Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of CO2 spatiotemporal variations in China using tower data
and a weather-biosphere-online-coupled model, WRF-VPRM

Abstract. Dynamics of CO2 has received considerable attention in the literature, yet significant uncertainties remain within the estimates of contribution from terrestrial flux and the influence of atmospheric mixing. In this study we apply the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Vegetation Photosynthesis and Respiration Model (WRF-VPRM) in China to characterize CO2 dynamics with tower data collected at a background site Lin’an (30.30° N, 119.75° E). The online coupled weather-biosphere WRF-VPRM simulations are able to simulate biosphere processes (photosynthetic uptake and ecosystem respiration) and meteorology in one coordinate system. Simulations are conducted for three years (2016–2018) with fine grid resolution (20 km) to detail the spatiotemporal variations of CO2 fluxes and concentrations. This is the first attempt to apply the weather-biosphere model for a multi-year simulation with integrated data from a satellite product, flask samplings, and tower measurements to diagnose the dynamics of CO2 in China. We find that the spatial distribution of CO2 is determined by anthropogenic emissions, while its seasonality (with maximum concentrations in April 15 ppmv higher than minimums in August) is dominated by terrestrial flux and background CO2. Observations and simulations reveal a consistent increasing trend in column-averaged CO2 (XCO2) of 0.6 %/yr resulting from anthropogenic emission growth and biosphere uptake. WRF-VPRM successfully reproduces ground-based measurements of surface CO2 concentration with mean bias of −0.79 ppmv (−0.20 %) and satellite derived XCO2 with mean bias of 0.76 ppmv (0.19 %). The model-simulated seasonality is also consistent with observations, with correlation coefficients of 0.90 and 0.89 for ground-based measurements and Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite data, respectively. However, evaluation against Lin'an tower data reveals uncertainty within the model for simulating the intensity and diurnal variation of terrestrial flux, which contributes to overestimation by ~5.35 ppmv (1.26 %). Lin'an tower observations also reveal a strong correlation (−0.85) between vertical CO2 and temperature gradients, suggesting a significant influence of boundary layer thermal structure on the accumulation and depletion of atmospheric CO2.
Website Interactivity’s Effects on Revisit Intention: A Moderated-Mediation Analysis of the Particulate Matter Issue in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study uses four manipulated versions of a website that provides particulate matter (PM) information, by differentiating the degree of interactivity of website features, to examine the effect of interactivity on systematic processing and behavioral intention. The data from the online experiment show that the medium level of interactivity was effective for enhancing systematic processing and, in turn, increased intentions to learn about the website. In addition, this relationship was especially emphasized for those who had negative preexisting PM attitudes. The findings contribute to developing the framework of interactivity research and provide suggestions for website design.
Hypo-magnesium and Hyperlipidemia Responsible for Hypertensive Status of Pregnant Women in Pakistani Population

Background/ Aim: Pregnancy induced hypertension (PIH) has been a leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. It could be responsible for several complications like hemodilution, altered lipid metabolism and deficiencies of different minerals in body. Although the causes of Pregnancy induced hypertension (PIH) remains indistinct. The aim of our present study was to evaluate the changes in magnesium serum levels and lipid profile in hypertensive and normotensive pregnant women. Original Research Article Parveen et al.; JPRI, 32(32): 61-66, 2020; Article no.JPRI. 62757 62 Materials and Methods: An analytical case control study comprising 60 individuals was designed. From which 30 normotensive pregnant women served as control group (A) and 30 pregnancy induced hypertensive women served as case group (B). Patients with pre-existing hypertension were excluded. Results: The independent t-test was used for comparison of various parameters between group A and B. Triacylglycerol (TAG) and low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels were significantly high in PIH (B) as compare to normotensive group (A). Mean serum values of TG were measured as (195.73 ± 70.28 vs 156.27 ± 55.60 mg dL) and LDL-C vs control (87.33 ± 37.74 vs 69.45 ± 28.58 mg dL -1 ) in PIH and normotensive groups respectively. HDL-C in PIH vs Control (47.40±1.12 vs 54.43 ±1.27 mg dL) and Mg PIH vs control (1.36±0.07 vs 1.94±0.35 mg dL) were measured respectively. High density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and magnesium Mg +2 levels were significantly reduced in PIH. Conclusion: The lower serum magnesium levels and abnormal lipids profile may indicate their possible role as risk factors in the development of PIH in pregnant women. Hence initial diagnosis of hypomagnesemia in PIH cases may help in minimizing the complications and development of new cure strategies.
Association of clinical characteristics with decision making in patients with severe lower extremity trauma

