Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of sarcopenia and the association of sarcopenia, premorbid factors, early functional outcome and 1-year mortality in Hong Kong Chinese fragility hip fracture patients

Background/purpose: Sarcopenia is a predictor of fall, which is a leading cause of fragility hip fractures (FHF). Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is a costly measurement method for sarcopenia. Rehabilitation and prognosis can be determined by early functional outcomes. Meanwhile, 1-year mortality of FHF patients is high. Aims: (i) To report the prevalence of sarcopenia. (ii) To investigate the relationships of sarcopenia, premorbid factors, early functional outcomes and 1-year mortality in Hong Kong Chinese FHF patients. Methods: FHF patients admitted to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong from April 2016 to March 2017 were reviewed, including outcomes of relative appendicular skeletal muscle mass index (RASM), handgrip strength (HGS), New Mobility Score (NMS), Modified Functional Ambulation Classification (MFAC), Modified Barthel Index (MBI), Cumulated Ambulation Score (CAS), Elderly Mobility Scale (EMS) and 1-year mortality. Results: One hundred sixty nine FHF patients, aged 82.68 ± 7.32 years, were reviewed. Prevalence of sarcopenia in male and female were 71.4% and 37.7%, respectively. RASM was correlated with HGS of both dominant (r = 0.366, p < 0.001) and non-dominant side (r = 0.383, p < 0.001), NMS (rs = 0.239, p < 0.001), MFAC (rs = 0.192, p = 0.013), MBI (rs = 0.182, p = 0.018) and CAS (rs = 0.183, p = 0.019). RASM was not significantly correlated with EMS-1 (rs = 0.050, p = 0.525) and EMS-DC (rs = 0.092, p = 0.249). There was significant correlation between Sarcopenia and EMS-DC (rrb = −0.226, p = 0.004). Sarcopenia was marginally not associated with 1-year mortality (χ 2 = 3.745, p = 0.053). One-year mortality of FHF patients with Sarcopenia and without Sarcopenia were 16.5% and 7.1%, respectively. FHF patients with Sarcopenia were not statistically significant to be more likely to face mortality within 1 year (R 2 = 0.030, OR = 2.638, p = 0.060). Conclusions: Prevalence of sarcopenia was high in FHF patients and RASM was correlated with HGS and NMS, which can be easily administered as screening tools. Sarcopenia was correlated with early functional outcome but not with 1-year mortality. Early detection of Sarcopenia is crucial for early implementation of rehabilitation and treatment.
SOIL FAUNA AND LEAF LITTER DECOMPOSITION IN DIFFERENT SUCCESSIONAL STAGES OF A SUBMOUNTAINOUS SEASONAL SEMIDECIDUOUS FOREST

In tropical forests, the stage of ecological succession influences the nutrient cycling. This study aimed to analyze soil fauna community structure, composition, and leaf litter decomposition in fragments of intermediate-successional and late-successional Submountainous Seasonal Semideciduous Forest (ISF and LSF, respectively). We used a square metal frame to collect 10 samples of the leaf litter layer and surface soil (0.00-0.05 m depth) from each area in the wet and dry seasons. Soil fauna individuals were then extracted using a modified Berlese-Tullgren funnel. For analysis of leaf litter decomposition, 15 litter bags containing 30 g of senescent leaves were randomly placed on the forest floor of each area in the dry season, and three bags were collected after 60, 90, 120, 150, and 180 days. LSF presented higher value of richness and was more associated with Diptera and Formicidae. There was no clear pattern in evenness and diversity with successional stage. The dissimilarity between ISF and LSF in terms of soil fauna community was greater in the dry season. Litter decomposition was almost identical in both areas.
Thermodynamic characteristics of adsorption of nonionic surfactants onto acetylene carbon black and AG-3 activated carbon

The effect of temperature on the adsorption of nonionic surfactants from aqueous solutions onto acetylene carbon black and AG-3 activated carbon are investigated. Thermodynamic characteristics of adsorption were calculated based on adsorption measurements. The results obtained revealed the low mobility of the adsorbed molecules of nonionic surfactants in the associates at the surface of nonporous carbonaceous adsorbent.
Discursive Communication Strategies for Introducing Innovative Products: The Content, Cohesion, and Coherence of Product Launch Presentations

In the information age, discourse plays an increasingly important role in promoting innovative products. But how language works in the innovation process remains underexplored. This study explores the discursive communication strategies used to introduce innovation by analyzing the content, cohesion, and coherence of product launch presentations by Steve Jobs. It reveals that such discursive communication strategies improve the audience’s understanding, recognition, and acceptance of innovative products. This study contributes to both business communication studies in general and research on innovation communication in product launches in particular.
Four Decades of Frontline Service Employee Research: An Integrative Bibliometric Review

