Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk perception and worry in environmental decision-making – a case study within the Swedish steel industry

Sustainable development is an important issue for the industry in order to fulfil legislation requirements and to be able to use green marketing as a competitive advantage. The Swedish steel industry has implemented a large number of environmental improvements, for example, within energy efficiency, raw materials and recyclability. Technical improvements can help the industry decrease its environmental impact; however, in order to reach sustainable development, more factors need to be considered: an effective environmental decision-making process, for example. This process may be influenced by personal factors such as risk perception and worry, which are factors that will not contribute to an effective decision-making process. The aim of this study was to investigate if personal worry and risk perception influenced environmental decision-making within the Swedish steel industry. Thirty-eight interviews were performed at 10 Swedish steelworks using the Q-methodology. The major perceived environmental risks with the facility and personal worry were assessed, compared to the day-to-day work. It was concluded that the major perceived risks were emissions of carbon dioxide, use of non-renewable energy and emissions of particulate matter. The decision-makers were mainly worried about emissions of carbon dioxide, emissions of dioxin and use of non-renewable energy. The environmental issues that were prioritised in practice (day-to-day work) were emissions of carbon dioxide, emissions of particulate matter and emissions of metals. Even though emissions of carbon dioxide were given the highest priority in the Q-sorts, there was in general no clear relationship between risk perception and personal worry with the prioritised environmental issues at the steelworks. The quantitative analysis of the Q-sorts and the qualitative interviews both showed that the day-to-day work was unaffected by personal worry and risk.
Virtual Reality Images of the Home Are Useful for Patients With Hospital-Based Palliative Care: Prospective Observational Study With Analysis by Text Mining

Background: Malignancy patients who need long-term hospitalization can feel loneliness affecting their quality of life. The global COVID-19 pandemic has caused visiting restrictions that could mean patients who might be missing out on family support and palliative care, therefore, need to adapt and change. We used virtual reality (VR) technology with the aim of reducing feelings of loneliness among these patients. Objectives: In a small cohort setting, we aimed to clarify the usefulness of VR viewing for this purpose by text mining interviews with the patients in palliative care after their VR experience, and to clarify the feasibility of this program. Design and Setting/Subjects: Four consecutive Japanese patients in the palliative care unit viewed personalized familiar persons or places through VR goggles, while communicating by telephone. After the VR experience, text mining of the patients' interviews was used to extract the words for the frequency count and co-occurrence analysis. Results: Four clusters were extracted: “relief from the pain of hospitalization by feeling safe and secure with family members nearby,” “using VR to regain daily life,” “immersive feeling of being in the same space as family,” and “loneliness due to the realistic feeling of separation from the family through VR experience. ” There were no cases of VR sickness. Conclusion: Our results attained by text mining suggest the promising potential of VR imaging of familiar surroundings for patients in palliative care.
Scaling sediment flux across landscapes

The BQART model is applied for the first time to the world's continents, to estimate the delivery of suspended sediment before (at 20 167 Mt/year) and after the interference by humans (presently at 12 838 Mt/year). Basin area is found to be the great integrator of relief, lithology, runoff, and humans. BQART is also used in a recursive manner to conceptually show the conveyance loss of suspended sediment along the pathway of rivers. Application of the Bagnold bed-material load equation to Space Shuttle Radar altimetry of river thalwegs is used to show the loss of sediment along the world's flood plains and other intra-continental sinks.
A CRITICAL TEST OF THE RELATION BETWEEN HEAT FLOW AND AGE

We obtained 17 successful 12.5 m heat flow measurements on Anomaly 13 east of the Reykjanes Ridge. All temperature gradients were linear below 7.5 m but showed a large increase toward the sediment surface in the upper 5m. From the linear gradients and thermal conductivities measured on the sediment recovered in the cores we computed a mean flow for Anomaly 13 (35 m.y. B.P.) of 1.98±0.24 μcal/cm2 s (82.9±10.1 mW/m2). Thirteen of the stations were taken in a detailed survey of a well-sedimented area at 56°N, 29°30′W. These measurements have a mean of 2.01±0.25 μcal/cm2 s (84.2±10.5 mW/m2). Almost all of the scatter in the data in this area can be accounted for by a combination of the refractive effect of the high thermal conductivity of the basement rocks and instrumental error. However, it is not possible from the present data set to rule out hydrothermal circulation in a ‘permeable’ basement as an explanation of the variation in the data. The mean value for the survey area is in excellent agreement with the relation between heat flow and the reciprocal of the square root of age predicted for oceanic crust less than 120 m.y. old. The sharp decrease in the temperature in the upper 5 m of sediment is most plausibly accounted for by a yearly periodic temperature change of an amplitude of 0.40°C in the Norwegian Sea overflow water. We suggest that the major temperature change occurs in late spring and reaches the area of our survey by early summer.
Potentials of Acetylcholinesterase and Butyrylcholinesterase Alterations in On-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery in Postoperative Delirium: An Observational Trial

