Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison of the short-term outcomes of simple and complex segmentectomy via uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery

Background Performing complex segmentectomy via uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) is a more demanding and intricate procedure than simple segmentectomy or lobectomy. Thus, the aim of our study is to evaluate the safety and feasibility of uniportal VATS complex segmentectomy compared to uniportal VATS simple segmentectomy by investigating surgical outcomes of patients undergoing those procedures. Methods We conducted a review of medical records for all patients who underwent uniportal VATS segmentectomy for lung cancer from May 2019 to February 2023. The characteristics of the patients and tumors, as well as the operative and postoperative outcomes, were compared between the group of patients who underwent simple segmentectomy and the group who underwent complex segmentectomy. Results Among 199 patients, 67 underwent simple segmentectomy through uniportal VATS, while 132 patients received complex segmentectomy through the same technique. There were no significant differences between the two groups regarding patient and tumor characteristics, operative outcomes, and postoperative outcomes, except for the surgical margin distances. Uniportal VATS complex segmentectomy resulted in shorter duration of postoperative stay (6 vs. 7 days, P=0.0116) but a closer surgical margin distance (20 vs. 22 mm, P=0.0175). Conclusions Our study supports the use of uniportal VATS complex segmentectomy as a safe and feasible treatment option compared to uniportal VATS simple segmentectomy for patients with clinical stage 1A non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, it is important to note that a short resection margin is probable in complex segmentectomy cases. Therefore, the location of the tumor should be thoroughly evaluated when performing uniportal VATS complex segmentectomy.
Distinct styles of fluvial deposition in a Cambrian rift basin

Process‐based and facies models to account for the origin of pre‐vegetation (i.e. pre‐Silurian) preserved fluvial sedimentary architectures remain poorly defined in terms of their ability to account for the nature of the fluvial conditions required to accumulate and preserve architectural elements in the absence of the stabilizing influence of vegetation. In pre‐vegetation fluvial successions, the repeated reworking of bars and minor channels that resulted in the generation and preservation of broad, tabular, stacked sandstone‐sheets has been previously regarded as the dominant sedimentary mechanism. This situation is closely analogous to modern‐day poorly vegetated systems developed in arid climatic settings. However, this study demonstrates the widespread presence of substantially more complex stratigraphic architectures. The Guarda Velha Formation of Southern Brazil is a >500 m‐thick synrift fluvial succession of Cambrian age that records the deposits and sedimentary architecture of three distinct fluvial successions: (i) an early rift‐stage system characterized by coarse‐grained channel elements indicative of a distributive pattern with flow transverse to the basin axis; and two coeval systems from the early‐ to climax‐rift stages that represent (ii) an axially directed, trunk fluvial system characterized by large‐scale amalgamated sandy braid‐bar elements, and (iii) a distributive fluvial system characterized by multi‐storey, sandy braided‐channel elements that flowed transverse to the basin axis. Integration of facies and architectural‐element analysis with regional stratigraphic basin analysis, palaeocurrent and pebble‐provenance analysis demonstrates the mechanisms responsible for preserving the varied range of fluvial architectures present in this pre‐vegetation, rift‐basin setting. Identified major controls that influenced pre‐vegetation fluvial sedimentary style include: (i) spatial and temporal variation in discharge regime; (ii) the varying sedimentological characteristics of distinct catchment areas; (iii) the role of tectonic basin configuration and its direct role in influencing palaeoflow direction and fluvial style, whereby both the axial and transverse fluvial systems undertook a distinctive response to syn‐depositional movement on basin‐bounding faults. Detailed architectural analyses of these deposits reveal significant variations in geometry, with characteristics considerably more complex than that of simple, laterally extensive, stacked sandstone‐sheets predicted by most existing depositional models for pre‐vegetation fluvial systems. These results suggest that the sheet‐braided style actually encompasses a varied number of different pre‐vegetation fluvial styles. Moreover, this study demonstrates that contemporaneous axial and transverse fluvial systems with distinctive architectural expressions can be preserved in the same overall tectonic and climatic setting.
The effect of worked examples on learning solution steps and knowledge transfer

