Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Uniform Mixing of Quantum Walks and Association Schemes

In recent years quantum algorithms have become a popular area of mathematical research. Farhi and Gutmann introduced the concept of a quantum walk in 1998. In this thesis we investigate mixing properties of continuoustime quantum walks from a mathematical perspective. We focus on the connections between mixing properties and association schemes. There are three main goals of this thesis. Our primary goal is to develop the algebraic groundwork necessary to systematically study mixing properties of continuous-time quantum walks on regular graphs. Using these tools we achieve two additional goals: we construct new families of graphs that admit uniform mixing, and we prove that other families of graphs never admit uniform mixing. We begin by introducing association schemes and continuous-time quantum walks. Within this framework we develop specific algebraic machinery to tackle the uniform mixing problem. Our main algebraic result shows that if a graph has an irrational eigenvalue, then its transition matrix has at least one transcendental coordinate at all nonzero times. Next we study algebraic varieties related to uniform mixing to determine information about the coordinates of the corresponding transition matrices. Combining this with our main algebraic result we prove that uniform mixing does not occur on even cycles or prime cycles. However, we show that the probability distribution of a quantum walk on a prime cycle gets arbitrarily close to uniform. Finally we consider uniform mixing on Cayley graphs of elementary abelian groups. We utilize graph quotients to connect the mixing properties of these graphs to Hamming graphs. This enables us to find new results about uniform mixing on Cayley graphs of Z3 and Z4.
Determinants of Tax Revenues in Jordan

This study aims to shed light on the reality of tax revenue and to identify its determinants in Jordan. This is done by analysing the impact of a set of economic and non-economic factors on tax revenue. Economic factors were represented by the real GDP, consumer price index CPI, foreign direct investment FDI, and economic openness, meanwhile, non-economic factors were represented by corruption and amendments to tax laws. In order to achieve its objectives, the study uses a descriptive method in addition to econometric analysis to time-series data for the period (1995-2019) using several models. Three econometric models were constructed: total tax revenue model, sales tax revenue model, and income tax revenue model. The models were constructed by employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, and depending on the results of standard diagnostic tests. The study found that the real GDP and CPI are the main determinants of tax revenue in Jordan. It also found that corruption has a significant negative impact on tax revenue, on contrast, amendments to tax laws has no clear impact or has insignificant impact on tax revenue. Thus, the study emphasizes the importance of maintaining price stability to reduce tax revenue volatility. Moreover, in order to increase tax revenue, the study recommends the government to stimulate economic growth, fight corruption, and that any suggested amendment to tax laws in the future should be studied more deeply; in order to ensure that its impact will be clearly reflected on tax revenue. جاءت هذه الدراسة بهدف بيان واقع وتطور الإيرادات الضريبية وتحديد العوامل المحددة لها في الأردن، من خلال تحليل مجموعة من العوامل الاقتصادية وغير الاقتصادية. تمثلت العوامل الاقتصادية بمتغيرات (الناتج المحلي الإجمالي الحقيقي، مؤشر أسعار المستهلك، الاستثمار الاجنبي المباشر، الانفتاح الاقتصادي)، أما العوامل غير الاقتصادية فكانت ممثله بمتغيرات (الفساد، التغيرات في القوانين الضريبية). وللوصول إلى الهدف، استخدم الباحث كل من الاسلوب الوصفي وتقنيات الاقتصاد القياسي لتحليل بيانات السلاسل الزمنية خلال الفترة (1995-2019) لثلاثة نماذج قياسية تم بناءها، نموذج لإجمالي الإيرادات الضريبية ونموذج لإيرادات ضريبة المبيعات ونموذج لإيرادات ضريبة الدخل، وذلك وفقاً لطريقة الانحدار الذاتي لفترات الابطاء الموزعة (ARDL) اعتماد على نتائج الاختبارات القياسية التشخيصية. أظهرت نتائج الدراسة أن كل من الاسعار (مؤشر أسعار المستهلك) والناتج المحلي الإجمالي هما محددان رئيسيان للإيرادات الضريبية في الأردن، وأن الفساد ذو أثر سلبي على الإيرادات الضريبية، بينما أشارت النتائج إلى عدم وجود أثر واضح للتعديلات على القوانين والتشريعات الضريبية على الحصيلة الضريبية، وإن وجد فهو جداً ضعيف. وبناءً على هذه النتائج توصي الدراسة بضرورة المحافظة على استقرار مستويات الاسعار منعاً لتذبذب حجم الإيرادات الضريبية، والعمل على تحفيز النمو الاقتصادي ومحاربة الفساد لما لذلك من أثر في زيادة الإيرادات الضريبية، وان يتم دراسة التعديلات التي يتم إجراءها على التشريعات والقوانين الضريبية بشكل أكثر دقة حتى تنعكس على الحصيلة الضريبية عند إقرارها.
An Optimized Method of Test Point Fast Design