Cardiac surgery is regularly associated with postoperative delirium (POD), affected by neuro-inflammation and changes in cholinergic activity. Therefore, this prospective observational study aimed to evaluate whether pre- and perioperative changes in blood acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) activity were associated with POD development in patients undergoing isolated elective coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. It included 93 patients. Pre- and postoperative blood AChE and BChE activities were measured with photometric rapid-point-of-care-testing. The Intensive Care Delirium Screening Checklist and the Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit were used to screen patients for POD. POD developed in 20 patients (21.5%), who were older (p = 0.003), had higher EuroSCOREs (p ≤ 0.001), and had longer intensive care unit stays (p < 0.001). On postoperative day one, BChE activity decreased from preoperative values more in patients with (31.9%) than without (23.7%) POD (group difference p = 0.002). Applying a cutoff of ≥32.0% for BChE activity changes, receiver operating characteristic analysis demonstrated a moderate prediction capability for POD (area under the curve = 0.72, p = 0.002). The risk of developing POD was 4.31 times higher with a BChE activity change of ≥32.0% (p = 0.010). Monitoring the pre- to postoperative reduction in BChE activity might be a clinically practicable biomarker for detecting patients at risk of developing POD after CABG surgery.
Drought metrics and temperature extremes over the Okavango River basin, southern Africa, and links with the Botswana high

The Okavango River Basin (ORB), including the World Heritage site Okavango Delta, is a region of high biodiversity projected to suffer increased early summer drying under climate change. Little work has been done on drought over this sensitive region. Here, various drought metrics are analysed over the ORB. These include a cumulative drought intensity index, based on the product of maximum temperature anomaly and maximum duration of a dry spell, and the Standardized Precipitation‐Evapotranspiration Index. Strong gradients in dry spell and hot day frequencies shift south over the ORB from August to November as the tropical rain‐belt moves increasingly south of the equator, the Congo Air Boundary declines and the Botswana High strengthens and moves southwestwards. By December, the tropical gradient in dry spell frequencies has vanished while that across the Limpopo River and southern ORB region, where the Botswana High is centred, is prominent. sub‐seasonal analyses highlight October–November 2013–2021 as particularly dry and hot over the Okavango Delta region. This dry and hot epoch appears related to a stronger and southward shifted Botswana High and reduced low‐level moisture convergence. On interannual scales, strong relationships were found with the Botswana High and El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The early summer shows a strong drying‐warming trend, related to a significant strengthening of the Botswana High. These trends, together with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 projected early summer drying over southern Africa, may impact severely on the sensitive ecosystems of the ORB and on agriculture, with important implications for the management of agricultural activities, water resources and biodiversity.
Spatial-Temporal Self-Attention for Asynchronous Spiking Neural Networks

The brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) are receiving increasing attention due to their asynchronous event-driven characteristics and low power consumption. As attention mechanisms recently become an indispensable part of sequence dependence modeling, the combination of SNNs and attention mechanisms holds great potential for energy-efficient and high-performance computing paradigms. However, the existing works cannot benefit from both temporal-wise attention and the asynchronous characteristic of SNNs. To fully leverage the advantages of both SNNs and attention mechanisms, we propose an SNNs-based spatial-temporal self-attention (STSA) mechanism, which calculates the feature dependence across the time and space domains without destroying the asynchronous transmission properties of SNNs. To further improve the performance, we also propose a spatial-temporal relative position bias (STRPB) for STSA to consider the spatiotemporal position of spikes. Based on the STSA and STRPB, we construct a spatial-temporal spiking Transformer framework, named STS-Transformer, which is powerful and enables SNNs to work in an asynchronous event-driven manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular neuromorphic datasets and speech datasets, including DVS128 Gesture, CIFAR10-DVS, and Google Speech Commands, and our experimental results can outperform other state-of-the-art models.
Assessing permanent deformation potential of asphalt mixtures based on viscoelastic characteristics

ABSTRACT In this study, permanent deformation potential of different asphalt mixtures subjected to the same aging condition was assessed, based on viscoelastic characteristics from the dynamic modulus (DM) test. First it was shown that the HWTT and RLPD test results were not well correlated, which might be due to the differences in the boundary condition and the impacts of moisture damage and stripping in the HWTT. The analysis results suggested that the shape parameter (γ) of the DM master-curves could be utilized to assess the rutting resistance potential of the asphalt mixtures from the RLPD test, compared to other rheological parameters such as the inflection point frequency and β. The |E*| at the RLPD test condition was well correlated to the rutting performance compared to the asphalt mixture’s rutting parameter |E*|/sinδ and the |E*| at the inflection point frequency. A novel rutting parameter (VERIndex) was developed to assess the rutting resistance potential of the asphalt mixtures, which simultaneously accounts for the |E*| and slope of the DM master-curves. Thereafter, the cracking and rutting performance thresholds were proposed, and, correspondingly used in the performance space diagram to aid with implementing the balanced mix design approach using the viscoelastic characteristics of asphalt mixtures.
Chapter 7 Machine Learning Techniques for Face Analysis

