Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development and validation of a measurement-driven inter crystal scatter recovery algorithm with in-system calibration

In PET a high percentage of gamma photons being detected undergo Compton scattering in the scintillator. Scintillator blocks are often built from optically isolated crystals. Depending on the angle of incidence and the scintillator geometry this might lead to inter crystal scatter (ICS) events, where energy is deposited in two or more crystals in the detector, which common positioning and reconstruction algorithms cannot resolve. Therefore, ICS events worsen the spatial resolution and the signal-to-noise ratio in the reconstructed image. We want to address this challenge by recovering individual crystals from ICS events with their corresponding energy deposits. This information could ultimately be fed into an image reconstruction framework. In this work, we established an algorithm based on a detector that couples a readout channel to each crystal (one-to-one coupling), which combines a measurement-driven calibration and a fitting routine to achieve the recovery of crystal interactions from measured light patterns. Using Geant4 simulations, we validated and optimized this approach by comparing the recovered events to the simulation ground truth. We showed that, with the best performing algorithm versions, all correct crystals could be identified for 95-97% of the simulated events and the crystal energies as well as the event energy sum could be recovered adequately. For the event energy sum a deviation of less than 5% could be achieved for 96% of all events. Overall, the developed ICS recovery algorithm was successfully validated for one-to-one coupled detector. Future application for other detector configurations should be possible and will be investigated. Additionally, using the new crystal interaction information to determine the most likely first interaction crystal is being examined to improve efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio in the PET reconstruction.
Discovering the potential impact of in-flight smart amenities on traveler experience: Focal roles of in-flight service quality and airline endorsement

The service quality provided and traveler endorsement of a particular airline over another may play crucial roles in explaining the inherent relationship between smart amenities and creating an immersive experience for air travelers. In this regard, 487 potential travelers were obtained via Egyptian Airlines, whether travelling from or coming to Egypt. SmartPLS 4 results revealed that intelligent seats, smart overhead bins, and an in-flight entertainment system significantly affected service quality on board. Besides, in-flight service quality positively affected traveler experience. Furthermore, in-flight service quality partially mediated the association between intelligent seats and traveler experience, while fully mediated the linkages between traveler experience and both smart overhead bins and in-flight entertainment system. Lastly, airline endorsement strengthened the positive association between in-flight service quality and traveler experience in favor of the Egypt Air sample. This paper highlights the effective contributions of decision-makers in the tourism and travel industry regarding the possibility of developing airlines for travelers, whether for business or leisure, as well as equipping aircraft with emerging technologies such as IOT-enabled smart glasses and Metaverse-enabled travel apps.
A comparative study of vertical jump parameters in men's college basketball and volleyball players

This study aimed to compare lower limb strength disparities between male college volleyball and basketball players in four distinct vertical jump types. We recruited 100 second-level (above the national standard) male college athletes (50 basketball and 50 volleyball players) from Capital University of Physical Education and Sports who volunteered to participate. We assessed the performance of each athlete with regards to the squat jump (SJ), countermovement jump (CMJ), continuous jump with straight legs (CJs), and continuous jump with bent legs (CJb). Data analysis was performed by independent samples t-tests in SPSS version 25.0. software. In the CMJ test, volleyball players had a significantly higher vertical jump displacement (VJD; p = 0.047, t = −2.018), squat displacement (SD; p = 0.005, t = −2.883), peak force (p = 0.023, t = −1.964), and peak velocity (p = 0.011, t = −1.687) than basketball players. In the SJ test, volleyball players had a significantly higher VJD (p = 0.041, t = −1.21) and SD (p = 0.008, t = −1.46) than basketball players. In the CJs test, volleyball players had a significantly higher average vertical jump displacement (AVJD; p = 0.042, t = −2.067) than basketball players. In the CJb test, volleyball players had a significantly higher AVJD (p = 0.001, t = −3.448), average squat displacement (p = 0.017, t = −2.44), and average contact time (p = 0.045, t = −2.038) than basketball players. The overall vertical jump ability of college volleyball players was better than that of college basketball players. CMJ, SJ, CJs and CJb training should be included in daily training sessions and considered in the selection of basketball and volleyball players. In addition, coaches can use fast twitch Fibers, the effect of pre-stretch and k as the main evaluation indicators to assess daily training progress.
DEFINING DEGRADATION: THE IMPACTS OF SWIDDEN ON FORESTS IN NORTHERN THAILAND

