Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preferred Learning Styles and Teaching Methods Among Medical Students: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction Knowing the learning styles of medical students is an important factor as it can help in making learning more effective. Research has shown that medical students in various years of studies have selective learning styles and liking to a particular teaching strategy. The aim of the present study was to identify the preferred learning styles and teaching methods of medical students through all the years of study using the VARK (for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, Kinesthetic) questionnaire. Method A cross-sectional study was conducted among the medical students of year 1 (MD1) to year 6 (MD6), except MD5, at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Sohar, Oman. The VARK questionnaire was used to record the learning style preference of the students, and an additional question was asked to know the teaching method that the students preferred to be used. Results A total of 292 students responded to the questionnaire. The majority of the students had preference for the multimodal style of teaching (54%), mostly bimodal (30%). This was followed by the kinesthetic mode of learning (30%) in the unimodal style. The MD1 and MD6 students had preference for the unimodal style whereas the other years (MD2, MD3, MD4) had preference for the bimodal style. The teaching method preferred by most of the students included clinical skills lab (64%) followed by interactive lecture (59%) and lab work (57%). Conclusion The study showed that most of the students had preference for more than one (bimodal) learning style. The research findings can help the teachers recognize the learning problems among students and execute the needed teaching strategies.
Spontaneous Remission in a Patient with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: A Case Report

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a myeloproliferative neoplasm in which granulocytic cells are the main proliferative component. At diagnosis, more than 90% of CML cases have the characteristic Philadelphia chromosome, containing the BCR::ABL1 fusion gene. The natural history of untreated CML is an initial indolent chronic phase which will be followed by an accelerated phase, blast phase, or both. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) have dramatically altered the natural history of CML. TKI discontinuation with the goal of treatment-free remission is currently part of current management recommendations. However, spontaneous remission without receiving any treatment is extraordinarily rare in CML patients. Herein, we report a 56-year-old male who presented with leukocytosis and was diagnosed as a case of CML in the chronic phase; however, treatment with TKIs was not initiated due to spontaneous hematological as well as molecular remission.
An efficient snow albedo model for the open and sub‐canopy

A new model is presented for simulating snow surface albedo in the open and beneath a mixed‐forest canopy. The model has modest input data requirements and is an efficient physically based parameterization that includes the dependency of albedo on solar zenith angle, cloud cover, canopy, snow grain size, litterfall, snowfall, snow depth, and partial snow cover. Measurements used in the model validation include incident spectral irradiances, wavelength‐integrated visible and near‐infrared albedos, snowfall records, snow depth, snow surface litter fractions, and quantity of fine litter in snow cores. Measured and modelled forest snow albedos were less than open snow albedos during the accumulation phase, when there was little or no surface litter. The model predicts lower albedos in the forest during the accumulation phase because of a spectral shift to less reflective wavelengths of incident radiation under the canopy. Snow grain size was important during both the accumulation and ablation phases. Surface litter fraction, incident spectra, snowpack depth, and partial snow cover were important factors lowering forest albedo during ablation. Despite lower mid‐winter albedos in the forest, the snow melted more rapidly in the open. During late ablation, snow albedo in the open became lower than snow albedo in the forest, because of the thinner snow in the open. At the end of the ablation season, partial snow cover affected the albedo in the forest over a longer time period than in the open. Additional work is needed to improve the physical basis of the grain growth model used here and to develop a spatial albedo model for open and forested terrain. Published in 2002 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Fast-SAGD Application in the Alberta Oil Sands Areas

Fast-SAGD, a modification of the SAGD process, makes use of additional single horizontal wells alongside the SAGD well pair to expand the steam chamber laterally. This method uses fewer wells and could reduce costs compared to a SAGD operation requiring paired parallel wells one above the other. In this study, the Fast-SAGD process has been optimized through numerical reservoir simulations for the three typical oil sands areas in Alberta: Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River. Two key reservoir parameters, reservoir thickness and vertical permeability, were screened under various operating conditions to characterize the optimal reservoir and operating conditions for the Fast-SAGD process. Economic analysis was then used for optimizing the Fast-SAGD operating conditions. In most cases, the simulation results indicated improved energy efficiency and productivity for the Fast-SAGD process. In those cases, the project economics were enhanced compared to the SAGD process. Both Cold Lake- and Peace River-type reservoirs are good candidates for Fast-SAGD. In shallow Athabasca-type reservoirs, which are thick with high permeability, Fast-SAGD was shown to be almost as good as SAGD. This new process demonstrates improved efficiency and lower costs for extracting heavy oil from these important reservoirs.
Simulation of aeolian sand saltation with rotational motion