Severe lower limb trauma represents a challenge for both the emergency department physicians and the surgeons. These injuries are associated with significant incidence of limb loss and it is not uncommon for the treating physician to make the hard decision between limb salvage, amputation or stump closure for a patient in critical condition. Our aim was to evaluate the epidemiology of traumatic lower extremity amputations and to analyze the factors which may have effect on patient resuscitation, limb salvage and efficient patient management. Patients who were admitted to our institution’s emergency department for traumatic lower extremity amputation over an 8 years’ period (2012 to 2020) were retrospectively analyzed. Patient files with the possibility of severe lower limb trauma and mangled extremity were retrieved and analyzed using ICD codes recorded/registered during the emergency department admission. Mean time from emergency admission to transfer to operating theater was 184,5 minutes. Replantation of the amputate was performed in 4 patients (19%). 25% of the amputations at the ankle level (1 out of 4) and 37.5% of the transtibial amputates (3 out of 8) were replanted. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary in every aspect of patient management; however, this does not justify a delay in treatment. Time spent during conclusion of necessary consultations does not have negative effects on patient outcome as long as patient is closely monitored and resuscitated in the emergency department.
Vitamin D in gestational diabetes mellitus and its association with hyperglycaemia, insulin sensitivity and other factors

Abstract We investigated if vitamin D is independently associated with hyperglycaemia in gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Serum 25 hydroxy vitamin D (25OHD), fasting blood glucose (FBG), HbA1c, fructosamine, insulin sensitivity (QUICKI equation), body mass index, clothing style and outdoor activity were measured in 58 pregnant women with GDM during the third trimester. 25OHD was also measured in 20 women with normal pregnancies. There was no significant difference in mean 25OHD concentrations between GDM (14.43 ± 5.27 ng/ml) and normal (15.45 ± 5.29 ng/ml) pregnancies, p = . 354. However, a higher percentage of GDM subjects had 25OHD concentration <19.8 ng/ml (86 versus 65%, p = .003). 25OHD did not correlate with FBG, HbA1c, fructosamine, insulin sensitivity or insulin dosage (p > .05). On multivariate analysis, only ethnicity (p = .006) and outdoor activity (p = .004) were associated with 25OHD. We conclude that the lower 25OHD levels in our GDM patients were related to ethnicity and outdoor activity (Study FF-2017-111, National University of Malaysia, 16 March 2017). IMPACT STATEMENT What is already known on this subject? Vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy is widespread and particularly in certain ethnic groups. Low vitamin D levels may be an aetiological factor for gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) but previous studies provide conflicting results perhaps due to confounding factors. What do the results of this study add? In this study of pregnant women with GDM from different ethnic backgrounds, we analysed serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D (25OHD) levels together with other confounding factors, that is, body mass index, ethnicity and sunlight exposure. Furthermore, instead of using consensus values, we determined cut-offs for different vitamin D status from normal pregnancies matched for gestational age and ethnicity. We found that a higher percentage of GDM subjects had lower vitamin D status but there was no correlation with hyperglycaemia or insulin sensitivity. The study showed that lower vitamin D levels in GDM was associated with ethnicity and less outdoor activity. What the implications are of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? In GDM patients, low vitamin D levels may be modifiable by supplementation or lifestyle change. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether this would impact on the occurrence of GDM.
The influence of hardiness and habit on security behaviour intention

ABSTRACT Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up a large percentage of businesses; they employ over 50% of all employees, and account for most partnerships in supply chain networks. This makes SME employees a target for cybercriminals. This study examines the factors that influence the security behaviour intention of SME employees to better understand how SMEs can manage cybersecurity risk caused by employee security behaviour. In a survey of 294 employees, the research model developed from the theory of planned behaviour and protection motivation theory, including the habit and hardiness personality trait, is empirically validated to understand employee security behaviour intention. The results of the study show that hardiness and habit have a significant effect on employee security behaviour intention. The findings contribute to the literature on personality traits and habit in the context of information security behaviour. The study's implications for research and practice are also discussed.
Identification of droughts and heatwaves in Germany with regional climate networks

Abstract. Regional climate networks (RCNs) are used to identify heatwaves and droughts in Germany and two subregions for the summer half-years and summer seasons of the period 1951 to 2019. RCNs provide information for whole areas (in contrast to the point-wise information from standard indices), the underlying nodes can be distributed arbitrarily, they are easy to construct, and they provide details otherwise difficult to access, like temporal and spatial extent and localisation of extreme events; this makes them suitable for the statistical analysis of climate model output. The RCNs were constructed on the regular 0.25∘ grid of the E-OBS data set. The season-wise correlation of the time series of daily maximum temperature Tmax and precipitation were used to construct the adjacency matrix of the networks. Based on the results of a sensitivity study, we used the edge density, which increases significantly during extreme events, as the main metrics to characterise the network structure. The standard indices for comparison were the Effective Drought Index and Effective Heat Index (EDI and EHI), respectively, based on the same time series and complemented by other published data. Our results show that the RCNs are generally able to identify severe and moderate extremes and can differentiate between regions and seasons.
Skin Lesion Segmentation Using Local Binary Convolution-Deconvolution Architecture

