Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender Differences in Perceptions and Attitudes of Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Study in University Students

The aim of the study was to examine perceptions of male and female students towards online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted at four universities in Tyrol (Austria). In addition to age and gender, participants reported their level of agreement with thematically relevant items using a four-part Likert scale (1 = completely disagree to 4 = completely agree). The reliability of the questionnaire was checked using Cronbach's alpha and gender-specific differences were examined via Mann-Whitney U test. The level of significance was p ≤ 0.05. Results: A total of 236 students (63.6% female) completed the questionnaire. Around three quarters of those surveyed were of the opinion that their university was poorly prepared for the challenges of online teaching at the beginning of the pandemic, but that digital teaching improved as the pandemic progressed. Compared to their male colleagues, female students rated the workload at the beginning of the pandemic higher, complained more about poorer home office conditions, had greater difficulties in using new software programs and obtaining study-relevant literature (p < 0.05). Female students agreed more frequently than male students that additional training of their own media skills and media didactic training for teachers was needed (p < 0.001). Insufficient transformation of certain course content and lack of clarity on assignments were criticized by around half of the students. Furthermore, over 90% of the students stated that they missed the contact with their fellow students. Conclusions: The results of this study support the need for improvements in the field of distance learning in order to mitigate the negative effects of online learning on study life and learning success of university students, especially women.
The impact of directors’ liability insurance on board meeting attendance

We study the relationship between directors’ liability insurance and board meeting attendance. We find that directors’ liability insurance and board meeting attendance are positively associated. This suggests that directors’ liability insurance may actually serve a governance role because an insurer definitely has incentives to thoroughly scrutinize the insured. As a result, director’s board meeting attendance rate increases because more monitoring of directors leads to more responsible behaviors of directors. With 98,524 yearly observations at the director level and 8,968 yearly observations at the firm level of listed firms in Taiwan during the period from 2008 to 2015, our empirical findings suggest that, on average, the board meeting attendance rate of insured firms is 2.9 percent higher than that of uninsured firms.
Meshed wavelength-division multiplexed networks partially equipped with wavelength converters

Summary form only given. A lot of work has been reported on the use of wavelength converters (WCs) in wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) networks. Recent research indicates that for a wide variety of applications the use of WCs in WDM networks results only in modest improvements in throughput, compared to networks without WCs. It has been observed that a limited set of nodes equipped with WCs can give almost equal performance as a virtual wavelength path network, where all nodes are fully equipped with WCs. Furthermore, it has been shown that already a limited form of wavelength conversion can enhance the performance of WDM ring networks. Former work indicates that a limited number of converters should be sufficient to provide decent performance. This paper reports the impact of two different architectures for the optical cross-connect (OXC), containing a limited number of WCs, on the performance of meshed WDM networks. The two OXC architectures considered are: (1) an OXC containing a pool of WCs, where a free WC can be used by any incoming channel, and (2) an OXC where the WCs are dedicated to a particular channel, conversion occurs before the signal is multiplexed on the outgoing fiber.
Non-thermal gliding arc discharge assisted turbulent combustion (up to 80 kW) at extended conditions: phenomenological analysis

ABSTRACT Plasma assisted combustion has been proposed as an efficient technique to enhance combustion, especially under the extreme conditions. For shedding light on the interactions between plasma and turbulent flame at extended conditions, a burner design with integrated electrodes was used to couple a non-thermal gliding arc (GA) discharge to a turbulent flame. The morphology and dynamic behaviors of the GA assisted flame under extended flow rates and gas temperatures were investigated by high-speed video imaging. It is found that two distinct types of flame (named as Flame A and Flame B) can be sustained by the GA discharge depending on the local flow conditions. Flame A was sustained by the GA on stable anchor points, while Flame B moved together with the thin plasma volume of the gliding arc, behaving as an unstable flame. When the fed air gas temperature was increased, Flame A became more stable while Flame B became fragile and extinguished easily. Furthermore, the phenomenological findings under different flow conditions imply typical four flame types for the GA discharge assisted combustion system, including the self-sustained flame at relatively low Reynolds number (Re), the GA sustained stable flame at moderate Re number, the GA sustained unstable flame and the GA assisted auto-ignited and propagating flame at relatively large Re number. In all, the GA discharge seems to provide various effects on combustion depending on the overall turbulence as well as the local equivalence ratio, the gas temperature, etc.
The Experience of Chronic Sorrow among Indonesian Mothers Who have Suffered Recent Perinatal Loss

