Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Aspetti nutrizionali della presenza della Silice nelle acque minerali e potabili

To evaluate the nutritional relevance of silicon, his chemical forms in nature, the analytical methods most used, the presence and distribution in drinking water (mineral and tap water) and the typical ratios with other elements in water are reviewed. The concentration levels in foodstuff and in an average diet from different geographical areas are reported. The authors discuss the silicon bio-availability in relation to the whole diet and to the fibre intake that is a major source of silicon. The scientific literature about the biological effect of silicon and the relationship between intake and health status examined in experimental animals and human beings do not allow a conclusive estimate of requirements and suggest the need of further studies, mostly epidemiological. The protection of arterial wall and the promotion of bone growth and health by silicon deserve confirmation.
Potential of grass invasions in desert shrublands to create novel ecosystem states under variable climate

The invasion of exotic grasses into shrublands is a major disturbance to dryland ecosystems. The presence of exotic grasses enhances the occurrence of wildfire in landscapes that had not evolved in the presence of fire, leading to high rates of mortality of the native vegetation. Exotic grasses could be more prone to water stress and mortality than the shrubs they replaced and may not establish during drought, facts that are crucial in ecosystems undergoing increased climatic variability. Here, we develop a process‐based modelling framework to investigate the complex dynamics resulting from the introduction of exotic grasses under variable climate. We find that the system converges towards different steady states, depending on the magnitude of climatic variability. While in the absence of climate fluctuations the shrubland state is replaced by an exotic grassland, interannual climate variability may inhibit grass invasion and stabilize the shrubland state. However, climatic variability also gives rise to a novel third, unvegetated state, with grass invasion being followed by drought, grass mortality and intense soil erosion. Most of the research on climate change effects on ecosystems has historically concentrated on the ecological impact of shifts in mean climate conditions. This study shows that changes in the variance are also important when shifts in vegetation composition (e.g. species invasions) result in different susceptibility to climatic variability. In the presence of random climate fluctuations, ecosystems can display steady states that differ from those that would exist under a constant climate or with a climate trend. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Analysis of different parameterisations of waveform inversion of compressional body waves in an elastic transverse isotropic Earth with a vertical axis of symmetry

In a multi‐parameter waveform inversion, the choice of the parameterisation influences the results and their interpretations because leakages and the tradeoff between parameters can cause artefacts. We review the parameterisation selection when the inversion focuses on the recovery of the intermediate‐to‐long wavenumbers of the compressional velocities from the compressional body (P) waves. Assuming a transverse isotropic medium with a vertical axis of symmetry and weak anisotropy, analytical formulas for the radiation patterns are developed to quantify the tradeoff between the shear velocity and the anisotropic parameters and the effects of setting to zero the shear velocity in the acoustic approach. Because, in an anisotropic medium, the radiation patterns depend on the angle of the incident wave with respect to the vertical axis, two particular patterns are discussed: a transmission pattern when the ingoing and outgoing slowness vectors are parallel and a reflection pattern when the ingoing and outgoing slowness vectors satisfy Snell's law. When the inversion aims at recovering the long‐to‐intermediate wavenumbers of the compressional velocities from the P‐waves, we propose to base the parameterisation choice on the transmission patterns. Since the P‐wave events in surface seismic data do not constrain the background (smooth) vertical velocity due to the velocity/depth ambiguity, the preferred parameterisation contains a parameter that has a transmission pattern concentrated along the vertical axis. This parameter can be fixed during the inversion which reduces the size of the model space. The review of several parameterisations shows that the vertical velocity, the Thomsen parameter δ, or the Thomsen parameter ε have a transmission pattern along the vertical axis depending on the parameterisation choice. The review of the reflection patterns of those selected parameterisations should be done in the elastic context. Indeed, when reflection data are also inverted, there are potential leakages of the shear parameter at intermediate angles when we carry out acoustic inversion.
Water Quality Investigation by Physicochemical Parameters of Satluj River (Himachal Pradesh, India)

Present investigation was carried out on Satluj river in Himachal Pradesh for the analysis of important physical and chemical water quality parameters during November, 2015 to February, 2016. Parameters such as turbidity, total alkalinity, pH, conductivity, magnesium hardness, biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), dissolved carbon dioxide, total hardness, chloride, phosphate, nitrate and calcium were analyzed from five sampling stations i.e. First Sampling Station (SS-1) – Khab, Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh; Second Sampling Station (SS-2) – Wangtoo, Near dam site of Karcham Wangtoo Hydroelectric Plant, Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh; Third Sampling Station (SS-3) – Bayal at the Rampur city, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh; Fourth Sampling Station (SS-4) Kol dam, Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh and Fifth Sampling Station (SS-5) Wajipur Kalan, Ludhiana, Punjab in the study area. The analyses were carried out according to APHA, 2012 procedures. The analysis of data reveals that turbidity, chemical oxygen demand, biological oxygen demand and chlorides were found to be higher than the acceptable limit prescribed by Bureau of Indian standards (BIS), WHO standards. Higher values of these parameters reveal that the pollution in Satluj river is due to siltation, domestic & municipal sewage, industrial sewage and surface run-off that effect the water quality directly or indirectly.
Compound Impact of Storm Surge and Flood Characteristics in Coastal Area Based on Copula