The test point design is the primary problems of fault diagnosis.Through topological digraph is used on the test point design,a topological relativity diagnosis method was advanced.The quick-operating processes of modeling and test point designing were realized.Compared with a relativity diagnosis method usually used.A new algorithm of test point fast design suitable for a complex system was put forward.
The effect of social media use on emotional eating in women aged 19-45

Aim: This study aims to examine the relationship between social media use and emotional eating in women. Material and Method: The study was cross-sectional and was conducted with 401 women aged 19-45 years living in Kadıköy, İstanbul. The introductory information form consisting of 4 stages, the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ), Eating Attitude Test (EAT-40), and Social Media Usage Scale (SMUS) were applied to the participants of the study. Statistical analyzes were evaluated using the SPSS 23 package program. Results: It was seen that 22.9% (n=92) of the participants were between the ages of 19-29, 57.1% (n=229) were between the ages of 30-39, and 20.0% (n=80) were between the ages of 40-45. According to the results of the analysis, there was no significant relationship between SMUS sub-dimensions, total SMUS scores and EAT-40 scores (p>0.05). In the continuance sub-dimension of the SMUS, a low-level significant positive correlation was found between emotional eating (r=0.203; p
Audit Committee and Internal Control Effectiveness in Public Sector Entities

This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the audit committee and internal control effectiveness nexus. The study worked on the assertion that the audit committee of the board enhances internal control effectiveness, which is widely documented and supported, more so in the private sector. As a result, many public sector entities’ governing boards are increasingly establishing such audit committees. Yet, it is unclear to what extent such increase in audit committees contribute to public sector entities’ internal control effectiveness, especially in developing economies. This study, therefore, examined the explanatory power of the audit committee’s characteristics, internal control specific oversight processes, and management support on the effectiveness of internal control of the reporting entity. Data was collected using structured questionnaire administered with key audit committee stakeholders of social security funds in Tanzania. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) was used to multi-regress the investigated independent variables against the dependent variable. Overall, results show that audit committee characteristics, audit committee internal control specific oversight processes and management support to audit committee significantly account for internal control effectiveness. Indeed, internal control specific oversight processes have the most significant positive explanatory power followed by management support to the audit committee and audit committee characteristics, respectively. Scholars, policymakers, audit committees, boards, and managers may use the results of this study to inform strategies and/or interventions aimed to improve audit committee’s contribution to internal control effectiveness.
Effects on Serum Hormone Concentrations after a Dietary Phytoestrogen Intervention in Patients with Prostate Cancer: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Phytoestrogens have been suggested to have an anti-proliferative role in prostate cancer, potentially by acting through estrogen receptor beta (ERβ) and modulating several hormones. We primarily aimed to investigate the effect of a phytoestrogen intervention on hormone concentrations in blood depending on the ERβ genotype. Patients with low and intermediate-risk prostate cancer, scheduled for radical prostatectomy, were randomized to an intervention group provided with soybeans and flaxseeds (∼200 mg phytoestrogens/d) added to their diet until their surgery, or a control group that was not provided with any food items. Both groups received official dietary recommendations. Blood samples were collected at baseline and endpoint and blood concentrations of different hormones and phytoestrogens were analyzed. The phytoestrogen-rich diet did not affect serum concentrations of testosterone, insulin-like growth factor 1, or sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). However, we found a trend of decreased risk of increased serum concentration of estradiol in the intervention group compared to the control group but only in a specific genotype of ERβ (p = 0.058). In conclusion, a high daily intake of phytoestrogen-rich foods has no major effect on hormone concentrations but may lower the concentration of estradiol in patients with prostate cancer with a specific genetic upset of ERβ.
Willingness of Healthcare Workers to Recommend or Receive a Third COVID-19 Vaccine Dose: A Cross-Sectional Study from Jordan

