Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COVID-19 Impact on Saudi Healthcare Workers’ Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices

In December 2019, Chinese authorities in the city of Wuhan reported the discovery of a new infectious disease spread by a beta coronavirus. Since the discovery of the first case, COVID-19 has had a global impact in almost every country around the world, resulting in more than 698 million cases and close to 7 million deaths (20). Saudi Arabia was one of the most impacted Middle East countries by COVID-19 having more than 800,000 cases and nearly 10,000 deaths (20). Healthcare workers’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices concerning COVID-19 were some of the key factors that were attributed to its rapid spread and prevention across many countries around the world. This literature review will discuss the COVID-19 impact on Saudi healthcare worker's knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP). Healthcare workers especially those working in the frontline needed comprehensive information and training on coronavirus to effectively protect themselves from the disease. It was through creating awareness and training on the disease that the Saudi healthcare system was able to promote KAP among its workers to effectively cometbat the spread of the disease (16). In conclusion, the literature review discussed various studies touching on the impacts of knowledge, attitude, and practices among healthcare workers in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Simulations and estimates of low latitude highland temperature by 5 CMIP5 models

The research applies monthly average data of 5 models on CMIP5 from 1961 to 2005 and temperature of the low latitude highland in high- resolution grid,followed by BP neural network,EOF analysis and Multiple Linear Regression to the area of low latitude highland between January 2006 and December 2099. The result shows that the temperature estimate of the future 94 years from the ensemble model simulation presents an apparent rising trend,in all emission scenario of RPC2. 6,RCP4. 5 and RCP8. 5. In 2099,compared with the average temperature in 2005,temperature is likely to increase by 0. 9℃ on RCP2. 6 emissions scenario,to increase by 1.8 ℃ on RCP4. 5,and to increase by 3. 3 ℃ on RCP8. 5.
Potency of tamoxifen against clinical isolates of Candida resistant to itraconazole

: Tamoxifen (TAM) has been shown to have an antifungal action along with its anticancer activity. Various species of fungi have shown varying susceptibility to TAM. The antifungal activity of TAM was studied against clinical pathogenic species of Candida that are resistant to itraconazole through using disk diffusion and dilution methods. Of 50 isolates of Candida from women with vulvovaginal candidiasis, 15 isolates were resistant to itraconazole. These isolates consisted of four isolates of C. albicans , ten isolates of C. glabrata and one isolate of C. utilis . All isolates were inhibited by a high concentration of TAM (20 mg/ml). Candida albicans was affected by TAM at10 mg/ml (MIC, 5.5-7 mg/ml). High susceptibility with a low MIC value of TAM (3 mg/ml) was observed in Candida glabrata isolates. Candida utilis was also found to be the isolate with the highest resistance to TAM (MIC, 15 mg/ml). In conclusion; TAM is an effective agent against drug-resistant species of Candida in high concentrations. It was also demonstrated that resistant isolates of C. glabrata are the most susceptible to TAM. High-dose of TAM is recommended for the treatment of fungal infections caused by drug-resistant species of Candida . Further studies are needed in this concern.
Paleogene fish otoliths (Teleostei) from the Subsilesian and Ždánice units in Moravia

Otolith assemblages from deposits of the Subsilesian Unit are reported for the first time. They consists solely of deep-water taxa. There were found no Late Oligocene-Early Miocene taxa in the Ženklava Formation what indicates older age of this Formation erroneouisly described as an analogue of the Krosno Formation.
Firm expectations about production and prices: Facts, determinants, and eﬀects ∗

This chapter revisits survey evidence about ﬁrm expectations, with a particular focus on ﬁrms’ production and prices. We aim at synthesizing the evidence established on the basis of various ﬁrm surveys from diﬀerent countries. We complement our discussion of existing work with new evidence based on the ifo Survey of German ﬁrms. This allows us, ﬁrst, to put together ﬁve stylized facts regarding ﬁrm expectations and expectation errors. In addition, we present new evidence regarding the stickiness of ﬁrm expectations. Second, we use the same data set to revisit key results regarding the formation of ﬁrm expectations. Firm expectations react strongly to ﬁrm-speciﬁc developments, whereas aggregate variables are less important. Third, we summarize the evidence on how ﬁrm expectations drive ﬁrm decisions.
EECA Region SORT IT Mental health interventions for rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis patients with alcohol use disorders, Zhytomyr, Ukraine