In low-lying coastal areas, the interplay of various factors including precipitation, river flow, and storm surge can lead to greater influence on floods when they occur simultaneously. The copula method was used in this study to investigate the bivariate flood risk of compounding storm surge and river discharge events in the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Our results indicate that while the correlation between storm surge and flood peak (S-Q) was weak, there was a strong dependence between the pairs of storm surge–flood volume (S-V) and storm surge–flood duration (S-D). For these three pairs, the Clayton copula was the optimal function for S-Q, while the Frank copula was the optimal function for S-V and S-D, respectively. When the flood volume exceeds 2.0 × 104 m3/s and the flood duration is more than 10 days, the bivariate hydrologic risk for S-V and S-D is observed to decrease rapidly. Furthermore, the failure probability (FP) would be underestimated when the combined impact of river flow and storm surge is ignored in coastal flood risk assessment. Such bivariate hydrologic risk analysis implies that when determining design values in coastal flood risk assessment, the combined impact of river flow and storm surge should be taken into account.
The Role of High-Skilled Foreign Accounting Labor in Shaping U.S. Startup Outcomes

This study examines whether and how high-skilled foreign accounting workers provide value to U.S. startup firms. We use the H-1B visa setting where U.S. firms that apply to hire high-skilled foreign workers are randomly awarded access to hire the workers through a computer-generated lottery. We find that startup firms awarded access to high-skilled foreign accounting labor are more likely to receive external funding and are more likely to successfully exit the private market by either IPO or acquisition. Consistent with these workers aiding market participants in the assimilation of firm information, we find that startup firms demand high-skilled foreign accounting workers at a higher rate during the years they are preparing their prospectuses. Additionally, we find that IPO startup firms awarded high-skilled foreign accounting workers are priced more accurately by analysts and have lower analyst forecast dispersion during their prospectus years. Collectively, these findings suggest that high-skilled foreign accounting workers aid startups in exiting the private sector and help facilitate information assimilation by the market. As the accounting profession struggles to find workers, we provide evidence of how a source of talent serves an economically important sector of the U.S. economy.
Calculator Provision as an Accommodation for the Canadian Forces Aptitude Test (CFAT)

The impact of calculator provision on the reliability and validity of a version of the Canadian Forces Aptitude Test—Problem Solving subtest was investigated in order to inform testing accommodation policy. Two hundred and fifty-four Canadian Armed Forces recruits undergoing basic training participated in the experimental research design, which consisted of a calculator and a no-calculator condition. Results supported that the convergent validity of the test was maintained in the calculator condition, as indicated by similar validity coefficients with other measures of cognitive ability in the two conditions; however, several items showed increased correct responding, and there was mixed support for criterion-related validity when calculators were provided. Additionally, the calculator condition moderated the relationship between calculator dependency and test performance, such that the relationship was positive in the calculator condition and negative in the no-calculator condition. Implications of these results with respect to accommodation policy are discussed, as well as additional research that would be beneficial in this area.
Likely ecological impacts of global warming and climate change on the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area

1. The Queensland Conservation Council Inc (QCC) has requested me to provide an expert report of the likely ecological impacts of global warming and climate change on the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, Australia. My letter of instructions is attached as Appendix 1. 2. This report has been prepared in response to that request for use in an objections hearing concerning an open-cut coal mine in the Queensland Land and Resources Tribunal. The mine is an extension of the Newlands Coal Mine, 129 km west of Mackay, known as the “Newlands Wollombi No. 2 Project”. I am instructed that the mining, transport and use of the coal from the mine will produce greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming and climate change estimated to be 84.0 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The contribution of these emissions to global warming and climate change is a matter for other witnesses. My evidence concerns the likely impacts of global warming and climate change on the Wet Tropics World heritage Area and the rainforest biodiversity contained within the area of which the emissions from the mine the subject of this objection are a contributing factor.
Implementation of flood risk management measures into spatial plans and policies