Background: The availability of COVID-19 vaccines worldwide necessitates measuring healthcare workers’ (HCWs’) willingness to recommend or receive these vaccines. Therefore, we conducted a local study in Jordan to assess HCWs’ willingness to recommend or receive a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and the predictors of such a decision. A cross-sectional study investigated Jordanian HCWs’ willingness regarding a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine using a self-administered online questionnaire through WhatsApp, a mobile phone application. A total of 300 HCWs participated in the current study. Of these HCWs, 65.3% were physicians, 25.3% were nurses, and 9.3% were pharmacists. HCWs’ overall willingness regarding a third vaccine dose was 68.4% (49.4% certainly and 19.0% probably), whereas the overall willingness of HCWs to recommend a third dose to their patients was 73.3% (49.0% certainly and 24.3% probably). Males had significantly higher willingness than females (82.1% vs. 60.1%, p < 0.05). Physicians reported more willingness than nurses and pharmacists. HCWs’ willingness was not significantly affected by direct contact with a patient infected with COVID-19 or by a personal history of COVID-19 infection. Only 31% of HCWs were certainly willing to recommend the vaccine to their patients with chronic diseases, and only 28% of the participants were certainly willing to recommend it to people aged 65 or older. HCWs’ willingness to receive a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine is limited in Jordan. This has affected their certainty in recommending this vaccine to their patients or people older than 60. Decision-makers and health-promotion programs in Jordan should focus on addressing this public health problem.
Stationarity Testing Under Smooth Transition Trends: Asymptotics Results and Some Empirical Evidence

The effects on the standard LM stationarity test of an incorrect specification of an instantaneous break when the true data generating process displays a logistic trend are analysed via Monte Carlo simulations under three alternative models. A stationarity test is derived for the case of an exogeneously determined smooth transition trend obtaining its asymptotical distribution by the Fredholm approach. Our result permits any continuous and piecewise continuously differentiable sigmoid. An asymptotic power analysis for the proposed test (under logistic transition) is carried out, and results of a number of Monte Carlo simulations, designed with a view to analyse the behavior of the test in finite samples, are reported. The case when the nonlinear parameters are estimated is also considered, with a derivation of the test null asymptotic distribution and some simulations and sensibility analyses. The paper ends with an application to testing stationarity for the Nelson and Plosser (1982) series, and with the comparison of the conclusions for the stationarity of the series with results of previous works.
Bore-generated macrovortices on erodible beds

Abstract The interaction of free-surface bores and an erodible porous channel bed in a shallow-water flow is analysed based on the assumption of weak coupling between free-surface discontinuities and bed discontinuities and on the simplest closure for the sediment transport rate (cubic with the mean flow velocity). It is shown that free-surface bores with finite cross-stream extent can evolve over the erodible bed by generating vertically oriented macrovortices in a manner similar to, but more complex than, that of free-surface bores of finite cross-stream extent over a rigid channel bottom. An equation for the potential vorticity is derived, which shows that on an erodible bed the vortices are generated by a combination of various mechanisms related to energy dissipation of both surface bores and bed discontinuities. The model is verified and the physics explored by comparison with a number of numerical simulations, typical of both riverine (dam-break test and pit test) and nearshore (bore on a beach test) flows, and with previously published experimental results. For all cases a fairly good agreement is found between the analytically estimated potential vorticity and that computed numerically.
Offensive Language Detection in Social Media Using Transformers and Importance of Pre-training