We conducted a comprehensive review of empirical research related to frontline service employees over the past four decades (1980-2020). Utilizing a bibliometric mapping approach, we identified 630 relevant articles appearing in service, management, marketing, and applied/occupational health psychology journals. Our analysis identified five distinct research clusters: (a) collective predictors and effects, (b) services encounters, (c) emotional regulation and management, (d) customer orientation, and (e) service stress and strain. In this article, we describe the nature of current research within each of these clusters and identify future directions within and across different clusters for scholarly work. Our review highlights the conceptual and methodological richness within the clusters and calls out for interdisciplinary scholarship to build a diverse, yet unified field of service work research.
Performance Evaluation Towards Automatic Building and Road Detection Technique for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Building and road detection from the high-resolution remote sensing images has many applications in a wide range of areas including urban design, real-estate management, and disaster relief. Extracting buildings and roads from the remote sensing images have been performed by human experts manually, but it takes too much time and the cost of labor to build is also very high. So, an automated system that can emulate a human operator is desired. Our goal is to develop a system for automatically detecting buildings and roads directly from high-resolution satellite images. Therefore, we propose Internal Gray Variance (IGV) to detect the buildings and roads in the urban areas. First, the satellite images are enhanced by using morphological operators, which enhance the edges of the objects. Then multiseed-based clustering technique detects the building and road edges using the variance in the gray levels. To reduce the false alarm, tiny regions that are improbable to be buildings and roads are separated. Finally, by using the adaptive threshold-based segmentation technique, the buildings are segmented and the road network is extracted based on supervised directional homogeneity. Finally, we evaluate our system on a large-scale road and building detection data sets that are publicly available.
Climate warming induced a stretch of the breeding season and an increase of second clutches in a passerine breeding at its altitudinal limits

Abstract The increase in the average air temperature due to global warming has produced an early onset of the reproduction in many migratory birds of the Paleartic region. According to the “mismatch hypothesis” this response can lead to a decrease in the breeding output when the conditions that trigger the departure from the wintering areas do not match the availability of food resources in the breeding ground. We used 653 brooding events registered during the period 1991–2013 to investigate the link between climatic variables and individual breeding performance of a partially migratory passerine, the Rock Sparrow Petronia petronia, breeding at the altitude limit of its distribution. The laying date (LD) of the earliest first clutch was associated with local spring (minimum) temperatures but did not show a significant trend during the period considered. The LD of the latest first clutch had a positive and statistically significant trend, unrelated to local covariates and resulting in a longer breeding season (∼1.5 days/year). A longer breeding season allowed birds to produce more second clutches, which proportion increased from 0.14 to 0.25. The average breeding success was also positively correlated with the average temperature in July and with the duration of the breeding season. Contrary to expectations, the most important climate-dependent effect was a stretch of the breeding season due to a significant increase of the LD of the latest first-clutches rather than an earlier breeding onset. We show how climate changes act on bird populations through multiple paths and stress the need to assess the link between climatic variables and several aspects of the breeding cycle.
Reply to “Letter to the editors on termite stone lines” by Smith et al. (2021)

To the Editors, The possible impact of bioturbation on the stratigraphic integrity of archaeological sites in tropical regions is an important issue in prehistoric research. Termites are a major cause of bioturbation in the seasonally wet tropics, including northern Australia, as Smith et al. (2021) recognize in their recent letter in response to our paper “Identifying disturbance in archaeological sites in tropical northern Australia: Implications for previously proposed 65,000‐year continental occupation date” (Williams et al., 2020). We thank them for their interest and welcome the opportunity to clarify some of the issues we discussed in our paper. We begin with the thorny question of whether we can distinguish stone layers formed solely as a result of termite activity from stone layers in archaeological sites formed primarily as a result of human activities. We then consider the impact of termites upon overdispersion in OSL equivalent dose rate (De) distributions. We conclude with a further comment on the recent controversial ages claimed for early human occupation in northern Australia, a topic we addressed in our paper.
Lab and Field Level Potential of Endophytic Bacteria in Managing the Dry Root Rot Disease in Black Gram Incited by Rhizoctonia bataticola (Taubenh) Butler 

Background: The plant growth promotion and efficacy against phytopathogens by the endophytic bacteria are being focused now due to their ecofriendly nature. Methods: Endophytic bacteria (24 nos) isolated from the roots, stems and leaves of black gram plants collected from different locations were tested for their potential to inhibit the growth of R. bataticola under in vitro and in vivo conditions. Result: The leaf endophyte BLE 4 exhibited maximum inhibition (79.6%) of R. bataticola followed by BSE 4 (77.4%), BSE 7 (77.0%) and BLE 1 (74.0%). Among these 4 isolates tested as seed treatment and soil application, there was significant increase in dry weight (7.1 g), plant height (37.7 cm), number of branches (13.2) and number of pods (26.2) in BLE 4 treated plots. Whereas, the incidence of dry root rot and yield were insignificant. In the screening study of isolates for their phosphate solubilization potential, protease activity, siderophore and HCN production, no single isolate possessed all the properties, but siderophore production, protease activity and phosphate solubilization were found in BSE 4, BRE 3, BRE 5 and BRE 10 isolates.
Board Monitoring and Advising in Dynamic Agency