Abstract The worked example effect has been well documented within the framework of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), which suggests that teaching with examples would be superior to engaging in unguided problem solving, particularly for novices, as using worked examples would reduce their cognitive load, compared to solving problems, thus facilitating knowledge retention. This paper, using multiple-step mathematics problems, reports an experiment investigating the micro level of the worked example effect on learning solution steps, from the perspective of cognitive load and challenge (as a relevant affective, motivational factor), testing the worked example effect with a transfer test. The results favoured worked examples on both the retention and transfer tests after learning and showed that using worked examples would reduce cognitive load and impose less challenge on each step during learning.
Multimedia-enhanced learning of volleyball rules in physical education and sports faculties

Background and Study Aim. As technology's role in education grows, assessing its efficacy in sports curriculum becomes increasingly crucial. In light of potential limitations in traditional teaching methods, exploring innovative approaches becomes imperative to enhance the learning experience. This study investigates the impact of multimedia usage in teaching the theoretical aspects of volleyball rules within faculties of physical education and sports sciences. Material and Methods. The research included a total of 87 students. From this pool, 20 students were selected to form two groups, each consisting of 10 students. This study compared two groups using two different teaching methods: a multimedia-based program group and a traditional program group. The research employed a descriptive approach and the causal-comparative study method. Results. The results indicated that the use of multimedia had a positive impact on teaching the theoretical aspects of volleyball rules courses. There were statistically significant differences between the pre- and post-measurements of the traditional program group, with the post-measurement being superior. Furthermore, significant differences were observed between the two post-measurements of the two groups, with the multimedia-based program group showing a superior outcome. Conclusions. These results emphasize the potential of multimedia as an effective tool for enriching sports curriculum within faculties of physical education and sports sciences. Further exploration of multimedia's role in education is warranted to harness its full potential for pedagogical enhancement.
Uncertainty quantification and global sensitivity analysis of the Los Alamos sea ice model

Changes in the high-latitude climate system have the potential to affect global climate through feedbacks with the atmosphere and connections with midlatitudes. Sea ice and climate models used to understand these changes have uncertainties that need to be characterized and quantified. We present a quantitative way to assess uncertainty in complex computer models, which is a new approach in the analysis of sea ice models. We characterize parametric uncertainty in the Los Alamos sea ice model (CICE) in a standalone configuration and quantify the sensitivity of sea ice area, extent, and volume with respect to uncertainty in 39 individual model parameters. Unlike common sensitivity analyses conducted in previous studies where parameters are varied one at a time, this study uses a global variance-based approach in which Sobol' sequences are used to efficiently sample the full 39-dimensional parameter space. We implement a fast emulator of the sea ice model whose predictions of sea ice extent, area, and volume are used to compute the Sobol' sensitivity indices of the 39 parameters. Main effects and interactions among the most influential parameters are also estimated by a nonparametric regression technique based on generalized additive models. A ranking based on the sensitivity indices indicates thatmore » model predictions are most sensitive to snow parameters such as snow conductivity and grain size, and the drainage of melt ponds. Lastly, it is recommended that research be prioritized toward more accurately determining these most influential parameter values by observational studies or by improving parameterizations in the sea ice model. « less
Urban park’s ecological and recreational aspects in developing country: evaluating the Bãngr-Weoogo Park in Ouagadougou

The recognition of recreational and conservation benefits of protected areas provides a usable economic rationale for their management. The value of recreational and conservation benefits of the Bangr-Weoogo urban parks at Ouagadoudou in Burkina Faso is evaluated using choice experiment. We aim to see if visitors' preferences shared between recreation and biodiversity of urban park, at first views divergent, can be reconcilable in developing countries context by identifying trade-offs between the different characteristics of the park. Our results show that current Park is preferred and increase of biodiversity level is the feature able to improve the visitors' well-being. Likewise, modification of current recreational restrictions or the increase of relaxing areas reduces their welfare.
Age-Related COVID-19 Influence on Male Fertility

The impact of coronavirus on the reproductive health of men attracts the special attention of many researchers. While studies suggest changes in sperm parameters and the possibility of testicular inflammation, further studies are needed to elucidate any potential age-related changes in these findings, which is the purpose of the present study. The semen quality parameters, cytokine concentration, and markers of the pro- and antioxidant system were assessed in 60 men five to seven months after the coronavirus infection and in 77 controls (without a history of coronavirus infection). Additionally, participants were divided into two age groups: less than 35 years and 35 years or older. Notably increased round cell count in ejaculate and reduced sperm hyaluronan binding ability were observed among post-infection patients younger than 35 years. In the same group, a decline in seminal plasma zinc levels and nitrotyrosine in the cell fraction was found. In men over 35 years of age, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to increased sperm DNA fragmentation, a decrease in the total antioxidant capacity, and an elevation in the levels of interleukin-1β and interleukin-10. The concentration of interleukin-1β decreased over time following recovery in all affected patients. The data obtained suggest the potential adverse impact of the coronavirus infection on male reproductive health; however, these effects appear to be age-dependent.
A Wideband 16x16 Butler Matrix for Millimeter-Wave Beam-Switching Applications