Deep learning techniques such as Deep Convolutional Networks have achieved great success in skin lesion segmentation towards melanoma detection. The performance is however restrained by distinctive and challenging features of skin lesions such as irregular and fuzzy border, noise and artefacts presence and low contrast between lesions. The methods are also restricted with scarcity of annotated lesion images training dataset and limited computing resources. Recent research in convolutional neural network (CNN) has provided a variety of new architectures for deep learning. One interesting new architecture is the local binary convolutional neural network (LBCNN), which can reduce the workload of CNNs and improve the classification accuracy. The proposed framework employs the local binary convolution on U-net architecture instead of the standard convolution in order to reduced-size deep convolutional encoder-decoder network that adopts loss function for robust segmentation. The proposed framework replaced the encoder part in U-net by LBCNN layers. The approach automatically learns and segments complex features of skin lesion images. The encoder stage learns the contextual information by extracting discriminative features while the decoder stage captures the lesion boundaries of the skin images. This addresses the issues with encoder-decoder network producing coarse segmented output with challenging skin lesions appearances such as low contrast between healthy and unhealthy tissues and fine grained variability. It also addresses issues with multi-size, multi-scale and multi-resolution skin lesion images. The deep convolutional network also adopts a reduced-size network with just five levels of encoding-decoding network. This reduces greatly the consumption of computational processing resources. The system was evaluated on publicly available dataset of ISIC and PH2. The proposed system outperforms most of the existing state-of-art.
Latinx Boys and Juvenile Delinquency

This study examines Latinx boys in the juvenile justice system and addresses acculturation theory to assess whether or not adjudicated foreign-born Latinx boys are more delinquent than others before adjudication, and whether or not these boys are a bigger burden on the juvenile justice system than others. The present study addresses data and methodological issues that plague the current research using the Ocean Tides Database containing multi-year (1975–2019) cross sectional data for 1,083 adjudicated boys. Multivariate analyses confirm that Latinx immigrant youth who are delinquent pose no greater threats to the American public either before or after adjudication than US-born citizens or other immigrants do. There is minimal support for acculturation theory in explaining behavioral differences between first and second-generation Latinx immigrants.
Refinement of hexagonal BaTiO3

Pure single crystals of barium titanate have been synthesized and the structure refined using the atomic coordinates of Burbank & Evans [Acta Cryst. (1948), 1, 330-336]. The short Ti-Ti distance in the face-sharing Ti 2 O 9 group was determined to be 2.690 (4) A, which is significantly shorter than in other barium titanate compounds
Efficient graphical-processor-unit parallelization algorithm for computing Eigen values

Abstract. Several leading-edge applications such as pathology detection, biometric identification, and face recognition are based mainly on blob and line detection. To address this problem, Eigen value computing has been commonly employed due to its accuracy and robustness. However, Eigen value computing requires a raised computational processing, intensive memory data access, and data overlapping, which involve higher execution times. To overcome these limitations, we propose in this paper a new parallel strategy to implement Eigen value computing using a graphics processing unit (GPU). Our contributions are (1) to optimize instruction scheduling to reduce the computation time, (2) to efficiently partition processing into blocks to increase the occupancy of streaming multiprocessors, (3) to provide efficient input data splitting on shared memory to benefit from its lower access time, and (4) to propose new data management of shared memory to avoid access memory conflict and reduce memory bank accesses. Experimental results show that our proposed GPU parallel strategy for Eigen value computing achieves speedups of 27 compared with a multithreaded implementation, of 16 compared with a predefined function in the OpenCV library, and of eight compared with a predefined function in the Cublas library, all of which are performed into a quad core multi-central-processing unit platform. Next, our parallel strategy is evaluated through an Eigen value-based method for retinal thick vessel segmentation, which is essential for detecting ocular pathologies. Eigen value computing is executed in 0.017 s when using Structured Analysis of the Retina database images. Accordingly, we achieved real-time thick retinal vessel segmentation with an average execution time of about 0.039 s.
Out-of-Pocket Costs and Perceived Financial Burden Associated with Prostate Cancer Treatment in a Quebec Remote Area: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background: In publicly funded healthcare systems, patients do not pay for medical visits but can experience costs stemming from travel or over-the-counter drugs. We lack information about the extent of this burden in Canadian remote regions. This study aimed to: (1) describe prostate cancer-related out-of-pocket costs and perceived financial burden, and (2) identify factors associated with such a perceived burden among prostate cancer patients living in a remote region of the province of Quebec (Canada). Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 171 prostate cancer patients who consulted at the outpatient clinic of the Centre Hospitalier de Rouyn-Noranda. Results: The majority of patients (83%) had incurred out-of-pocket costs for their cancer care. The mean total cost incurred in the last three months was $517 and 22.3% reported a moderate, considerable or unsustainable burden. Multivariable analysis revealed that having incurred higher cancer-related out-of-pocket costs (OR: 1.001; 95%CI: 1.001–1.002) private drug insurance (vs. public, OR: 5.23; 95%CI: 1.13–24.17) was associated with a greater perceived financial burden. Having better physical health-related quality of life (OR: 0.95; 95%CI: 0.913–0.997), a university education (vs. elementary/high school level, OR: 0.03; 95%CI: 0.00–0.79), and an income between $40,000 and $79,999 (vs. ≤ $39,999, OR: 0.15; 95%CI: 0.03–0.69) were associated with a lower perceived burden. Conclusion: Prostate cancer patients incur out-of-pocket costs even if they were diagnosed many years ago and the perceived burden is significant. Greater attention should be paid to the development of services to help patients manage this burden.
Substrate Type Affects Scent-Trailing Behavior of Newborn Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus)