Intuition suggests that shareholders benefit from active boards. We present a model to show that if contract renegotiation is possible, then an active board might not always be desirable from the shareholders' perspective. This happens because low board activity may partially offset the distortion in the manager's incentives caused by the renegotiation option. While the value of low board activity stems from the board's weak monitoring, a strong measurement effect of the board's advising in the manager's performance measures is necessary to implement it. In this case, a sufficiently independent board motivates a low level of board activity.
Work Engagement and Its Relationship with Personal Well-Being: A Cross-Sectional Exploratory Study of Human Service Workers

ABSTRACT Studies on worker well-being within the human services sector have largely looked at factors that put the well-being of workers at risk but few studies have focused on workplace experiences that promote worker well-being. This study examines the relationship between work engagement and life satisfaction, and overall health among social workers and human service workers. Data for this study were drawn from a convenience sample of 133 social workers and human service workers using a self-administered workplace survey. Two hierarchical linear multiple regression models were conducted to assess the relationship between work engagement and affective (i.e., life satisfaction) and physical well-being (i.e., health). Findings suggest that being engaged with work is associated with greater levels of life satisfaction and health. A discussion on the impact of study findings on practice and future research is presented.
Application of Molecular Sieves for Drying Transformers Insulated with Mineral Oil, Natural Ester, or Synthetic Ester

A high level of moisture in the insulation system of power transformers is often the cause of their failure. This can be prevented by drying a transformer in its place of installation. In the article the application of molecular sieves (MS) in the drying process of the transformer insulation system was analyzed. The water sorption isotherms of 3A MS in mineral oil, natural ester, and synthetic ester at 35 °C were determined, which was not described in the literature before. An evaluation of the influence of temperature on the drying dynamics of electro-insulating liquids using MS was also carried out. The drying dynamics were tested at three temperatures, i.e., 35 °C, 50 °C, and 65 °C, which allowed to analyze the effect of temperature on a short-term or continuous drying process. The tests showed that 3A MS’s ability to adsorb water varied depending on the type of electro-insulating liquid. The determined water sorption isotherms, described by means of Langmuir adsorption model, make it possible to calculate the amount of MS needed for drying transformers with different liquid insulation. The research and analyses show the MS’s great potential for the drying of transformer insulation systems.
Biodegradation of Reactive Red-11 by the Isolate Enterococcus casseliflavus CMGS-1 Strain

Pollutions are the insertion of contaminations, in the natural environments leads to various obstructions, in water pollutants synthetic dye pollution emerging rapidly. In Asia, India may become second major contributor of textile waste water discharging (Verma et al., 2012). The basic structure constituent of dyes are contains n=n bonds, attached to a benzene ring, and various other compounds like SO3H, SO2NH2, NO2 Attached to a aromatic nucleus (Jain et al., 2012). Various physical, chemical methods like reverse osmosis, Fenton’s reagent, chemical flocculation, ion exchange, coagulation, are available but these methods are expensive leads secondary sludge generation and complete degradation cannot be achieved (Jadhav et al., 2012). More than 10000 different kinds of dyes are available in world (Kadam et al., 2011). These dyes are carcinogenic, toxic, and mutagenic in nature. (Shah et al., 2013). The ultimate solution we will get from microorganisms, these are the natural cleaners of the nature. In these direction we selected the potential strain which having the capacity to degrade reactive red-11, confirmed by the FT-IR analysis.
Morning boundary layer conditions for shallow to deep convective
cloud evolution during the dry season in the central Amazon

Abstract. Observations of the boundary layer (BL) processes are analyzed in four shallow convective days (ShCu) and four shallow-to-deep convective days (ShDeep) using a suite of ground-based measurements from the second Intensive Operating Period as part of the Observation and Modeling of the Green Ocean Amazon (IOP2; GoAmazon 2014/5) Experiment. The BL stages in ShDeep days, from the nighttime to the cloudy mixing layer stage, are then described in comparison with ShCu days. Atmosphere thermodynamics and dynamics, environmental profiles, and surface fluxes were employed to compare these two distinct situations for each stage of the BL evolution. Particular attention is given to the morning transition stage, in which the BL changes from stable to unstable conditions in the early morning hours. Results show that the duration of the morning transition on ShDeep days decreases under high humidity and intense vertical wind shear. Higher humidity since nighttime not only contributes to lowering the cloud base during the rapid growth of the BL but also contributes to the balance between radiative cooling and turbulent mixing during nighttime, resulting in large sensible heat flux in the early morning. A large sensible heat flux promotes rapid growth of the well-mixed layer, thus favoring the deeper BL starting from around 08:00 LST. Under these conditions, turbulent mixing provides a lifting mechanism by which air parcels reach the lifting condensation level, leading to the formation of shallow cumulus clouds and their subsequent evolution into deep convective clouds.
The effects of HRM approach on quality management techniques and performance