This paper presents a compact and wideband 16×16 Butler Matrix (BM) beam-switching network operating over the frequency band from 37 GHz to 42 GHz. The structure is designed based on a three-layer stack-up and consists of wideband aperture couplers and Schiffman phase shifters. PCB VIA interconnect is adopted to avoid crossover and therefore minimizing the circuitry footprint and design complexity. The simulation results show a return loss and isolation better than -9 dB and -12 dB, respectively with an average insertion loss of 6 dB over the bandwidth. The BM network has a compact size of 60 mm × 26 mm which makes it a suitable beam-switching network option for integration inside millimetre-wave consumer electronics applications. The designed 16×16 BM has been fabricated and measured. Array factor is plotted using the simulated and measured phases and magnitudes of the network. The array factor plots show that by feeding the input ports separately, 16 directional beams are produced covering ±68° spatial angle at the center frequency of 39.5 GHz.
Machine learning and spectral techniques for lithological classification

Experimentations with applications of machine learning algorithms such as random forest (RF), support vector machines (SVM) and fuzzy inference system (FIS) to lithological classification of multispectral datasets are described. The input dataset such as LANDSAT-8 and Advanced Space-borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) in conjunction with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital elevation are used. The training data included image pixels with known lithoclasses as well as the laboratory spectra of field samples of the major lithoclasses. The study area is a part of Ajmer and Pali Districts, Western Rajasthan, India. The main lithoclasses exposed in the area are amphibolite, granite, calc-silicates, mica-schist, pegmatite and carbonates. In a parallel implementation, spectral parameters derived from the continuum-removed laboratory spectra of the field samples (e.g., band depth) were used in spectral matching algorithms to generate geological maps from the LANDSAT-8 and ASTER data. The classification results indicate that, as compared to the SVM, the RF algorithm provides higher accuracy for the minority class, while for the rest of the classes the two algorithms are comparable. The RF algorithm effectively deals with outliers and also ranks the input spectral bands based on their importance in classification. The FIS approach provides an efficient expert-driven system for lithological classification. It based on matching the image spectral features with the absorption features of the laboratory spectra of the field samples, and returns comparable results for some lithoclasses. The study also establishes spectral parameters of amphibolite, granite, calc-silicates, mica-schist, pegmatite and carbonates that can be used in generating geological maps from multispectral data using spectral matching algorithms.
Prediction of Volume Change in an Expansive Soil as a Result of Vegetation and Environmental Changes

This paper presents a numerical model to predict the volume change in an expansive soil as a result of vegetation and environmental changes. The model formulation is based on the general theory of unsaturated soil behavior. Three typical volume change situations associated with water uptake by tree roots and water infiltration into soils due to watering at surface are presented.
Assessment of the Pacific sardine resource in 2009 for U. S. management in 2010: Executive Summary

Per requests of the 2009 May STAR panel, we examined the estimates of spawning biomass based on the weighted average for each of the parameters: P0 and four adult parameters: female weight (W), sex ratio (R), batch fecundity (F) and daily spawning fraction (S), where the weight was the estimated spawning biomass in each of two regions. The resulting estimates of spawning biomass were imprecise. Our exercise indicated that the total spawning biomass was best estimated by the sum of the two regional spawning biomasses. We revised the estimate of the daily spawning fraction (S) by using the average of females spawning the night before capture (day-1) and those spawning two nights before capture (day-2) for the number of spawning females to replace females spawning the night of capture (day-0) with the total number of mature females adjusted accordingly. We computed the female spawning biomass (or the population egg production) for years when adequate adult samples were available: 1986, 1987, 1994, 2004, 2005, and 2007-2009. Estimates of spawning biomass and the female spawning biomass (fs. biomass) were recalculated for 1986, and 1987 using the recent estimation procedure. In addition, we also provided a time series of total egg production for years when not all the adult parameter estimates were available or few trawls were taken: 1988, 1996-2003, and 2006. Two time series were summarized in two separate tables similar to Table 4 in Lo et al. (2007 and 2008). The year of 1995 was excluded from the stock assessment because the survey area was the quarterly CalCOFI area (CalCOFI lines 77-95) and not the standard daily egg production method survey area (CalCOFI lines 60-95).
Online discussion in improving argumentation skills during last decade: A review