In recent years there has been a growing interest in improving all aspects of the interaction between humans and computers with the clear goal of achieving a natural interaction, similar to the way human–human interaction takes place. The most expressive way humans display emotions is through facial expressions. Humans detect and interpret faces and facial expressions in a scene with little or no effort. Still, development of an automated system that accomplishes this task is rather difficult. There are several related problems: detection of an image segment as a face, extraction of the facial expression information, and classification of the expression (e.g., in emotion categories). A system that performs these operations accurately and in real time would be a major step forward in achieving a humanlike interaction between the man and machine. In this chapter, we present several machine learning algorithms applied to face analysis and stress the importance of learning the structure of Bayesian network classifiers when they are applied to face and facial expression analysis. Roberto Valenti Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, e-mail: rvalenti@
A Survey on Masked Autoencoder for Visual Self-supervised Learning

With the increasing popularity of masked autoencoders, self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision undertakes a similar trajectory as in NLP. Specifically, generative pretext tasks with the masked prediction have become a de facto standard SSL practice in NLP (e.g., BERT). By contrast, early attempts at generative methods in vision have been outperformed by their discriminative counterparts (like contrastive learning). However, the success of masked image modeling has revived the autoencoder-based visual pretraining method. As a milestone to bridge the gap with BERT in NLP, masked autoencoder in vision has attracted unprecedented attention. This work conducts a survey on masked autoencoders for visual SSL.
Natural history of intraosseous low-grade chondroid lesions of the proximal humerus

Introduction Enchondromas and grade 1 chondrosarcomas are commonly encountered low-grade chondroid tumors in the proximal humerus. While there is a concern for malignant transformation, few studies have evaluated the natural history of these lesions. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the natural history of proximal humerus low-grade chondroid lesions managed both conservatively and surgically, and to define management criteria using clinical and radiographic findings for these low-grade chondroid lesions. Methods The patient population included 90 patients intended for conservative treatment and 22 patients proceeding directly to surgery. Data collection was based on a combination of chart review and patient imaging and descriptive statistics were calculated for each group. Results No malignant transformations were noted amongst any group. In the conservative treatment group, 7 of 64 (11%) progressed to surgery after an average of 20.3 months of conservative treatment due to persistent pain unexplained by other shoulder pathology. Importantly, 71% experienced continued pain at a mean of 53.1 months post-operatively. The group that went directly to surgery also demonstrated pain in 41% at an average follow-up of 57.3 months. Discussion Low-grade cartilaginous lesions of the proximal humerus without concerning imaging findings can be managed with conservative treatment and the risk of malignant transformation is very low. Patients with a clear source of their shoulder pain unrelated to their tumor and without concerning characteristics on imaging can be managed with serial annual radiographic imaging. Patients undergoing surgery for these indolent tumors are likely to experience persistent pain even after surgery.
Impaired β-cell glucokinase as an underlying mechanism in diet-induced diabetes

ABSTRACT High-fat diet (HFD)-fed mouse models have been widely used to study early type 2 diabetes. Decreased β-cell glucokinase (GCK) expression has been observed in HFD-induced diabetes. However, owing to its crucial roles in glucose metabolism in the liver and in islet β-cells, the contribution of decreased GCK expression to the development of HFD-induced diabetes is unclear. Here, we employed a β-cell-targeted gene transfer vector and determined the impact of β-cell-specific increase in GCK expression on β-cell function and glucose handling in vitro and in vivo. Overexpression of GCK enhanced glycolytic flux, ATP-sensitive potassium channel activation and membrane depolarization, and increased proliferation in Min6 cells. β-cell-targeted GCK transduction did not change glucose handling in chow-fed C57BL/6 mice. Although adult mice fed a HFD showed reduced islet GCK expression, impaired glucose tolerance and decreased glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS), β-cell-targeted GCK transduction improved glucose tolerance and restored GSIS. Islet perifusion experiments verified restored GSIS in isolated HFD islets by GCK transduction. Thus, our data identify impaired β-cell GCK expression as an underlying mechanism for dysregulated β-cell function and glycemic control in HFD-induced diabetes. Our data also imply an etiological role of GCK in diet-induced diabetes. This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper. Summary: β-cell glucokinase expression is decreased in diet-induced diabetes. β-cell-targeted overexpression of glucokinase improved the diabetic phenotype, suggesting an etiological role of glucokinase downregulation in diet-induced diabetes.
Cervical Cancer Screening Recommendations: Now and for the Future