This paper reconsiders existing 'orthodox' definitions of forest degradation by looking at the changes in vegetation caused by swidden farming near three upland villages in Northern Thailand. It is argued that the common belief that swidden is a degrading land use, causing species loss, soil erosion, and water shortages, is highly simplistic. Instead, swidden should be evalu- ated in recognition of its great diversity in species encouraged; the economic uses of species; and the cultural needs and practices of different forest users. The case studies indicate that swiddens from Lawa and Karen ethnic groups may provide better land man- agement and diversity than reforestation, largely because of the practice of using 'relict emergents'--or retaining trees in cleared ground. But a different swidden system in one Akha village led to species loss and less useful secondary regrowth. It is argued that environmental policy makers should acknowledge that many secondary forest formations in Thailand do not constitute degraded forest, and that defining degradation from the viewpoint of one ethnic group may avoid loss of potentially valuable forest uses defined by others.
Cross-Regional Equity in Health Care Funding (NIRSA) Working Paper Series No. 3

In Ireland as in many other countries, much health care provision is State funded and State provided. Equity, in the sense of equality of 'treatment' for individuals with the same health needs irrespective of their geographical locatins, or incomes, has been, and is, very much stressed as an appropriate policy objective. However, health care delivery in Ireland (and in some other countries included the UK) operates through reginally based Health Boards responsible for provision in their own regions. This implies mechanisms for funding allocations to Boards that allow for the corresponding regional needs, but the choice of mechanism is not at all a simple or non-contestious topic. It is important though, and so a very appropriate topic for research by the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Anallysis. This Working Paper is at least a first step in a relevant investigation. Following much research, formulae have beeen developed in the UK for the allocation of health care funding across regions with the ofjective of attaining regional equity in health care. The formulae employ criteria such as regional populations, age and gender distributions, and regiional morbidity and socio-economic measures. The UK work is a natural starting point for corresponding Irish formulae. So one theme of this paper is a critical review of the UK's formulea and assessing how the system has actually worked in Northern Ireland. However, we think it is also important to critically examine the apparent primacy granted to the objective of equality attainment. As regards the first theme, we conclude some assumptions are implausible and some issues unresolved and we disscuss the implications should a formula based regional allocatin strategy be desired for Ireland. As regards the second theme, we find that healthcare equity - in spite of the primacy in many minds - is an elusive entity, very hard to measure, let alone achieve. Making it a primary objective in health care provision carries a price as regards attainment of other objectives and this, alone with its elusiveness, deserves consideration by helath economists and policy mak
Geochemistry of Late Triassic-Early Jurassic aluminous A-type syenogranite-alkali feldspar granite in Yichun area,Heilongjiang Province and its tectonic implications

An analysis of petrography, major elements, trace elements and isotopic elements of Late Triassic-Early Jurassic syenogranites-alkali feldspar granites in Yichun area of Heilongjiang Province shows that most of these rocks have high temperature idiomorphic or conical quartz, accessory mineral fluorite, graphic texture and drusitic structure. Lithochemically, they are characterized by high silicon, enrichment of alkali, low calcium and magnesium and meta-aluminous to peraluminous nature. The REE distribution patterns show slight LREE enrichment with gentle right-oblique deviation and relative flat HREE pattern, sea-gull model of europium depletion, concentration of HFS elements such as Zr, Ce, Y and Ga, and depletion of Ba, Sr and Eu. Homogenization temperatures of quartz inclusions in these rocks are 750~950℃, indicating characteristics of high temperature hypabyssal magmatic passive injection. Syenogranites-alkali feldspar granites are rich in SiO2, K2O and Al2O3, and the values of δ18O are 5.1‰~10.3‰, belonging to granitic rock of normal or somewhat lower δ18O values. The values of ISr are relatively high and the values of of eNd are comparatively low, suggesting that original source materials of the source area are related to the metamorphic basement of the primeval lower crust, and also to a definite extent of crust-mantle magmatic mixing. Based on an integrated analysis, the authors hold that the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic syenogranites-alkali feldspar granites in Yichun area of Heilongjiang Province should belong to aluminous A2-type granites, and the tectonic background might be continental postcollisional collapse and extensional dynamic regime after the ultimate closure of the paleo-Asian ocean.
Attributed Graph Convolutional Network for Enhanced Social Recommendation Through Hybrid Feedback Integration

Social recommendation, a technique aimed at predicting user preferences by harnessing social ties, has frequently employed collaborative filtering (CF) due to its demonstrated efficiency and scalability. Nonetheless, a decline in performance of most extant CF techniques has been observed when confronted with extreme sparsity in explicit feedback. Past investigations predominantly merged both explicit and implicit feedback to mitigate the data scarcity issue, embedding based solely on explicit characteristics and formulating objective functions founded on user-item associations. Such a paradigm signifies a dependency on these interactions to compensate for deficient embeddings. Notably, a considerable discrepancy exists between implicit feedback and genuine user satisfaction in social recommendations, attributed to pervasive false positive interactions devoid of detailed user/item attributes. Furthermore, the establishment of connectivity between users/items has been partially dependent on users' inclinations, suggesting that the aggregation procedure might overlook certain neighbourhood preferences. In response to these challenges, a hybrid neural graph model endowed with attributive features has been introduced. This model amalgamates explicit/implicit feedback, attribute data, and a user-item interaction graph. To counteract data sparsity, a variational graph framework has been devised to extract latent representations from both feedback and attribute data. For the effective and explicit discernment of collaborative signals, the embedding incorporates a user-item interaction graph, which offers a potent modelling of elevated-order connectivities and the detection of latent user-item associations. The user and item embeddings are derived via an attentive propagation method, with the ultimate item embeddings being sourced through a linear weighted sum, eschewing non-linear activation functions. Comparative analyses on four real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior efficacy of the proposed methodology in relation to leading contemporary recommendation systems.
The Impact of Ethical Behavior, Conscientiousness, and Religiosity on Job Engagement with Ethical Leadership as a Mediator