This study aimed to find research trend online discussion to improve argumentation skills in education especially physics education. The method used in this research is bibliometric analysis by using VOSviewer. The data used is the Scopus database in the last 10 years. The research findings found that there are 1,447 documents that meet the predetermined criteria. The number of online discussion research increases gradually over the research period 2012-2021. The two highest sources of documents came from journals and conference proceedings and a higher percentage of citations were carried out on scientific journal. There are five trend research clusters on online discussion (4 main clusters and 1 secondary). The first cluster focuses on online discussion methods, the second cluster focuses on online discussion model, the third cluster focuses on the application of online discussions, the fourth cluster focuses on media used in online discussions, the fifth secondary cluster focuses on the goals of online discussion. The “argumentation” keyword is not included in the top 10 keywords, this shows that online discussion research has just little linked to argumentation as an indicator of the quality of online discussion. This condition creates an opportunity for further research related to online discussion in improving argumentation skills.
Towards A Holistic Landscape of Situated Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on different aspects of ToM and are prone to shortcuts and data leakage. In this position paper, we seek to answer two road-blocking questions: (1) How can we taxonomize a holistic landscape of machine ToM? (2) What is a more effective evaluation protocol for machine ToM? Following psychological studies, we taxonomize machine ToM into 7 mental state categories and delineate existing benchmarks to identify under-explored aspects of ToM. We argue for a holistic and situated evaluation of ToM to break ToM into individual components and treat LLMs as an agent who is physically situated in environments and socially situated in interactions with humans. Such situated evaluation provides a more comprehensive assessment of mental states and potentially mitigates the risk of shortcuts and data leakage. We further present a pilot study in a grid world setup as a proof of concept. We hope this position paper can facilitate future research to integrate ToM with LLMs and offer an intuitive means for researchers to better position their work in the landscape of ToM. Project page: https://github.com/Mars-tin/awesome-theory-of-mind
LAVSS: Location-Guided Audio-Visual Spatial Audio Separation

Existing machine learning research has achieved promising results in monaural audio-visual separation (MAVS). However, most MAVS methods purely consider what the sound source is, not where it is located. This can be a problem in VR/AR scenarios, where listeners need to be able to distinguish between similar audio sources located in different directions. To address this limitation, we have generalized MAVS to spatial audio separation and proposed LAVSS: a location-guided audio-visual spatial audio separator. LAVSS is inspired by the correlation between spatial audio and visual location. We introduce the phase difference carried by binaural audio as spatial cues, and we utilize positional representations of sounding objects as additional modality guidance. We also leverage multi-level cross-modal attention to perform visual-positional collaboration with audio features. In addition, we adopt a pre-trained monaural separator to transfer knowledge from rich mono sounds to boost spatial audio separation. This exploits the correlation between monaural and binaural channels. Experiments on the FAIR-Play dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LAVSS over existing benchmarks of audio-visual separation. Our project page: https://yyx666660.github. io/LAVSS/.
The field theory of collective Cherenkov radiation associated with electron beams

Classical Cherenkov radiation is a celebrated physics phenomenon of electromagnetic (EM) radiation stimulated by an electric charge moving with constant velocity in a three-dimensional dielectric medium. Cherenkov radiation has a wide spectrum and a particular distribution in space similar to the Mach cone created by a supersonic source. It is also characterized by the energy transfer from the charge's kinetic energy to the EM radiation. In the case of an electron beam passing through the middle of an EM waveguide, the radiation is manifested as collective Cherenkov radiation. In this case, the electron beam can be viewed as a one-dimensional non-neutral plasma, whereas the waveguide can be viewed as a slow wave structure. This collective radiation occurs, in particular, in traveling wave tubes (TWTs), and it features the energy transfer from the electron beam to the EM radiation in the waveguide. Based on a first principles Lagrangian field theory, we develop a convincing argument that the collective Cherenkov effect in TWTs is, in fact, a convective instability, that is, amplification. We also recover Pierce's theory as a high-frequency limit of our generalized Lagrangian theory. Finally, we derive for the first time expressions identifying low- and high-frequency cutoffs for amplification in TWTs.