 Abstract —Being exposed to offensive language on social media platforms is relatively higher because of anonymity and distant self-expression compared to real communication. Billions of contents are shared daily on these platforms, making it impossible to detect offensive posts with manual editorial processes. This situation arises the need for automatic detection of offensive language in social media posts to provide users' online safety. In this paper, we applied different Machine Learning (ML) models on over manually annotated 36,000 Turkish tweets to detect the use of offensive language messages automatically. According to the results, the most successful model for predicting offensive language is pre-trained transformer-based ELECTRA model with 0.8216 F-1 score. We also obtained the highest F-1 score with 0.8342 in this dataset up to now by combining transformer-based ELECTRA and BERT models in an ensemble model.
The complexity of competition between three native Australian fruit fly species, Bactrocera tryoni, B. neohumeralis and B. jarvisi in a changing environment

This thesis studies competition between three endemic Australian fruit fly species, Bactrocera tryoni, B. neohumeralis and B. jarvisi, all which are considered to have pest status in Australia. Intra- and interspecific interactions were investigated between adult females competing for oviposition substrates through video analysis and behavioural observations, as well as laboratory studies investigating larval competition, all within a changing environment. To further add to the outcomes of these investigations, the influence of a third trophic level on the outcome of competition was investigated and evaluated for future fruit fly control predictions.
Antibiotic Misuse Behaviours of Older People: Confirmation of the Factor Structure of the Antibiotic Use Questionnaire

Antibacterial resistance (AR) is responsible for steadily rising numbers of untreatable bacterial infections, most prevalently found in the older adult (OA) population due to age-related physical and cognitive deterioration, more frequent and long-lasting hospital visits, and reduced immunity. There are currently no established measures of antibiotic use behaviours for older adults, and theory-informed approaches to identifying the drivers of antibiotic use in older adults are lacking in the literature. The objective of this study was to identify predictors of antibiotic use and misuse in older adults using the Antibiotic Use Questionnaire (AUQ), a measure informed by the factors of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB): attitudes and beliefs, social norms, perceived behavioural control, behaviour, and a covariate—knowledge. A measure of social desirability was included, and participants scoring highly were excluded to control for social desirability bias. Confirmatory Factor Analyses and regression analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses in a cross-sectional, anonymous survey. A total of 211 participants completed the survey, 47 of which were excluded due to incompletion and high social desirability scores (≥5). Results of the factor analysis confirmed that some (but not all) factors from previous research in the general population were confirmed in the OA sample. No factors were found to be significant predictors of antibiotic use behaviour. Several suggestions for the variance in results from that of the first study are suggested, including challenges with meeting requirement for statistical power. The paper concludes that further research is required to determine the validity of the AUQ in an older adult population.
How stable is the relationship between gang membership and delinquency over time? An exploratory analysis using repeated cross-sectional data from students in one state, 2001-2017

ABSTRACT Some ethnographic research suggests that the criminogenic effect of gang membership may not be invariant over time, yet this possibility has gone untested despite the expansive body of research on potential moderators of gang involvement. This research used nine years of self-report data from high school students in Massachusetts (N = 22,120) to explore whether the effect of gang membership on delinquency was moderated over the survey period: 2001 to 2017. The dependent variables included physical fighting, weapon and gun carrying, and drug use and access. The findings suggest that the effect of gang membership on physical fighting and weapon carrying significantly weakened toward the end of the survey period, although this dissipation was not gradual or linear over the survey period. The implications of these findings are discussed with the aim of identifying future avenues of research that could be completed to further examine the role of time period on gang membership.
Expectations Regarding Gastein Healing Gallery Treatment and Their Connection to Health-Related Quality of Life