[1] In this work, we propose a theoretical model based on the distribution functions of initial liftoff velocity and angular velocity of sand grains to describe a sand saltation process in which both wind field–sand grain coupling and the Magnus force experienced by saltating sand grains have been incorporated. The computation results showed that the Magnus force had significant effects on sand grain saltation. In particular, when the Magnus force was incorporated, the calculated sand transport fluxes and sand transport rate per unit width were closer to the experimental value than when this force was excluded. The sand transport flux is enhanced because the Magnus force owing to particle rotation causes the particles to have higher and longer trajectories, so the particles can get more speed and energy from the wind, which leads to a larger sand transport flux. In addition, it was found that when taking the Magnus force into account, the probability density of the impact velocity and angular velocity of saltating sand grains followed an exponential distribution and a unimodal asymmetric distribution, respectively. Moreover, the sand energy flux increased with the height above the sand surface until the energy flux reached its maximum and then decreased. Furthermore, the energy flux near the ground surface decreased as the grain diameter increased, but beyond a specific height the energy flux increased with the grain diameter. Finally, for the same sand grain diameter, the energy flux increased with the friction velocity.
Threat Perception Captured by Emotion, Motor and Empathetic System Responses: A Systematic Review

— The fight or flight phenomena is of evolutionary origin and responsible for the type of defensive behaviours enacted, when in the face of threat. This review attempts to draw the link between fear and aggression as motivational levers for fight or flight defensive behaviours. Furthermore, this review investigates whether human biological motion is modulated by the affective behaviours associated with the fight or flight phenomenon. It examines how threat informed emotion and motor systems have the potential to result in the modulation of empathetic appraisal. This is of interest to this systematic review, as empathetic modulation is crucial to prosocial drive, which has the potential to alleviate the perceived threat. Hence, this review investigates the role of affective computing in capturing the potential outcome of threat perception and associated empathetic responses. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the affective responses and biological motion evoked from threat scenarios, affective computing methods used to capture these neurophysiological and behavioural responses are discussed. A systematic review using Google Scholar and Web of Science was conducted as of 2023, and findings were supplemented by bibliographies of key articles. A total of 26 studies were analysed from initial web searches to explore the topics of empathy, threat perception, fight or flight, fear, aggression, and human motion. Relationships between affective behaviours (fear, aggression) and corresponding motor defensive behaviours (fight or flight) were examined within threat scenarios, and whether existing affective computing methods are effective in capturing these responses, identifying the varying consensus in the literature, challenges, and limitations of existing research.
Air blast produced by the Meteor Crater impact event and a reconstruction of the affected environment

Abstract— Using scaling relationships determined from nuclear explosions, the radial extent of the air blast produced by the Meteor Crater impact event is estimated. The wind velocity at a distance of 5 crater radii (3 km) from the point of impact should have exceeded 2000 km/h. Hurricane force winds would have existed as far away as 20 to 40 km, depending on the exact explosive energy of the impact event. To determine how this event may have affected the environment surrounding the crater, the topography, vegetation, and animal life that existed at the time of the impact are reconstructed. For example, if the coniferous woodlands were 100 m lower than they are presently and they had moved farther out onto the plains, then the air blast would have flattened trees within a 16 to 22 km radius of the point of impact and damaged them over an area of 4100 to 8500 km2. The distance over which the damage occurred may have been up to 2× larger in some directions around the crater because of additional effects produced by the ballistic shock wave. Unfortunately, since the trajectory of the projectile is not well known, the direction of the ballistic shock wave effects cannot yet be determined.
Ocean Tide and Atmospheric Loading

We describe the ingredients of an automatic service for the dissemination of ocean tide loading coefficients and the considerations that led to the solution employed. The paper reviews the surface loading problem, methods for computation and especially the improvement of coastline resolution for accurate representation of coastal loads. We finally compare the loading results based on several ocean tide models with coefficients estimated from VLBI observations.
Highly siderophile element (HSE) abundances in the mantle of Mars are due to core formation at high pressure and temperature

Highly siderophile elements (HSEs) can be used to understand accretion and core formation in differentiated bodies, due to their strong affinity for FeNi metal and sulfides. Coupling experimental studies of metal–silicate partitioning with analyses of HSE contents of Martian meteorites can thus offer important constraints on the early history of Mars. Here, we report new metal–silicate partitioning data for the PGEs and Au and Re across a wide range of pressure and temperature space, with three series designed to complement existing experimental data sets for HSE. The first series examines temperature effects for D(HSE) in two metallic liquid compositions—C‐bearing and C‐free. The second series examines temperature effects for D(Re) in FeO‐bearing silicate melts and FeNi‐rich alloys. The third series presents the first systematic study of high pressure and temperature effects for D(Au). We then combine our data with previously published partitioning data to derive predictive expressions for metal–silicate partitioning of the HSE, which are subsequently used to calculate HSE concentrations of the Martian mantle during continuous accretion of Mars. Our results show that at midmantle depths in an early magma ocean (equivalent to approximately 14 GPa, 2100 °C), the HSE contents of the silicate fraction are similar to those observed in the Martian meteorite suite. This is in concert with previous studies on moderately siderophile elements. We then consider model calculations that examine the role of melting, fractional crystallization, and sulfide saturation/undersaturation in establishing the range of HSE contents in Martian meteorites derived from melting of the postcore formation mantle. The core formation modeling indicates that the HSE contents can be established by metal–silicate equilibrium early in the history of Mars, thus obviating the need for a late veneer for HSE, and by extension volatile siderophile elements, or volatiles in general.
Optimization of Polyvinyl Alcohol-Based Electrospun Fibers with Bioactive or Electroconductive Phases for Tissue-Engineered Scaffolds