Background: Perinatal death results in physical loss of a child as well as symbolic loss (loss of self, hope and self-esteem) experienced by many parents. Loss is often expressed via a grief response that can develop into chronic sorrow. Ineffective coping strategies may increase susceptibility to complications associated with chronic sorrow. These complications can include clinical depression, dysthymic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, attachment disorder, drug dependence, psychosis, and suicidal ideation. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the barriers and facilitators to chronic sorrow particularly among vulnerable populations. Aim: To explore the experience of chronic sorrow among Indonesian women who have suffered perinatal loss. Methods: The present qualitative study utilized a descriptive phenomenological approach. Participants included women who experienced chronic sorrow due to perinatal loss within the past seven weeks to three years. Maximum variation sampling was used based on women’s current number of children. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and analyzed using a modified Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method. Results: Three key themes emerged from the data: (1) recurrent experiences of grief are common particularly when exposed to certain triggers (memories from pregnancy, mementos); (2) adequate coping strategies and emotional support are needed to help treat grief; and (3) specific characteristics of chronic sorrow are associated with perinatal loss, such as grief that feels diminished and the presence of another child serving as both a cure and a trigger of sorrow. Conclusion: Chronic sorrow as a result of perinatal loss is experienced repeatedly when mothers face certain triggers. We have identified two characteristics (diminished grief, having another child serve to both cure and trigger sorrow) that are specific to the experience of chronic sorrow compared to that of general grief. It is important to understand the experience of chronic sorrow and how coping strategies and a support system can help grieving mothers to overcome their loss.
Fast Segmentation of Metastatic Foci in H&E Whole-Slide Images for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Breast cancer is the leading cause of death for women globally. In clinical practice, pathologists visually scan over enormous amounts of gigapixel microscopic tissue slide images, which is a tedious and challenging task. In breast cancer diagnosis, micro-metastases and especially isolated tumor cells are extremely difficult to detect and are easily neglected because tiny metastatic foci might be missed in visual examinations by medical doctors. However, the literature poorly explores the detection of isolated tumor cells, which could be recognized as a viable marker to determine the prognosis for T1NoMo breast cancer patients. To address these issues, we present a deep learning-based framework for efficient and robust lymph node metastasis segmentation in routinely used histopathological hematoxylin–eosin-stained (H–E) whole-slide images (WSI) in minutes, and a quantitative evaluation is conducted using 188 WSIs, containing 94 pairs of H–E-stained WSIs and immunohistochemical CK(AE1/AE3)-stained WSIs, which are used to produce a reliable and objective reference standard. The quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 89.6% precision, 83.8% recall, 84.4% F1-score, and 74.9% mIoU, and that it performs significantly better than eight deep learning approaches, including two recently published models (v3_DCNN and Xception-65), and three variants of Deeplabv3+ with three different backbones, namely, U-Net, SegNet, and FCN, in precision, recall, F1-score, and mIoU (p<0.001). Importantly, the proposed system is shown to be capable of identifying tiny metastatic foci in challenging cases, for which there are high probabilities of misdiagnosis in visual inspection, while the baseline approaches tend to fail in detecting tiny metastatic foci. For computational time comparison, the proposed method takes 2.4 min for processing a WSI utilizing four NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080Ti GPU cards and 9.6 min using a single NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080Ti GPU card, and is notably faster than the baseline methods (4-times faster than U-Net and SegNet, 5-times faster than FCN, 2-times faster than the 3 different variants of Deeplabv3+, 1.4-times faster than v3_DCNN, and 41-times faster than Xception-65).
The Gifts Of Athena Historical Origins Of The Knowledge Economy

Thank you for reading the gifts of athena historical origins of the knowledge economy. As you may know, people have look hundreds times for their favorite readings like this the gifts of athena historical origins of the knowledge economy, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some harmful virus inside their laptop.
Reconstructing the concept of school climate

ABSTRACT Background School climates have broad-ranging implications for students’ success and well-being, with research suggesting that a positive school environment plays a crucial role. However, more needs to be understood about school climate from students’ points of view. Purpose This study sought to explore what constitutes school climate from students’ perspectives. Method In this qualitative study, 22 grade 8 to 11 students (ages 13–18) from a secondary school in Canada participated in semi-structured focus group discussions (6 to 8 students per group). The students described their perceptions of school climate from their own perspectives. Later in the session, the students were introduced to ten school climate dimensions identified in a previous study and asked whether they would remove any dimensions or add new ones. Data were transcribed and analysed in depth, using thematic coding. Findings The analysis yielded fifteen main dimensions, of which seven represented those identified in the previous study. The remaining eight dimensions emphasised the uniqueness of students’ experiences and the facets that they value in school climate. These included the availability of school resources, leadership, teacher professionalism, student-teacher relationships, a sense of order, and support. Conclusions Understanding school climate plays a critical role in efforts to foster a positive school environment for students. Our study highlights the need for multi-reporter methodologies to fully comprehend the complexity of school climate, thereby helping to inform policies and professional development practices that aim to improve school climates.
Chemical Components, Antioxidant Activity, and Glycemic Response Values of Purple Sweet Potato Products