Introduction: Despite concerted efforts, Ukraine is challenged by increasing rates of multidrug and rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (MDR/RR-TB) comorbid with alcohol use disorder (AUD). This study describes a cohort of RR-TB patients with high alcohol consumption treated in MSF Zhytomyr Project, Ukraine. Methodology: We used programmatic data for 73 RR-TB patients screened with the AUD Identification Test March-July 2019 and followed-up for culture conversion/TB treatment outcome till 31 January 2020. We described socio-demographic, behavioral, and clinical characteristics, the level of depressive symptoms, and TB treatment outcomes in three groups: 1) patients with AUD who received mental health interventions (MHI); 2) patients with AUD who did not receive MHI; 3) patients with no AUD. We also found three potential contributors to declining to receive MHI. Results: Main characteristics of the study groups did not differ substantially. Those receiving MHI (mean: nine sessions) were rated for alcohol consumption as ‘ hazardous ’ (41%), ‘ harmful ’ (43%) and ‘ dependence ’ (36%) and had higher depression scores versus the second (p=0.009) and third (p=0.095) groups at baseline. Depressive symptoms declined at 9-month follow-up for all patients. Culture conversion was seen at 77%, 73%, and 83% for each group respectively. We also found three reasons for declining from MHI. Conclusions: We detected little differences across the groups. However, our study cohort demonstrated substantially higher adherence rates, culture conversion and reduction of depressive symptoms than reported globally. We recommend further research on the effectiveness of MHI in changing the drinking habits, quality of life and/or TB treatment outcomes of patients with AUD.
Changes in community perspectives on the roles and rules of church forests in northern Ethiopia: evidence from a panel survey of four Ethiopian Orthodox communities

Some of the only Afromontane forest in northern Ethiopia today is on lands managed by followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, where for centuries priests and communities have conserved forest groves around church buildings. The ecological value of the thousands of church forests in Ethiopia has been widely acknowledged, but little is known about the diverse local institutions that govern these resources, or how such institutions might be changing in response to Ethiopia’s rapid recent economic development. This study uses a unique panel survey to explore changes in community perspectives on the social and ecological roles of church forests, and rules governing church forest use, in four Orthodox communities over time. Our sample consists of 122 household surveys conducted in 2002 and a further 122 surveys from 2014, with 71 households interviewed in both periods. We find that reported uses of church forests vary across forests and over time, with larger forests more likely to be used for extractive purposes such as firewood and construction timber, while smaller forests have become more restricted to renewable or non-extractive uses such as natural medicines, honey, and prayer. Results of logistic regression suggest church followers’ support for preserving church forests increases with age and access to alternative sources of firewood – including exotic Eucalyptus spp. plantations which are increasingly widespread in northern Ethiopia. We also observe a shift since 2002 away from an expectation that church followers themselves hold responsibility for rule enforcement in church forests to a perceived sharing of responsibility by church authorities (i.e. priests) and government (i.e. police) in 2014. Together the progressive introduction of exotic tree species in church forests combined with the erosion of religious norms surrounding local forest governance may threaten the integrity and diversity of these unique social-ecological systems.
Learning Spectral Fractional Anisotropy and Mean Diffusivity Features as Neuroimaging Biomarkers for Tracking White Matter Integrity Changes in Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1 Patients using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a genetic neuromuscular progressive multisystem disease that results in a broad spectrum of clinical central nervous system (CNS) involvement, including problems with memory, attention, executive functioning, and social cognition. Fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity along-tract data calculated using diffusion tensor imaging techniques play a vital role in assessing white matter microstructural changes associated with neurodegeneration caused by DM1. In this work, a novel spectrogram-based deep learning method is proposed to characterize white matter network alterations in DM1 with the goal of building a deep learning model as neuroimaging biomarkers of DM1. The proposed method is evaluated on fractional anisotropies and mean diffusivities along-tract data calculated for 25 major white matter tracts of 46 DM1 patients and 96 unaffected controls. The evaluation data consists of a total of 7100 spectrogram images. The model achieved 91% accuracy in identifying DM1, a significant improvement compared to previous methods.Clinical relevance— Clinical care of DM1 is particularly challenging due to DM1 multisystem involvement and the disease variability. Patients with DM1 often experience neurological and psychological symptoms, such as excessive sleepiness and apathy, that greatly impact their quality of life. Some of DM1 CNS symptoms may be responsive to treatment. The goal of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of DM1 on the CNS and to develop a deep learning model that can serve as a biomarker for the disease, with the potential to be used in future clinical trials as an outcome measure.
Electrical stimulation thresholds differ between V1 and V2