Bureaucratic reform aims to achieve employee engagement to improve employee performance. The purpose of the research is to test the model and the influence of ethical behavior, conscientiousness, and religiosity on employee engagement, with ethical leadership as the mediator. A quantitative approach was used in this research, with a sample of 400 civil servants from the Ministry of Religious Affairs in West Java selected through convenience sampling. Employee engagement was measured using the UWES, Ethical Behavior was based on the employees' code of ethics at the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Conscientiousness was measured using one dimension of the BFI, Religiosity was measured using the Centrality Religiosity Scale, and Ethical Leadership was measured using the Ethical Leadership Scale. The data was collected through a questionnaire using Google Forms, and the data analysis technique used was SEM. The results of the model testing were not fit, so they cannot be used to draw conclusions about the population. However, all the minor hypotheses were accepted. The higher the exogenous variable, the higher the endogenous variable, both directly and indirectly, with ethical leadership acting as a good mediator. Conscientiousness was found to be the most influential exogenous variable, while ethical behavior was the weakest.
The Effect of Nurse led Intervention on Knowledge and Anxiety of Hepatic Patients Undergoing Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

Background: Today, gastrointestinal endoscopy is the most commonly used procedure in medicine. for the most accurate diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from gastrointestinal disorders Thus, anxiety as a negative influence or side effect of endoscopy reduces patients' acceptance ability. Aim: To determine the effect of nurse led intervention on knowledge and anxiety among hepatic patients undergoing gastrointestinal endoscopy. Design: A quasi-experimental, pre and posttest design with a control group was used. Setting: The study was conducted at ElMahalla Hepatology Educational Hospital, Egypt. Methods: two tools were used, structured interview questionnaire to assess knowledge and demographic data of patients and Beck Anxiety Inventory scale to assess patients anxiety. Results: This study clarified that the effect of the nurse led intervention was positive and clear. It also shows that there was good improvement with high significant differences in knowledge and anxiety in study group compared to their control post intervention (P<0.001). Conclusion: The findings of the study showed that the anxiety state was found to be more common among the patients subjected to endoscopy procedure. Providing educational program was an effective method to increase awareness and decrease the anxiety of the patients subjected to gastroscopy. Recommendations: Replication of the current study on a larger probability sample from different geographical areas, to achieve generalizable results.
Double-Stranded RNA-Dependent Protein Kinase (PKR)-Dependent Apoptosis Induction by a Novel Small Compound

The interferon-induced, double-strand RNA-dependent protein kinase (PKR) can play critical roles in inhibiting virus replication and inducing apoptosis. To develop new agents that may inhibit viral replication or induce apoptosis in cancer cells via the PKR signaling pathway, we screened a chemical library for compounds that have differential cytotoxic effects on wild-type (MEF/PKR +/+ ) and PKR-knockout (MEF/PKR -/- ) mouse embryonic fibroblast cells. We identified a synthetic compound, 1H-benzimidazole-1-ethanol, 2,3-dihydro-2- imino-ａ -(phenoxymethyl)-3-(phenylmethyl)-, monohydrochloride (BEPP), that induces a cytotoxic effect more effectively in MEF/PKR +/+ cells than in MEF/PKR -/- cells. BEPP also relatively effectively inhibited the growth of a human lung cancer cell line overexpressing PKR, compared with other cancer cell lines. In sensitive cells, BEPP induced apoptosis with activation of caspase-3. Treatment with BEPP led to increased phosphorylation of PKR and eIF2 α , increased expression of BAX, and decreased expression of Bcl-2. BEPP-induced apoptosis was PKR dependent and was blocked by adenovector expressing the dominant-negative PKR. Furthermore, pretreatment of HeLa cells at a noncytotoxic dose of BEPP effectively inhibited Vaccinia virus replication. Together, our results suggest that BEPP and its analogues may induce PKR-dependent apoptosis and inhibition of viral replication and that they can be a potential anticancer or antivirus agent.
One-Way Communication Complexity of Partial XOR Functions