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer worldwide, with over 600,000 new cases annually and approximately 350,000 cancer-related deaths per year. The disease burden is disproportionately distributed, with cancer-related mortality ranging from 5.2 deaths per 100,000 individuals in highly-developed countries, to 12.4 deaths per 100,000 in less-developed countries. This article is a review of the current screening recommendations and potential future recommendations.
Stochastic representation of spatial variability in thaw depth in permafrost boreal forests

A simple stochastic representation of the spatial variability in thaw depth is proposed. Thaw depth distribution measured in the two larch‐type forests in eastern Siberia, Spasskaya Pad and Elgeeii, showed different spatial, seasonal, and interannual variability, respectively. Year‐to‐year variation in active‐layer thickness was minor in Spasskaya Pad compared to Elgeeii. A gamma distribution adequately represented both sites' thaw depth spatial variability as the cumulative probability. Thus, we developed a simple model using the gamma distribution that illustrates the spatial variability in thaw depth at any thawing stage as a function of a given mean thaw depth. A hierarchy of models was introduced that sequentially considered the constant state, linearity, and nonlinearity in the dependence of the rate parameter of the gamma distribution on the mean thaw depth. Although the requirements of the model levels differed between Spasskaya Pad and Elgeeii, the proposed model successfully represented the spatial variability in thaw depth at both sites during different thaw seasons.
Proofs and Certificates for Max-SAT (Extended Abstract)

In this paper, we present a tool, called MS-Builder, which generates certificates for the Max-SAT problem in the particular form of a sequence of equivalence-preserving transformations. To generate a certificate, MS-Builder iteratively calls a SAT oracle to get a SAT resolution refutation which is handled and adapted into a sound refutation for Max-SAT. In particular, the size of the computed Max-SAT refutation is linear with respect to the size of the initial refutation if it is semi-read-once, tree-like regular, tree-like or semi-tree-like. Additionally, we propose an extendable tool, called MS-Checker, able to verify the validity of any Max-SAT certificate using Max-SAT inference rules.
Pigmentação testicular e ciclo reprodutivo anual de Physalaemus cuvieri Fitzinger, 1826 em populações de biomas distintos

Reproduction can be described as the set of physiological, morphological, and behavioural attributes that allow for the success of a species through maximum offspring under specific environmental conditions. In amphibians, as well as being under hormonal control, and in view of their genetic constitution, the reproductive cycle is also influenced by environmental factors that determine the gametogenetic cycle throughout the year. The aim of this study was to characterize the reproductive cycle of Physalaemus cuvieri in populations from the Mata Atlântica region and the Cerrado region, comparing the morphological gonad variations to the climatic factors of precipitation, temperature, relative humidity and wind speed, through a Canonical Correspondence Analysis, as well as comparing the quantity of pigments present in the testis with the pre-reproductive, reproductive and regenerative periods using the ANOVA, and estimating the genetic diversity between the populations of the two biomes with genetic markers ISSR (Inter Simple Sequence Repeats). The relationship between spermatogenesis and the quantity of testicular pigmentation in individuals of Eupemphix nattereri has also been analyzed. Seven cellular types representing the germinal epithelium were characterized. The total variance throughout the reproductive cycle was of 23%, with the first two axes accountable, respectively by 68.7% and 10.2% of the total variance accumulated in the weighted average of two cellular types with relation to the four analyzed environmental variables. The Monte Carlo permutation test indicated that cellular type and precipitation were significantly correlated. At the end of the regenerative period, characterized by the cellular type spermatagonia I, the stimulated gametogenesis began due to the increase in precipitation, followed by the pre-reproductive period characterised by the cellular type spermatid I and II. The beginning of the reproductive period, characterized by the elevated
Internet use predicts Chinese character spelling performance of junior high school students: multiple mediating roles of pinyin input proficiency and net-speak experience

To examine the complex relationship between Internet use experience and character spelling performance among Chinese junior high school students, the study explored the multiple mediating roles of Pinyin input proficiency and net-speak experience. A total of 447 Chinese junior high school students aged 12–15 years old completed the Internet Use Experience and Pinyin Input Proficiency Assessment, the Net-speak Experience Questionnaire and the Chinese Spelling Test. The results showed that: (1) All investigated variables were significantly correlated with each other, but there was no direct relationship between Internet use and Chinese spelling performance. (2) Pinyin input proficiency and net-speak experience play a chain mediating role in the relationship between Internet use and Chinese character spelling performance. Teens’ Internet use experience indirectly and positively predicted Chinese character spelling performance through the mediation of Pinyin input method use and net-speak experience. The implication of this study is that Chinese children should be guided to engage in Internet activities that require Pinyin typing and use net-speak creatively in order to promote the traditional Chinese character spelling skills when instructing teenagers to engage in Internet activities.