Cortical visual prostheses are designed to treat blindness by restoring visual perceptions through artificial electrical stimulation of the primary visual cortex (V1). Intracortical microelectrodes produce the smallest visual percepts and thus higher resolution vision - like a higher density of pixels on a monitor. However, intracortical microelectrodes must maintain a minimum spacing to preserve tissue integrity. One solution to increase the density of percepts is to implant and stimulate multiple visual areas, such as V1 and V2, although the properties of microstimulation in V2 remain largely unexplored. We provide a direct comparison of V1 and V2 microstimulation in two common marmoset monkeys. We find similarities in response trends between V1 and V2 but differences in threshold, neural activity duration, and spread of activity at the threshold current. This has implications for using multi-area stimulation to increase the resolution of cortical visual prostheses.
Protracted development of visuo-proprioceptive integration for uni-and bimanual motor coordination

Sensory and motor processes undergo massive developmental changes over at least a decade in human development. Interdependencies between different sensorimotor control mechanisms as well as bodily abilities are difficult to assess when isolated experiments are tested in small age ranges. Here, we assessed coordinative abilities of 120 children aged 4-12 for the two hands or a hand with another sensory signal in multiple, highly comparable sensorimotor tasks. This multi-task approach allowed assessing the development and interplay of several aspects of motor control related to different coordinative requirements. Children were first able to symmetrically move the two hands, and only later to coordinate one hand with a proprioceptive or visual signal. The ability to strategically ignore sensory information was available last. The pattern of partial correlations among tasks suggests protracted, interdependent, chained development within individuals. NEW AND NOTEWORTHY Development unfolds as a cascade: each new ability sets the stage for learning further skills in motor, sensory, cognitive, and social domains. Here, we charted the performance of 4–12- year-olds in six coordinative tasks that are all based on a common experimental paradigm but address three different sensorimotor-cognitive domains. This approach characterizes dependencies between multiple aspects of cognitive modulation in the interplay of sensory integration and motor control.
How does Music Affect Your Brain? A Pilot Study on EEG and Music Features for Automatic Analysis

Music can effectively induce specific emotion and usually be used in clinical treatment or intervention. The electroencephalogram can help reflect the impact of music. Previous studies showed that the existing methods achieved relatively good performance in predicting emotion response to music. However, these methods tend to be time consuming and expensive due to their complexity. To this end, this study proposes a grey wolf optimiser-based method to predict the induced emotion through fusing electroencephalogram features and music features. Experimental results show that, the proposed method can reach a promising performance for predicting emotional response to music and outperform the alternative method. In addition, we analyse the relationship between the music features and electroencephalogram features and the results demonstrate that, musical timbre features are significantly related to the electroencephalogram features.Clinical relevance— This study targets the automatic prediction of the human response to music. It further explores the correlation between EEG features and music features aiming to provide the basis for the extension to the application of music. The grey wolf optimiser-based method proposed in this study could supply a promising avenue for the emotion prediction as induced by music.
Facilitating knowledge sharing Improving SOP adaptation and cross-sectional collaboration

Due to a lack of cross-sectional collaboration and standardization in job performance in a ‘Finance and Accounting department’, at a large public Danish University, the management decided on two interventions: Firstly, eight operations employees participated in a ten-hour Training Within Industry – Job Instruction (TWI-JI) course and secondly a trainer Community of Practice (CoP) was established. The study followed the case in a ten-month period. Qualitative data for the employee perceived organizational change and the employee-assessed causes of the change shows that TWI-JI was mostly related to changes in training and less to knowledge sharing. Analysis of the time trainers used on training and on the development of job instructions (JI’s) shows that trainers performed activity related to the change causes . The study documents that the case company experienced a substantial positive change within the organizational capabilities ’Training’ and ‘Knowledge sharing’, and that the TWI-JI intervention has played an important role. We propose that TWI-JI could play an important role in organizational knowledge sharing because the method can improve the organizational capability to develop knowledge through JI development and share knowledge through training sessions. The lack of data describing process change and by this being a single organization case study limits the results.
Measurement of Blood Dilution during Lancet-Free Blood Sampling

In this paper, we report on a fluorescent and colorimetric system for measuring the dilution of capillary blood released by a needle-free jet injector. Jet injection uses a high-speed liquid jet to penetrate tissue, and in the process can release capillary blood that can be collected for performing blood tests. In this way, blood sampling can be performed without the use of a lancet. However, any injectate that mixes with the collected blood dilutes the sample and may significantly impact subsequent analyses. By adding the fluorescent marker indocyanine green to the injected liquid, the fraction of injectate mixed into the collected blood can be measured. The incorporation of colorimetry allows our system to also correct for the impact of hematocrit on fluorescence. The results from this system show that it can determine the dilution of blood that has been diluted by up to 10 %, the upper limit of dilution typically observed in lancet-free blood sampling via jet injection.Clinical Relevance— Blood samples can be collected by jet injection without significant dilution, avoiding the need for lancing.
Dissociating haptic feedback from physical assistance does not improve motor performance