Boolean function $F(x,y)$ for $x,y \in \{0,1\}^n$ is an XOR function if $F(x,y)=f(x\oplus y)$ for some function $f$ on $n$ input bits, where $\oplus$ is a bit-wise XOR. XOR functions are relevant in communication complexity, partially for allowing Fourier analytic technique. For total XOR functions it is known that deterministic communication complexity of $F$ is closely related to parity decision tree complexity of $f$. Montanaro and Osbourne (2009) observed that one-sided communication complexity $D_{cc}^{\rightarrow}(F)$ of $F$ is exactly equal to nonadaptive parity decision tree complexity $NADT^{\oplus}(f)$ of $f$. Hatami et al. (2018) showed that unrestricted communication complexity of $F$ is polynomially related to parity decision tree complexity of $f$. We initiate the studies of a similar connection for partial functions. We show that in case of one-sided communication complexity whether these measures are equal, depends on the number of undefined inputs of $f$. On the one hand, if $D_{cc}^{\rightarrow}(F)=t$ and $f$ is undefined on at most $O(\frac{2^{n-t}}{\sqrt{n-t}})$, then $NADT^{\oplus}(f)=t$. On the other hand, for a wide range of values of $D_{cc}^{\rightarrow}(F)$ and $NADT^{\oplus}(f)$ (from constant to $n-2$) we provide partial functions for which $D_{cc}^{\rightarrow}(F)<NADT^{\oplus}(f)$. In particular, we provide a function with an exponential gap between the two measures. Our separation results translate to the case of two-sided communication complexity as well, in particular showing that the result of Hatami et al. (2018) cannot be generalized to partial functions. Previous results for total functions heavily rely on Boolean Fourier analysis and the technique does not translate to partial functions. For the proofs of our results we build a linear algebraic framework instead. Separation results are proved through the reduction to covering codes.
A Cyclic Model of Foredune Blowout Evolution for a Leeward Coast: Island Beach, New Jersey

Abstract The formation and development of three foredune blowouts at Island Beach State Park, New Jersey during the period 1981 to 1991 demonstrate the cyclic evolution of these landforms. The evolution is documented with: 1) a long-term study of topographic changes in blowout form documented with systematic surveys carried out at three- to five-year intervals; and 2) a four-week field study involving the collection of wind-speed profiles and wind direction at several locations in two of the blowouts and the measurement of elevation changes resulting from significant wind events. Results show that blowouts on leeward coasts favor onshore sand movement from the beach despite the dominance of offshore winds because vegetation on the landward side of the blowouts traps sand moved onshore and stabilizes the surface against deflation by offshore winds. Feedback between dune morphology, wind flow, and vegetation produces a sequence of landform changes that are conceptualized in a model of foredune blowout devel.
Effect of Educational Intervention on Knowledge, Satisfaction and Quality of Bowel Preparation for Patients Scheduled for Colonoscopy

Background: Colonoscopy is considered one of the most significant screening and therapeutic modality for colorectal cancer. Colonoscopy depends on pre-procedure bowel preparation unlike other screening tests as if patient undergone poor bowel preparation, significant pathology may be missed. This study was aim to evaluate the effect of an educational intervention on knowledge, satisfaction and quality of bowel preparation for patients scheduled for colonoscopy. This study was conducted at Gastrointestinal Endoscopy unit at Cardiac and Gastrointestinal Center - Domyata, Egypt. Quasi-experimental design was utilized in this study on a purposeful sample of (120) patients in the previous mentioned setting. Two tools were used to collect the data. Tool I: Colonoscopy Patient assessment sheet, Tool II: Quality of bowel preparation for colonoscopy Assessment. Result: It was found that majority of study group (90%) had an excellent quality of bowel cleanliness as measured by Boston bowel scale post educational intervention compared to control group (60%). Conclusion: Highly statistically significant improvement in total knowledge level related to colonoscopy preparations, quality of bowel preparations and patient satisfaction. The study recommended that availability of written visual information about proper colonoscopy bowel preparation facilitate patient’s education and improve quality of bowel cleanliness.
Carbonate Sedimentology and Sequence Stratigraphy

Sedimentology and stratigraphy are neighbors yet distinctly separate entities within the earth sciences. Sedimentology searches for the common traits of sedimentary rocks regardless of age as it reconstructs environments and processes of deposition and erosion from the sediment record. Stratigraphy, by contrast, concentrates on changes with time, on measuring time and correlating coeval events. Sequence stratigraphy straddles the boundary between the two fields. This book, dedicated to carbonate rocks, approaches sequence stratigraphy from its sedimentologic background. This book attempts to communicate by combining different specialities and different lines of reasoning, and by searching for principles underlying the bewildering diversity of carbonate rocks. It provides enough general background, in introductory chapters and appendices, to be easily digestible for sedimentologists and stratigraphers as well as earth scientists at large.