Using data from 250 companies from Brazil and Denmark, this study aims to investigate the effects of commitment- and control-oriented human resource management (HRM) on the relationship between four QM technique groups, namely goal setting (GS), continuous improvement (CI), measurement (MS) and failure prevention and control (FPC) techniques, and performance. Both HRM approaches affect the QM techniques and performance positively. However, the association with control-oriented HRM has a stronger performance effect for three QM techniques groups (CI, MS and FPC) than the association with commitment-oriented HRM. Only for the GS techniques, the effects of control- and commitment-oriented HRM on performance are not statistically significantly different. These results show that HRM practices may contribute to enable QM techniques to have a positive effect on performance. Additionally, the results demonstrate that control-oriented HRM supports the QM techniques better in improving performance than commitment-oriented HRM for most groups of QM techniques studied. These findings suggest an important duality: while previous studies suggest that QM practices thrive in a commitment-oriented HRM environment, this research shows that QM techniques are best supported through control-oriented HRM. Further research, going beyond the two country samples, is needed to explore the implications of this duality.
Inorganic Ammonium Halide Additive Strategy for Highly Efficient and Stable CsPbI3 Perovskite Solar Cells

All‐inorganic perovskite cesium lead iodide (CsPbI3) exhibits excellent prospects for commercial application as a light absorber in single‐junction or tandem solar cells due to its outstanding thermal stability and proper bandgap. However, the device performance of CsPbI3‐based perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is still restricted by the unsatisfactory crystal quality and severe non‐radiative recombination. Herein, inorganic additive ammonium halides are introduced into the precursor solution to regulate the nucleation and crystallization of the CsPbI3 film by exploiting the atomic interaction between the ammonium group and the Pb–I framework. The grain boundaries and interfacial contact of the CsPbI3 film have been improved, which leads to significant suppression in the non‐radiative recombination and an enhancement in the charge transport ability. With these benefits, a high efficiency of 18.7% together with an extraordinarily high fill factor of 0.83–0.84 has been achieved, comparable to the highest records reported so far. Moreover, the cell exhibits ultra‐high photoelectrical stability under continuous light illumination and high bias voltage with 96% of its initial power‐conversion efficiency being sustained after 2000 h operation, even superior to the world‐champion CsPbI3 solar cell. The findings are promising for the development and application of all‐inorganic PSCs using a simple inorganic additive strategy.
In-vitro evaluation of antioxidant and antiradical potential of successive extracts, semi-purified fractions and biosynthesized silver nanoparticles of Rumex vesicarius

The aim of the present study was to assess in vitro the antiradical and antioxidant activities of successive extracts and semi-purified fractions from Rumex vesicarius L. In the present work, three extracts (n-Hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol) and 22 column fractions of methanolic extract (as promising extract) were evaluated against 2,2-diphenyl- 1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH•) and 2,2-azinobis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline- 6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS) radical scavenging methods as antiradical and antioxidant activities compared with Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) as synthetic standard and silver nanoparticles of methanolic extract (Ag-NPs-Me), in addition to analysis of chemical constituents of extract and fraction using Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The obtained results revealed that, both methods go parallel showing that the concentration of extract and incubation time are dependent and proportional with phenolic compounds concentration. Absolute methanol extract recorded the highest antioxidant activity when compared with the other crude extracts with 79.3 and 78.8% against DPPH and ABTS respectively when compared with BHT as synthetic standard (89.4 and 89.9%) against DPPH and ABTS respectively. Calculation of the antiradical activity units showed the highest values of methanolic extract and its promising fraction (No. 12) after 300 seconds (5 minutes) comparing with antioxidant activity (30 min). Also, the antioxidant activity increased with synthetic Ag-NPs-Me when compared with methanolic extract by (IC50= 53.9 and 74.6 µg/ml respectively). Thus, the GC-MS analysis of successive extracts of R. vesicarius L showed a highly complex profile, containing approximately 24 different components. One pure compound was identified from fraction No. 12. The identified compound was l-(+)- ascorbic acid 2, 6-dihexadecanoate. The data also revealed presence of closely similar antioxidant activities in methanolic extract or its pure compounds with BHT when mixed at different proportions. From the obtained results it could be concluded that R. vesicarius methanolic extracts and fractions can be extensively used in the production of potential antioxidant, antiradical and AgNPs-Me for biomedical application on the consumer’s health.