Floods and risk in river basins can only effectively be reduced if, in addition to technical measures, spatial planning regulates land use in flood‐prone areas. The development of new settlements and industry has to be kept out of the main risk zones. Furthermore detention areas as well as room for river functions must be safeguarded in a long‐term perspective. To make the requirements of flood risk management applicable for regional planning approaches, the Rhine basin is divided into eight different ‘action areas’, according to the following criteria: (1) prevailing flood danger, (2) geophysical situation and (3) possible effects of retention measures. Groups of required actions are assigned to each action area. By this means the framework for regional flood risk management in the Rhine basin is determined.
Parallel GPU Optimization of the Shooting and Bouncing Ray Tracing Methodology for Propagation Modeling

We propose a novel unified parallelization framework consisting of algorithms, strategies, and data structures to radically enhance the efficiency of the shooting and bouncing rays (SBRs) method for ray tracing (RT) electromagnetic propagation modeling. The massively parallel optimization of the SBR code is achieved by integration of the SBR with NVIDIA OptiX Prime programming interfaces on graphics processing units (GPUs), comprehensive parallelization of all components of the SBR algorithm, including electric field computation and postprocessing tasks being traditionally limited to sequential operation, and addressing and optimizing memory usage and constraints to further advance the efficiency of the overall method. Numerical results demonstrate that the newly proposed optimized SBR methodology achieves massive parallel versus serial speedups and upward of 99% parallelism under Amdahl’s parallelization scaling law. The strategic use of GPUs and the innovative, meticulous parallel optimization of all computational aspects of the code, explained in detail in the article, yield an SBR RT methodology of unparalleled efficiency, without sacrificing the previously advanced and established accuracy of the method. Rather, the presented major enhancements of the efficiency and the uniquely high level of parallelism are enabled by and addressed synergistically with the improvements of the accuracy of the SBR computation.
CrackHAM: A Novel Automatic Crack Detection Network Based on U-Net for Asphalt Pavement

The maintenance of pavements takes considerable time and poses a significant task, especially when it comes to detecting cracks at the pixel level. Due to the complexity of pavement conditions, such as road markings, shadows, and oil stains, deep learning techniques are still a challenge in automating crack detection. This paper presents a novel methodology termed as CrackHAM, which is an encoder-decoder network founded on the U-Net architecture. The primary objectives of CrackHAM are twofold: to achieve accurate and robust pavement crack detection while reducing the parameters of the network. Our study introduces two significant improvements to the existing neural network architecture, namely the phased multi-fusion module and the dual attention mechanisms. These improvements improve the process of defect extraction, resulting in an improved level of performance. Furthermore, a novel module named HASPP is devised to augment the network’s capacity to acquire more comprehensive receptive fields. In order to lower the number of network parameters, a technique is employed whereby only use half of the number of input channels and output channels in the VGG16 are utilized as U-Net encoder modules. The empirical findings demonstrate that in the Deepcrack, Crack500, and FIND public datasets, CrackHAM achieves superior segmentation performance compared to the FCN, Deeplabv3, Swin-Unet, and U-Net models while utilizing only one-third of the computational resources.
Gut microbiota analyses of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma patients undergoing narrowband ultraviolet B therapy reveal alterations associated with disease treatment

Recent studies have shown a close relationship between cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) and its microbiome. CTCL disease progression is associated with gut dysbiosis and alterations in bacterial taxa parallel those observed in immunologically similar atopic dermatitis. Moreover, the microbial profile of lesional skin may predict response to narrowband ultraviolet B (nbUVB), a common skin-directed therapy. However, the relationship between the gut microbiome, an immunologically vital niche, and nbUVB remains unexplored in CTCL. Herein, we performed 16S rRNA sequencing and PICRUSt2 predictive metagenomics on DNA extracted from stool swabs of 13 CTCL patients treated with nbUVB, 8 non-treated patients, and 13 healthy controls. Disease response was assessed with modified Severity Weighted Assessment Tool (mSWAT); of nbUVB-treated patients, 6 improved (decreased mSWAT), 2 remained stable, and 5 worsened (increased mSWAT). Protective commensal bacteria including Lactobacillaceae and Erysipelatoclostridiaceae were significantly less abundant in CTCL patients compared to controls. With treatment, the CTCL gut microbiome exhibited decreased phylogenetic diversity and lower relative abundance of pro-inflammatory Sutterellaceae. Sutterellaceae was also significantly more abundant in patients who worsened, and Eggerthellaceae and Erysipelotrichaceae trended higher in patients who improved. Finally, PICRUSt2 functional predictions based on shifts in abundance of bacterial sequences repeatedly identified alterations in inositol degradation, which plays a key role in host immunomodulation, including inositol phospholipid signaling relevant to T-cell survival and proliferation. Our results bolster the paradigm of gut dysbiosis in CTCL and its functional implications in disease pathogenesis, and further delineate bacterial taxa associated with nbUVB response and with nbUVB treatment itself.
High protein intake can lead to serious hypophosphatemia and hypokalemia in growth restricted preterm newborns