The accurate mimicking of the fibrillary structure of the extracellular matrix represents one of the critical aspects of tissue engineering, playing a significant role in cell behavior and functions during the regenerative process. This work proposed the design of PVA-based multi-component membranes as a valuable and highly versatile strategy to support in vitro regeneration of different tissues. PVA can be successfully processed through electrospinning processes, allowing for the integration of other organic/inorganic materials suitable to confer additive bio-functional properties to the fibers to improve their biological response. It was demonstrated that adding polyethylene oxide (PEO) improves fiber processability; moreover, SEM analyses confirmed that blending PVA with PEO or gelatin enables the reduction of fiber size from 1.527 ± 0.66 μm to 0.880 ± 0.30 μm and 0.938 ± 0.245 μm, respectively, also minimizing defect formation. Furthermore, in vitro tests confirmed that gelatin integration allows the formation of bioactive nanofibers with improved biological response in terms of L929 adhesion and proliferation. Lastly, the processability of PVA fibers with conductive phases such as polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) or poly(3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) has also been verified. From this perspective, they could be promisingly used to design electroactive composite fibers able to support the regeneration process of electrically stimulated tissues such as nerves or muscles.
Cooperative Scene-Event Modelling for Acoustic Scene Classification

Acoustic scene classification (ASC) can be helpful for creating context awareness for intelligent robots. Humans naturally use the relations between acoustic scenes (AS) and audio events (AE) to understand and recognize their surrounding environments. However, in most previous works, ASC and audio event classification (AEC) are treated as independent tasks, with a focus primarily on audio features shared between scenes and events, but not their implicit relations. To address this limitation, we propose a cooperative scene-event modelling (cSEM) framework to automatically model the intricate scene-event relation by an adaptive coupling matrix to improve ASC. Compared with other scene-event modelling frameworks, the proposed cSEM offers the following advantages. First, it reduces the confusion between similar scenes by aligning the information of coarse-grained AS and fine-grained AE in the latent space, and reducing the redundant information between the AS and AE embeddings. Second, it exploits the relation information between AS and AE to improve ASC, which is shown to be beneficial, even if the information of AE is derived from unverified pseudo-labels. Third, it uses a regression-based loss function for cooperative modelling of scene-event relations, which is shown to be more effective than classification-based loss functions. Instantiated from four models based on either Transformer or convolutional neural networks, cSEM is evaluated on real-life and synthetic datasets. Experiments show that cSEM-based models work well in real-life scene-event analysis, offering competitive results on ASC as compared with other multi-feature or multi-model ensemble methods. The ASC accuracy achieved on the TUT2018, TAU2019, and JSSED datasets is 81.0%, 88.9% and 97.2%, respectively.
The Impact of Banking Competition on Bank Financial Stability: Evidence from ASEAN 5 Countries

In the era of the global economy, increasing banking competition will encourage an increase in banking transactions and activities. Banking transactions and activities will affect a country's financial stability. The purpose is to obtain the nonlinear effect of banking competition on financial stability at a specific regime. Previous research assumed that this impact applies to every economic regime. The impact of banking competition on financial stability can change at certain regime levels. Nonlinear impact occurs according to the regime. The method is based on a nonlinear threshold regression model. The researchers obtained the data from five ASEAN countries. The findings of this research are in-depth information about the financial system stability model. Analysis of the effect of variance supports the inconsistency of the effects found by several previous researchers. Practical implications are aimed at policymakers to make different decisions at the GDP level, CAR and Liquidity. The economic regime in each country is different, so this analysis is constructive for policymakers to see the conditions of banking competition and financial system stability at a certain regime level. The originality article systematically offers an analysis that assumes the effect can change at a certain regime level.JEL Classification: E5, G15, G01, G32, C24
Secondary pulmonary infection and co-infection in elderly COVID-19 patients during the pandemics in a tertiary general hospital in Beijing, China