Animals can obtain social information from monitoring chemical cues in their environment left behind by conspecifics, competitors, predators, or prey. Whereas many studies have addressed the ability of snakes to trail scents in the laboratory along a homogeneous substrate (i.e., butcher paper), our objective was to determine if the scent-trailing behavior of a snake was affected by changes in substrate type (paper, sand, leaf litter, and burnt leaf litter). We brought five pregnant Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) into the laboratory where each gave birth to an average of nine newborns. After each newborn shed, we conducted Y-maze trials. The scent of the mother was applied down one arm of the Y-maze. Each newborn was tested on each substrate. Newborns non-randomly chose the arm with the mother's scent 87% of the time when tested on paper (P < 0.001) and 73% of the time when tested on sand (P = 0.011). When tested on leaf litter and burnt leaf litter, newborns chose the arm with the mother's scent 67% and 53% of the time (P = 0.068 and P = 0.715, respectively). Newborns also took longer to complete trials on paper compared to other substrates (F3,112 = 10.26, P> < 0.001). Thus, substrate affected the ability of newborns to scent-trail their mother. In a natural setting, the heterogeneity of substrates may facilitate scent-trailing behavior as more conducive substrates may be present among substrates that impede scent-trailing behavior. However, as prescribed fire becomes a more popular forest management tool, care should be taken in where this tool is applied.
The Influence of Work Discipline, Motivation, Job Satisfaction and the Work Environment on the Performance of Contract Employees

Every company always wants to have quality human resources to support the company's success in achieving its goals. Employees as human resources are an important asset for an organization, institution or company. Therefore, it must be managed effectively and efficiently. The achievement of company goals or the success of the company is greatly influenced by the individual performance of its employees. Thus, every organization must strive to improve employee performance in hopes of achieving company goals. This study aims to analyze the effect of work discipline, motivation, job satisfaction and work environment on the performance of contract employees at Bank Rakyat Indonesia Mataram Branch Office. This study used four analysis tools for validity and reliability, tested classical assumptions, multiple linear regression analysis, Model Test (F test) and Hypothesis Test (t test) using the SPSS application. The results of the study using the t test variables of work discipline, motivation, job satisfaction and work environment showed a significant value smaller than 0.05, this means that the variables of work discipline, motivation, job satisfaction and work environment have an effect on employee performance.
The gas-phase chemistry of carbon chains in dark cloud chemical models

We review the reactions between carbon chain molecules and radicals, namely Cn, CnH, CnH2, C2n+1O, CnN, HC2n+1N, with C, N and O atoms. Rate constants and branching ratios for these processes have been re-evaluated using experimental and theoretical literature data. In total 8 new species have been introduced, 41 new reactions have been proposed and 122 rate coefficients from kida.uva. 2011 (Wakelam et al. 2012) have been modified. We test the effect of the new rate constants and branching ratios on the predictions of gas-grain chemical models for dark cloud conditions using two different C/O elemental ratios. We show that the new rate constants produce large differences in the predicted abundances of carbon chains since the formation of long chains is less effective. The general agreement between the model predictions and observed abundances in the dark cloud TMC-1 (CP) is improved by the new network and we find that C/O ratios of 0.7 and 0.95 both produce a similar agreement for different times. The general agreement for L134N (N) is not significantly changed. The current work specifically highlights the importance of O + CnH and N + CnH reactions. As there are very few experimental or theoretical data for the rate constants of these reactions we highlight the need for experimental studies of the O + CnH and N + CnH reactions, particularly at low temperature.