesian OU students responded to the questionnaire. The main data were analyzed through partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) procedures. For predicting intention to use e-LS, the strongest affecting factor is attitudes. Subjective norms play a bigger than perceived usefulness in predicting intention to use. In predicting attitudes, perceived ease of use is the strongest predictor, followed by perceived usefulness. Subjective norms, facilitating conditions, and perceived enjoyment are significant predictors of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Recommendations were elaborated for all stakeholders: researchers, tutors, policymakers, and OU students.
“I Don’t Want to Be Known as a Weak Man”: Insights and Rationalizations by Male Students on Men’s Sexual Violence Perpetration against Female Students on Campus

Understanding how men view rape is foundational for rape prevention, but it is not always possible to interview men who rape, especially in a college campus context. We explore male students’ insights into and rationalizations for why men on campus perpetrate sexual violence (SV) against female students by analysing qualitative focus group discussion data with male students. Men contended that SV is a demonstration of men’s power over women, yet they did not perceive sexual harassment of female students as serious enough to constitute SV and appeared to be tolerant of it. Men perceived “sex for grades” as exploitative and rooted in the power asymmetry between privileged male lecturers and vulnerable female students. They were disdainful of non-partner rape, describing it as acts exclusively perpetrated by men from outside campus. Most men felt entitled to have sex with their girlfriends, although an alternative discourse challenged both this entitlement and the dominant masculinity linked to it. Gender-transformative work with male students is needed to support them to think and do things differently while they are on campus.
A randomized controlled trial of social cognition and interaction training for persons with first episode psychosis in Hong Kong

Social cognitive impairment is a core limiting factor of functional recovery among persons with first episode psychosis (FEP). Social Cognition and Interaction Training (SCIT) is a group-based, manualized training with demonstrated evidence in improving social cognitive performance among people with schizophrenia. However, there are few studies on the effect of SCIT for people with FEP and for people in non-Western societies. This study evaluated the feasibility, acceptability and initial effectiveness of the locally-adapted SCIT in improving social cognitive functioning in Chinese people with FEP. The SCIT was delivered two sessions per week over a 10-weeks period, each session lasted for 60–90 min. A total of 72 subjects with FEP were recruited from an outpatient clinic and randomized to conventional rehabilitation (“Rehab”) and experimental (“SCIT and Rehab”) groups. Primary outcome measures included four social cognitive domains including emotion perception, theory-of-mind, attributional bias and jumping-to-conclusion, and secondary measures included neurocognition, social competence and quality of life. Participants were assessed at baseline, post-treatment, and 3-months post-treatment. Repeated measures ANCOVAs, with baseline scores as covariates, were used to compare the group differences in various outcomes across time. The results showed that the SCIT was well-accepted, with a satisfactory completion rate and subjective ratings of relevance in the experimental group. Moreover, treatment completers (n = 28) showed evidence of an advantage, over conventional group (n = 31), in reduced attributional bias and jumping-to-conclusions at treatment completion, lending initial support for the SCIT in Chinese people with FEP. Future research should address the limitations of this study, using more refined outcome measurements and higher treatment intensity of the SCIT.
Association between quarantine and sleep disturbance in Hong Kong adults: The mediating role of COVID-19 mental impact and distress