In robots for motor rehabilitation and sports training, haptic assistance typically provides both mechanical guidance and task-relevant information. With the natural human tendency to minimise metabolic cost, mechanical guidance may however prevent efficient short term learning and retention. In this work, we explore the effect of providing haptic feedback to the not active hand during a tracking task. We test four types of haptic feedback: task- or error-related information, no information and irrelevant information. The results show that feedback provided to the hand not carrying out the tracking task did not improve task performance. However, irrelevant information to the task worsened performance, and negatively influenced the participants’ perception of helpfulness, assistance, likability and predictability.
Impact of Imperfect Exoskeleton Algorithms on Step Characteristics, Task Performance, and Perception of Exoskeleton Performance

Lower-limb exoskeletons may experience errors in operational settings, where an expected assistive torque is missing. These errors may affect user's gait strategies and perception of the exoskeleton's performance, leading to impacted human-exoskeleton fluency and user trust in the system. In this study, we introduced five different exoskeleton control algorithms with fixed error rates up to 10% error (90% accuracy). Two groups of participants (N=22, 11 per group) walked with a bilateral ankle exoskeleton while completing a targeted stepping task and experienced each controller twice, but in different orders. The impact of exoskeleton error rates was assessed on step characteristics (step length and width), task performance (absolute task error), and perception of exoskeleton performance (survey responses). Step character-istics were not impacted by exoskeleton errors, but multiple participants were not able to achieve acceptable task accuracy and increased task error over time across all error rates. Increasing error rates negatively impacted users' perception of algorithm predictability, exoskeleton supportiveness, and probability of future usage. Perceived predictability and future usage probability transitioned from positive to negative between 2% and 5% error. Understanding the effect of increasing exoskeleton error rates informs minimum algorithm accuracy to support human-exoskeleton fluency and performance for gait-assist exoskeletons.
Vision Transformer for Parkinson’s Disease Classification using Multilingual Sustained Vowel Recordings

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the 2nd most prevalent neurodegenerative disease in the world. Thus, the early detection of PD has recently been the subject of several scientific and commercial studies. In this paper, we propose a pipeline using Vision Transformer applied to mel-spectrograms for PD classification using multilingual sustained vowel recordings. Furthermore, our proposed transformed-based model shows a great potential to use voice as a single modality biomarker for automatic PD detection without language restrictions, a wide range of vowels, with an F1-score equal to 0.78. The results of our study fall within the range of the estimated prevalence of voice and speech disorders in Parkinson’s disease, which ranges from 70-90%. Our study demonstrates a high potential for adaptation in clinical decision-making, allowing for increasingly systematic and fast diagnosis of PD with the potential for use in telemedicine.Clinical relevance— There is an urgent need to develop non invasive biomarker of Parkinson’s disease effective enough to detect the onset of the disease to introduce neuroprotective treatment at the earliest stage possible and to follow the results of that intervention. Voice disorders in PD are very frequent and are expected to be utilized as an early diagnostic biomarker. The voice analysis using deep neural networks open new opportunities to assess neurodegenerative diseases’ symptoms, for fast diagnosis-making, to guide treatment initiation, and risk prediction. The detection accuracy for voice biomarkers according to our method reached close to the maximum achievable value.
Changes in pelvic floor electrical activity and vulvar pain after botulinum toxin treatment of vestibulodynia: are clinical and electrophysiological outcomes related?*

Vestibulodynia is a gynecological condition with different treatment options available, including botulinum neurotoxin type A (BoNT/A) injections into the vulvar vestibule. Unlike other treatments, no studies have assessed changes in the myoelectrical activity of the pelvic floor muscles (PFM) after BoNT/A treatment. The aim of this study was thus to evaluate these changes and to correlate them with changes in vulvar pain sensitivity. To do this, 35 patients with vestibulodynia were recruited, the myoelectrical activity of their left and right PFM was recorded with surface electromyography (sEMG), and their vulvar pain sensitivity was monitored according to Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and an algometer, both before and after BoNT/A treatment. According to our results, patients’ signals during PFM relaxation showed a significantly higher power than those of healthy women at baseline, as shown by their root mean square values (RMS), but became similar at follow-up. Patients’ mean vulvar pain VAS scores significantly decreased after treatment. Furthermore, baseline-to-follow-up differences of RMS at PFM rest vs. mean VAS were significantly correlated (CC=0.48, p<0.01) so that higher reductions in the PFM activity power were associated with higher decreases in vulvar pain.Clinical Relevance— Altered PFM electrophysiological condition of patients with vestibulodynia becomes similar to healthy women’s after BoNT/A treatment. This study also points to a relationship between the evolution of clinical and PFM electrophysiological conditions