Background Most people are infected with COVID-19 during pandemics at the end of 2022. Older patients were more vulnerable. However, the incidence of secondary bacterial, fungal or viral pulmonary infection and co-infection is not well described in elderly hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of all elderly (≥65 years) hospitalized patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 from December 1, 2022 to January 31, 2023. Demographics, underlying diseases, treatments, and laboratory data were collected. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were used to explore the risk factors associated with secondary bacterial, fungal or viral pulmonary infection and co-infection. Results A total of 322 older patients with COVID-19 were enrolled. The incidence of secondary bacterial, fungal or viral pulmonary infection and co-infection was 27.3% (88/322) and 7.5% (24/322), respectively. The overall in-hospital mortality of all patients was 32.9% (106/322), and the in-hospital mortality among patients who acquired with secondary pulmonary infection and co-infection was 57.0% (57/100). A total of 23.9% (77/322) of patients were admitted to ICU within 48 h of hospitalization. The incidence of secondary pulmonary infection and co-infection among patients admitted to the ICU was 50.6% (39/77) and 13.0% (10/77), respectively. The overall in-hospital mortality of ICU patients was 48.1% (37/77), and the in-hospital mortality of ICU patients acquired with secondary pulmonary infection and co-infection was 61.4% (27/44). A total of 83.5% (269/322) of the included patients received empirical antibiotic therapy before positive Clinical Microbiology results. Influenza A virus (the vast majority were the H3N2 subtype) was the most common community acquired pathogen for co-infection. While A. baumannii, K. pneumoniae, and P. aeruginosa were the common hospital acquired pathogens for co-infection and secondary pulmonary infection. The incidence of Carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacilli (CR-GNB) infections was high, and the mortality reached 76.9%. Predictors of secondary pulmonary infection and co-infection were ICU admission within 48 h of hospitalization, cerebrovascular diseases, critical COVID-19, and PCT > 0.5 ng/mL. Conclusion The prognosis for elderly hospitalized COVID-19 patients with secondary pulmonary infection or co-infection is poor. The inflammatory biomarker PCT > 0.5 ng/mL played an important role in the early prediction of secondary pulmonary infection and co-infection in COVID-19 patients.
Experimental Investigation of Innovative Internal Trailing Edge Cooling Configurations with Pentagonal Arrangement and Elliptic Pin Fin

This paper describes a heat transfer experimental study of four different internal trailing edge cooling configurations based on pin fin schemes. The aim of the study is the comparison between innovative configurations and standard ones. So, a circular pin fin configuration with an innovative pentagonal scheme is compared to a standard staggered scheme, while two elliptic pin fin configurations are compared to each other turning the ellipse from the streamwise to the spanwise direction. For each configuration, heat transfer and pressure loss measurements were made keeping the Mach number fixed at 0.3 and varying the Reynolds number from 9000 to 27000. In order to investigate the overall behavior of both endwall and pedestals, heat transfer measurements are performed using a combined transient technique. Over the endwall surface, the classic transient technique with thermochromic liquid crystals allows the measurement of a detailed heat transfer coefficient (HTC) map. Pin fins are made of high thermal conductivity material, and an inverse data reduction method based on a finite element code allows to evaluate the mean HTC of each pin fin. Results show that the pentagonal arrangement generates a nonuniform HTC distribution over the endwall surface, while, in terms of average values, it is equivalent to the staggered configuration. On the contrary, the HTC map of the two elliptic configurations is similar, but the spanwise arrangement generates higher heat transfer coefficients and pressure losses.
Current Status and Conservation of the Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao) in the Osa Conservation Area (ACOSA), Costa Rica

The status and conservation of the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) in the Osa Conservation Area (ACOSA) was studied from October to December 2005. The study consisted of a 22 question interview carried out with 105 local residents, and a workshop at which 18 locals attended. Notable results included: a) the scarlet macaw population is found throughout the entire Osa Peninsula and on the mainland with a northern limit a Playa Pinuelas; b) estimates of the population size varied between 800—1200 individuals and it was generally believed that the numbers are increasing; c) the ACOSA scarlet macaws do not roost communally; d) At least 59 plant species (seed and fruit) are fed on by the ACOSA scarlet macaws and exotic species: beach almond (Terminalia catappa), teak (Tectona grandis) and melina (Gmelina arborea) are important; e) the scarlet macaws nests between December and May in cavities of at least 28 tree species, with ceiba (Ceiba pentandra) and garlic (Caryocar costarricense) the species most utilised; f ) approximately 25–50 chicks are poached each year, with one person responsible for poaching 25 chicks; g) three scarlet macaw release programs are based in the area of Golfito and Pavones and h) the strategic plan covers research, monitoring, outreach, marketing and conservation projects for the species. This includes studies of population dynamics, habitat, nesting ecology, genetics, chick poaching and conservation programs.