The present study examines connections between patient expectations and health-related quality of life. We explore a key distinction between expectations about general health and expectations for functional improvement. Patients were 1444 individuals with multiple conditions experiencing chronic pain who were seeking treatment at the Gastein Healing Gallery in Böckstein, near Bad Gastein, Austria. In addition to measures of expectations, patients completed measures of pain, mental and physical health, life satisfaction, fatigue, and sleep problems. Structural equation models were used to fit a latent variable model where both expectation variables were used to predict health-related quality of life. Results showed that expectations regarding potential functional improvement resulting from treatments at the Gastein Healing Gallery were associated with improved health-related quality of life. Expectations about general health improvements related to treatment were not associated with health-related quality of life. To facilitate optimal healing, clinicians may decide to emphasize expectations about functional recovery when discussing treatment methods similar to those offered at the Gastein Healing Gallery, and in so doing, health-related quality of life may benefit.
MWG-Net: Multiscale Wavelet Guidance Network for COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation From CT Images

Recently, accurate segmentation of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection from computed tomography (CT) scans is critical to the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. However, infection segmentation is a challenging task due to various textures, sizes and locations of infections, low contrast, and blurred boundaries. To address these problems, we propose a novel multiscale wavelet guidance network (MWG-Net) for COVID-19 lung infection by integrating the multiscale information of wavelet domain into the encoder and decoder of the convolutional neural network (CNN). In particular, we propose the wavelet guidance module (WGM) and wavelet and edge guidance module (WEGM). Among them, the WGM guides the encoder to extract infection details through the multiscale spatial and frequency features in the wavelet domain, while the WEGM guides the decoder to recover infection details through the multiscale wavelet representations and multiscale infection edge information. Besides, a progressive fusion module (PFM) is further developed to aggregate and explore multiscale features of the encoder and decoder. Notably, we establish a COVID-19 segmentation dataset (named COVID-Seg-100) containing 5800+ annotated slices for performance evaluation. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to compare our method with other state-of-the-art approaches on our COVID-19-Seg-100 and two publicly available datasets, i.e., MosMedData and COVID-SemiSeg. The results show that our MWG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on different datasets and can achieve more accurate and promising COVID-19 lung infection segmentation.
Characterization and Association of Rips Repertoire to Host Range of Novel Ralstonia solanacearum Strains by In Silico Approaches

Ralstonia solanacearum species complex (RSSC) cause several phytobacteriosis in many economically important crops around the globe, especially in the tropics. In Brazil, phylotypes I and II cause bacterial wilt (BW) and are indistinguishable by classical microbiological and phytopathological methods, while Moko disease is caused only by phylotype II strains. Type III effectors of RSSC (Rips) are key molecular actors regarding pathogenesis and are associated with specificity to some hosts. In this study, we sequenced and characterized 14 newly RSSC isolates from Brazil’s Northern and Northeastern regions, including BW and Moko ecotypes. Virulence and resistance sequences were annotated, and the Rips repertoire was predicted. Confirming previous studies, RSSC pangenome is open as α≅0.77. Genomic information regarding these isolates matches those for R. solanacearum in NCBI. All of them fit in phylotype II with a similarity above 96%, with five isolates in phylotype IIB and nine in phylotype IIA. Almost all R. solanacearum genomes in NCBI are actually from other species in RSSC. Rips repertoire of Moko IIB was more homogeneous, except for isolate B4, which presented ten non-shared Rips. Rips repertoire of phylotype IIA was more diverse in both Moko and BW, with 43 common shared Rips among all 14 isolates. New BW isolates shared more Rips with Moko IIA and Moko IIB than with other public BW genome isolates from Brazil. Rips not shared with other isolates might contribute to individual virulence, but commonly shared Rips are good avirulence candidates. The high number of Rips shared by new Moko and BW isolates suggests they are actually Moko isolates infecting solanaceous hosts. Finally, infection assays and Rips expression on different hosts are needed to better elucidate the association between Rips repertoire and host specificities.