Background COVID-19 quarantine has been associated with increased sleep problems and prolonged psychological responses to the pandemic could mediate this relationship. The present study attempted to examine the mediating role of COVID-19 mental impact and distress between quarantine and sleep disturbance. Methods The present study recruited 438 adults (109 with quarantine experience) in Hong Kong via an online survey between August and October 2021. The respondents completed a self-report questionnaire on quarantine, Mental Impact and Distress Scale: COVID-19 (MIDc), and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). The MIDc was treated as a latent mediator and continuous PSQI factor and poor sleep quality (PSQI score > 5) were the study outcomes. We evaluated the direct and indirect effects of quarantine on sleep disturbance via MIDc using structural equation modeling. Analyses were adjusted for gender, age, education level, knowing confirmed COVID-19 cases, COVID-19 frontline work, and primary income source of the family. Results More than half (62.8%) of the sample reported poor sleep quality. Quarantine was associated with significantly higher levels of MIDc and sleep disturbance (Cohen d = 0.23 – 0.43, p < 0.05). In the structural equation model, the MIDc mediated the relationship between quarantine and sleep disturbance (αβ = 0.152, 95% CI = 0.071 to 0.235). Quarantine significantly increased the proportion of poor sleep quality by 10.7% (95% CI = 0.050 to 0.171) indirectly via MIDc. Conclusions The results provide empirical support to the mediating role of the MIDc as psychological responses in the relationship between quarantine and sleep disturbance.
Non-Autoregressive Sparse Transformer Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an important task in practical applications such as automatic driving and surveillance systems. It is challenging to effectively model social interactions among pedestrians and capture temporal dependencies. Previous methods typically emphasized social interactions among pedestrians but ignored the temporal consistency of predictions and suffered from superfluous interactions by dense undirected graphs, resulting in a considerable deviance from reality. In addition, autoregressive approaches predicted future locations conditioning on previous predictions one by one, which would lead to error accumulation and time consuming. To address these issues, we present Non-autoregressive Sparse Transformer (NaST) networks for pedestrian trajectory prediction. Specifically, NaST models sparse spatial interactions and sparse temporal dependency via a sparse spatial transformer and a sparse temporal transformer separately. Different from previous predictions such as RNN-based approaches, the transformer decoder works in non-autoregressive pattern and predicts all the future locations at one time from a query sequence, which could avoid the error accumulation and be less computationally intensive. We evaluate our proposed method on the ETH and UCY datasets, and the experimental results show our method outperforms comparative state-of-the-art methods.
Banzhilian formula alleviates psoriasis-like lesions via the LCN2/MMP-9 axis based on transcriptome analysis

Introduction: Oral Banzhilian formula (BZLF) is effective in the clinical treatment of psoriasis. However, the effectiveness and mechanism of different drug delivery routes deserve further study. Methods: First, we established the mouse model of psoriasis using imiquimod (IMQ), and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used for the quality control of BZLF. Secondly, Total RNA Sequencing and bioinformatics analysis were used to explore the regulatory mechanism of BZLF in improving psoriatic lesions. Finally, further verification was based on animal experiments. Results: we externally applied BZLF for skin lesions in an imiquimod-induced psoriasis mouse model and found that BZLF alleviated psoriasis-like skin lesions while inhibiting the expression of Ki67 and inflammatory factors (Il17a, Tnf-α, S100a7 and Cxcl1) in skin lesions. Transcriptome sequencing results suggested that BZLF inhibited signalling pathways closely related to psoriatic inflammation, such as the IL-17 signalling pathway, chemokine signalling pathway, TNF signalling pathway, and NF-kappa B signalling pathway, and the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network identified LCN2 as one of the core target genes and screened out its regulated downstream gene MMP9. Discussion: Our findings suggest that the anti-psoriatic mechanism of BZLF involved in downregulating the LCN2/MMP-9 axis.
Simulations of the viscous flow normal to an impulsively started and uniformly accelerated flat plate

The development of a two-dimensional viscous incompressible flow generated from an infinitesimally thin flat plate, impulsively started or uniformly accelerated normal to the free stream is studied computationally. An adaptive numerical scheme, based on vortex methods, is used to integrate the vorticity–velocity formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations. The results of the computations complement relevant experimental works while providing us with quantities such as the vorticity field and the unsteady forces experienced by the body. For the uniformly accelerated plate the present simulations capture the development of a number of centers of vorticity along the primary separating shear layer. This phenomenon has been observed in experimental works but has not been predicted by inviscid models. The present simulations suggest that this Kelvin–Helmholtz-type instability is driven by the interaction of primary and secondary vorticity near the tips of the plate and depends on the acceleration of the plate.
Distribution of Compensating Variations for Discrete Choice Models

For additive random utility discrete choice models, we provide a formula for the distribution function of the compensating variations for a large class of indirect utility functions. The distribution function has a closed form which only depends on the choice probabilities. We also provide a formula for the moments of the compensating variation which can be computed up to a one-dimensional integral. Therefore, our results allow the computation of exact welfare measure without the use of Monte-Carlo simulations.We illustrate our approach with a numerical example.
Acclimatization of banana plantlets inoculated with Bacillus sp. and irrigated with low-salinity water