Purple sweet potato is a source of starch with high potential to be developed as a functional food. It can be boiled and consumed as a snack or processed into intermediate goods such as flour. The flour can then be modified through partial gelatinization and followed by a retrogradation process to produce resistant starch-rich purple sweet potato flour. The study was aimed at obtaining the glycemic response values of purple sweet potato products, namely, boiled purple sweet potatoes (BSP), purple sweet potato noodles (SPN), and resistant starch-rich purple sweet potato noodles (RSPN). SPN was prepared from conventional purple sweet potato flour, whereas RSPN was made from resistant starch-rich purple sweet potato flour. Moreover, water, ash, protein, fat, and carbohydrate; total phenolic, anthocyanin, and resistant starch contents; and the rate of hydrolysis of starch were evaluated. Ten subjects were involved in the estimation of glycemic response determined by the area under the curve (AUC) of the blood glucose after consuming products. Glucose syrup was used as a reference. The glycemic response data were processed using ANOVA and further tested using LSD at p < 0.05. The results showed RSPN had the lowest glycemic index value if compared to BSP and SPN (58.7, 63.5, and 83.7) and fell under food with medium GI, but the differences were not statistically significant. RSPN and SPN were classified as medium GI; however, the process of partial gelatinization followed by retrogradation during the preparation of flour used for raw material in making RSPN has successfully maintained the total phenol and anthocyanin and increased resistant starch content of the noodle Processing of purple sweet potato flour into noodle lowered the GI category, and when the flour was partially gelatinized and retrograded, the noodle had more potentiality as a functional food due to their high total phenolic and anthocyanin content.
SIDECAR ASIC at ESO

Teledyne Imaging Sensors (TIS) has developed a CMOS device known as the SIDECAR application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This single chip provides all the functionality of FPA drive electronics to operate visible and infrared imaging detectors with a fully digital interface. A Teledyne 2K ×2K silicon PIN diode array hybridized to a Hawaii-2RG multiplexer, the Hybrid Visible Silicon Imager (HyViSI) was read out with the ESO standard IR detector controller IRACE, which delivers detector limited performance. We have tested the H2RG HyViSI detector with the TIS SIDECAR ASIC in 32 channel readout mode at cryogenic temperatures. The SIDECAR has been evaluated down to 105 Kelvin operating temperature and performance results have been compared to those obtained with external electronics. Furthermore ESO has developed its own interface card to replace the JADE USB card provided by Teledyne. The ASIC controller is now being embedded in the ESO standard VLT hard and software environment. This paper provides an update on the recent development of the new ESO ASIC interface card. We find that the SIDECAR ASIC provides performance equal to external electronics.
Impacts of COVID-19 on the Use of Digital Technology in Construction Projects in the UAE

The construction industry has been incorporating digital technology over the last two decades, albeit gradually, as “technology-push” continues to overcome customary and traditional passivity typical in the sector. The objective of the study presented in this paper is to investigate how digital technology is making a headway in the construction industry as a consequence of COVID-19. For the purpose of this paper, digital technology applications are divided into three groups: data acquisition, processing, and communication. The methodology involved conducting a questionnaire survey among the construction professionals in the UAE. The survey included questions on the extent of use and level of investment on the three types of technology in three periods—pre-COVID, during COVID, and post-COVID. The results clearly show the increasing level of usage of digital technology in the construction industry from pre-COVID to during COVID and post-COVID periods. Among the three categories, communication technology indicated higher extent of use as compared to the other two. In addition, a marked difference was observed between the “small” project organizations and the “large” ones. Unsurprisingly, both usage and investment in digital technology, in smaller organizations, indicated higher extent of increase in during and post-pandemic periods when compared to the larger organizations.
Momentum and market volatility: a Bayesian regime-switching model