Abstract Objectives High protein parenteral nutrition (HPPN) in the early postnatal period is a recommended strategy for very low birth weight (VLBW) infants. However, limited data is available on electrolyte changes when HPPN strategy is utilized. We investigated the impact of HPPN on the development of hypophosphatemia and hypokalemia in preterm VLBW newborns. Methods A retrospective, single‐center study investigated the levels of phosphate and potassium in VLBW infants who received HPPN (amino acids intake up to 3.5 g/kg/day) during the first week of life. Preterm infants were divided into two subgroups: appropriate for gestational age (AGA) and small for gestational age (SGA) newborns. Clinical data were obtained from hospital database and medical records. Results Overall, 170 VLBW infants were included for the study analysis: 41 SGA (mean birth weight 752 ± 39 g) and 129 AGA infants (mean birth weight 994 ± 23 g). Phosphate and potassium levels were significantly lower in the SGA infants compared to AGA infants (Phosphate: 0.97 ± 0.07 mmol/l vs. 1.44 ± 0.04 mmol/l, p < 0.001; Potassium: 3.0 ± 0.1 mmol/l vs. 3.6 ± 0.1 mmol/l, p < 0.001). Conclusions Repeated measurement of serum phosphate and potassium is recommended when HPPN strategy is utilized in preterm SGA infants where significant hypophosphatemia and hypokalemia might have serious clinical consequences.
The last millennium climate reanalysis project: Framework and first results

An “offline” approach to DA is used, where static ensemble samples are drawn from existing CMIP climate‐model simulations to serve as the prior estimate of climate variables. We use linear, univariate forward models (“proxy system models (PSMs)”) that map climate variables to proxy measurements by fitting proxy data to 2 m air temperature from gridded instrumental temperature data; the linear PSMs are then used to predict proxy values from the prior estimate. Results for the LMR are compared against six gridded instrumental temperature data sets and 25% of the proxy records are withheld from assimilation for independent verification. Results show broad agreement with previous reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean 2 m air temperature, with millennial‐scale cooling, a multicentennial warm period around 1000 C.E. , and a cold period coincident with the Little Ice Age (circa 1450–1800 C.E.). Verification against gridded instrumental data sets during 1880–2000 C.E. reveals greatest skill in the tropics and lowest skill over Northern Hemisphere land areas. Verification against independent proxy records indicates substantial improvement relative to the model (prior) data without proxy assimilation. As an illustrative example, we present multivariate reconstructed fields for a singular event, the 1808/1809 “mystery” volcanic eruption, which reveal global cooling that is strongly enhanced locally due to the presence of the Pacific‐North America wave pattern in the 500 hPa geopotential height field.
Stepping Forward: Enhancing Cognitive Learning Outcomes through Hybrid RCCR-Based Learning on Circulatory System Material

The time constraints at the end of the semester often lead to suboptimal delivery of circulatory system materials, which consequently affect students' learning outcomes. Hence, this research aims to delve into the impact of applying the RCCR (Reflect-Collaborate-Convey-Record) approach based on Hybrid Learning on enhancing cognitive learning outcomes. This study utilizes a quasi-experimental design, encompassing a control group with pretests and posttests, though they are not equivalent. Evaluation of cognitive learning outcomes involves multiple-choice questions in both the pretest and posttest phases. The data from these evaluations are quantitatively analyzed in-depth. After the learning process, the average posttest score for the control group reached 71.61, while the experimental group achieved a score of 81.25. Statistical analysis indicates a significant difference in posttest results between the experimental and control groups. The analysis of change scores (N-gain) also shows a significant difference between the experimental and control groups (p<0.05). These findings highlight a strong connection between cognitive learning outcomes and metacognitive skills mastery (r=0.83). Consequently, this learning model presents a valuable alternative for overcoming classroom time constraints and effectively enhancing cognitive learning outcomes.
Analysing the new marketing model for entertainment companies: A case study of SM. entertainment

In recent years, the metaverse have captured the general public’s attention. After so many years of development, the Korean entertainment market has become more and more competitive, and SM Entertainment, as the leading Korean entertainment company, chose to catch the wave of metaverse and create a unique metaverse marketing model, which has been a great success. The aim of the paper was to explore whether SM’s “metaverse” strategy could be a new model for all entertainment companies. This paper investigated the influential factors based on the 4Is of marketing mix theory and through a SWOT analysis. The paper showed that the importance of interest and Interaction is rising in the entertainment market. It concluded that this marketing model has won because of its uniqueness; therefore, other companies cannot replicate its success. If one company wanted to take its place in the competitive market, it would need to have its own unique marketing model.