ABSTRACT Plant growth-promoting bacteria emerge as an alternative to attenuate abiotic stresses in plants such as salinity. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of Bacillus sp. strains 186 and 109 on the acclimatization of banana cv. ‘Prata Catarina’ irrigated with saline water. The experiment was conducted in a completely randomized design in a 4 × 2 factorial scheme, with 4 growth-promotion treatments, subjected to 2 levels of electrical conductivity of irrigation water. Irrigation with saline water decreased the number of leaves, leaf area, transpiration rate, stomatal conductance, and CO2 assimilation rate in banana leaves, regardless of inoculation with bacterial strains. The use of Bacillus sp. strain 109 promoted increments in phosphorus and iron contents in banana plants irrigated with low-salinity water.
Analyzing shelf life of processed cheese by soft computing

Feedforward soft computing multilayer models were developed for analyzing shelf life of processed cheese. The models were trained with 80% of total observations and validated with 20% of the remaining data. Mean Square Error, Root Mean Square Error, Coefficient of Determination and Nash - Sutcliffo Coefficient were used in order to compare the prediction ability of the developed models. From the study, it is concluded that feedforward multilayer models are good in predicting the shelf life of processed cheese stored at 7-8 o C.
Improving the Academic Performance and Mental Health of Non-Traditional University Students Through a Shorter Delivery Model: Exploring the Impact of the Southern Cross Model

University students are often depicted as carefree young adults; however, many students struggle to manage the “normal” stresses of university life and may experience high rates of psychological distress. This study compared a traditional delivery model to a shorter delivery model (i.e., the Southern Cross Model) in terms of students’ psychological distress, their perceived time pressure, and academic performance. The results indicated a significant difference in academic performance and psychological distress between the shorter delivery model and the traditional delivery model, with students in this shorter delivery model experiencing lower levels of psychological distress and enhanced academic performance. No significant difference in time pressure was found between the delivery models. This study indicates that the Southern Cross Model may enhance students’ academic performance and help them to better manage the normal stresses of university life.
Modeling and Optimization of the Adsorption of Cr (VI) in a Chitosan-Resole Aerogel Using Response Surface Methodology

In this paper, a model for Cr (VI) removal and optimization was made using a novel aerogel material, chitosan-resole CS/R aerogel, where a freeze-drying and final thermal treatment was employed to fabricate the aerogel. This processing ensures a network structure and stability for the CS, despite the non-uniform ice growth promoted by this process. Morphological analysis indicated a successful aerogel elaboration process. , FTIR spectroscopy corroborated the aerogel precursor’s identity and ascertained chemical bonding after adsorption. Owing to the variability of formulations, the adsorption capacity was modeled and optimized using computational techniques. The response surface methodology (RSM), based on the Box–Behnken design using three levels, was used to calculate the best control parameters for the CS/R aerogel: the concentration at %vol (50–90%), the initial concentration of Cr (VI) (25–100 mg/L), and adsorption time (0.3–4 h). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and 3D graphs reveal that the CS/R aerogel concentration and adsorption time are the main parameters that influence the initial concentration of CS/R aerogel metal-ion uptake. The developed model successfully describes the process with a correlation coefficient of R2 = 0.96 for the RSM. The model obtained was optimized to find the best material design proposal for Cr (VI) removal. Numerical optimization was used and showed superior Cr (VI) removal (94.4%) under conditions of a CS/R aerogel concentration of 87/13 %vol, with an initial concentration of Cr (VI) of 31 mg/L, and an adsorption time of 3.02 h. These results suggest that the proposed computational model can obtain an effective and viable model for CS material processing and for optimization of the uptake of this metal.
Evidence for precession of the R aquarii jet

Several models of the R Aqr northeast jet have been proposed which attempt to explain the presence of shock excitation, resulting in a confusing picture of this nearest astrophysical jet. This paper compares observations of the jet in the R Aqr system with the HST's Faint Object Camera (FOC) and radio continuum images acquired with the VLA. The forbidden-O III jet structure is derived from restored FOC imagery, which has been convolved with an elliptical Gaussian of the same size as the restoring beam of the 6-cm VLA maps, allowing image comparison at the same spatial resolution. It is found that, at increasing distances from the central star, the forbidden O III emission knots that comprise the optical jet occur at systematically larger position angles when compared with corresponding features in the radio images. The angular separation of forbidden O III and radio continuum emission can be understood in terms of a shock formed when ejecta in the stream interacts with previously existing circumstellar material and subsequently cools by nebular line emission.