Our study finds that momentum is a persistent phenomenon that exhibits great variability in its strength in the UK stock market. Inspired by psychological evidence that cognitive biases can shift overtime, we conjecture that there may be two stock market states, namely, the calm and the turbulent market state, and that the switch between these two market states is governed by market volatility. Using Bayesian estimation methods, our results confirm the role of market volatility as the critical switching variable, which is also found to have additional predictive power for momentum returns in the turbulent market state. Somewhat contradictory to the findings in cross-sectional studies, we find that past returns have a negative impact on momentum profits. We also find that both winners and losers tend to perform better in the turbulent market state than in the calm market state and that losers’ outperformance is responsible for large momentum losses in the turbulent market state. Investment strategies that take advantage of the predictability of momentum dynamics outperform momentum strategies. Our findings are not readily reconciled with risk-based explanations but can be loosely explained in a behavioural framework.
The Influence of Community Partnership Benchmark on Management Outcomes in Child Friendly Schools of Makueni County, Kenya

The Kenya government’s effort to adopt and implement the CFS model created a gap with some public primary schools becoming child friendly while others lagged behind. This paper reports a study on the influence of community partnership as a benchmark on the management outcome of child friendly schools. The study was conducted in Makueni County of Kenya in which Child friendly school partnership with Communities was significantly established. A population of about 45,102 was studied producing a sample of 402 respondents. In schools where community partnership existed, 63.6% have operational BOM committees, Parents provided funds for school projects and construction of buildings (58.1%), Parents participated in school’s decision-making process (59.4%) and Parents met at least once every month to discuss school development (59.8%). However, other than parents, partnership with other stakeholders was not clear. The study recommended strengthened implementation of community partnership with child friendly schools for the benefit of children.
Resilience in the Perinatal Period and Early Motherhood: A Principle-Based Concept Analysis

A context-specific delineation of research approaches to resilience in the perinatal and early motherhood literature is currently lacking. A principle-based concept analysis was used to establish a description of how women’s resilience is currently conceptualised and operationalised within empirical research in the perinatal period and early motherhood (defined as up to five-years postpartum). CINAHL, Medline, PsychInfo, EMBASE, ASSIA, Web of Science, Scielo, Maternity and Infant Care, the Cochrane Library, and the World Health Organization were systematically searched (January/February 2020 and March 2022). Fifty-six studies met the inclusion criteria. Analysis demonstrated interchangeable use of associated concepts such as ‘coping’, ‘coping strategies’, and ‘adaptation’. Resilience was frequently operationalised as the absence of illness symptomatology, rather than the presence of mental well-being. Investigations of positive areas of functioning were predominately related to the mother’s family role. There was limited qualitative exploration of women’s perspectives. Recommendations for the pragmatic application of resilience research were not well developed. The narrow operationalisation of resilience by mental ill-health and parental role, and the distinct absence of women’s perspectives, restricts the logical maturity and pragmatic application of the concept. Future research may benefit from exploration of women’s insights on indicators that might best reflect positive functioning and resilience in this period.
use of humour in medical education: students’ perspective

In early 20th century, Sir William Osler supported the use of humour as an efficacious tool in medical education, which continues to be used today. Despite the abundance of literature delineating this important role, it is often overlooked among medical students. A descriptive cross-sectional study was planned where a total of 295 medical students from the pre-clerkship and clerkship phases at Beirut Arab University Faculty of Medicine were included in the study. A questionnaire was distributed among the participants assessing their perception on the use of humour in medical education. Data were collected, entered, and analysed on SPSS software version 23.1. Results with p-value < 0.05 were considered statistically significant. The majority of participants agreed to the implementation of humour in medical education. They supported different forms of humour to be used, and considered mockery, sarcasm, the instructor appearing as a performer, and humour that is irrelevant to the course as inappropriate. Inappropriate humour distracts attention and disrupts the formal atmosphere. Our findings suggest that medical students’ opinions on using humour in medical education are supportive. The findings of this study might be of benefit to assist teachers in using humour to improve the attendance and interest of the students in the class and create an environment conducive to optimal student learning.
Determining the Proper Specification for Endogenous Covariates in Discrete Data Settings

Abstract An important but often overlooked obstacle in multivariate discrete data models is the specification of endogenous covariates. Endogeneity can be modeled as latent or observed, representing competing hypotheses about the outcomes being considered. However, little attention has been applied to deciphering which specification is best supported by the data. This paper highlights the use of existing Bayesian model comparison techniques to investigate the proper specification for endogenous covariates and to understand the nature of endogeneity. Consideration of both observed and latent modeling approaches is emphasized in two empirical applications. The first application examines linkages for banking contagion and the second application evaluates the impact of education on socioeconomic outcomes.