Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validated Prognostic Scores to Predict Outcomes in ECLS-Bridged Patients to Lung Transplantation

Selection of patients who may benefit from extracorporeal life support (ECLS) as a bridge to lung transplant (LTx) is crucial. The aim was to assess if validated prognostic scores could help in selecting patients who may benefit from ECLS-bridging predicting their outcomes. Clinical data of patients successfully ECLS-bridged to LTx from 2009 to 2021 were collected from two European centers. For each patient, we calculated Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), Simplified Acute Physiology Score III (SAPS III), Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II), before placing ECLS support, and then correlated with outcome. Median values of SOFA, SAPS III, and APACHE II were 5 (IQR 3–9), 57 (IQR 47.5–65), and 21 (IQR 15–26). In-hospital, 30 and 90 days mortality were 21%, 14%, and 22%. SOFA, SAPS III, and APACHE II were analyzed as predictors of in-hospital, 30 and 90 days mortality (SOFA C-Index: 0.67, 0.78, 0.72; SAPS III C-index: 0.48, 0.45, 0.51; APACHE II C-Index: 0.49, 0.45, 0.52). For SOFA, the score with the best performance, a value ≥9 was identified to be the optimal cut-off for the prediction of the outcomes of interest. SOFA may be considered an adequate predictor in these patients, helping clinical decision-making. More specific and simplified scores for this population are necessary.
Research Africa Network (RAN) RAN Working Paper

This paper investigates the role of institutional infrastructures in the financial inclusion-growth nexus for a panel of twenty countries in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA). Employing the System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), the following insightful outcomes are established. First, while there is an unrestricted positive impact of physical access to ATMs and ICT measures of financial inclusion on SSA’s growth but only the former was found significant. Second, the four institutional components via economic, political, institutional and general governances were also found to be growth-spurring. Lastly, countries with low levels of real per capita income are matching up with other countries with high levels of real income per capita. The empirical evidence of some negative net effects and insignificant marginal impacts are indication that imperfections in the financial markets are sometimes employed to the disadvantage of the poor. On the whole, we established positive effects on growth for the most part. The positive effects are evident because the governance indicators compliment financial inclusion in reducing pecuniary constraints hindering credit access and allocation to the poor that deteriorate growth.
TEFL textbook evaluation : From teachers ’ perspectives

This study aims to examine the advantages and disadvantages of one type of TEFL materials, English language textbook “Spot On” , used in state primary schools in Turkey. Sample of the research consists of 46 English teachers chosen randomly from state primary schools in Malatya and Adıyaman city centres. A five-likert type scale was used for evaluation. In this research, the course book was evaluated in term of ‘layout and design, activities and tasks, language type, subject, content and skills and whole aspect’. The research revealed that ‘Spot On’ textbook actually did not stand up reasonably well to a systematic in-depth analysis and that the negative attributes far out-weighed the positive characteristics.
The Finnmarkian phase of the Caledonian Orogeny

The Kalak nappe complex of N Norway involves late Precambrian to Middle Cambrian sediments and a Precambrian gneiss basement on which the sediments were deposited. While the uppermost nappe in Finnmark was emplaced during the Silurian the members of the Kalak nappe complex were emplaced in late Cambrian/early Ordovician times during the Finnmarkian orogenic stage—probably the analogue of the Grampian stage of the British Caledonian. The tectonic-metamorphic events of the Finnmarkian stage were broadly coeval with the emplacement of basic and alkaline igneous bodies of the Seiland Igneous Province which were introduced from 552 ± 17 Ma (syn-D1) until 501 ± 27 Ma (late D2) and which themselves reflect magmatic evolution from tholeiitic to alkaline types.
Changes in Yield-Related Traits, Phytochemical Composition, and Antioxidant Activity of Pepper (Capsicum annuum) Depending on Its Variety, Fruit Position, and Ripening Stage

The relationship between fruit position, ripening stage, and variety has not been well studied in pepper plants. To understand the interaction of these factors, a diversity of phytochemical traits as well as antioxidant activity were investigated with agronomic traits in eleven hot pepper varieties collected from the upper and lower parts of the plant and harvested at three maturity stages (green, orange, and red). Capsaicin content (CAP) showed a relatively high genetic effect; on the contrary, total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC), and antioxidant activity were more affected by the ripening stage and fruit position. The CAP values ranged from 0.29 (‘FKbM’) to 0.77 (‘Bka’) mg CAP equivalents g−1 DW. The ripening stage was the predominant factor for TPC, TFC, DPPH, and FRAP. There was no significant interaction between A × FP, A × RS, and FP × RS for all agro-morphological fruit traits. Variety, fruit position, and ripening stage effects are more significant than all interactions calculated. Lower fruit positions in all samples showed a maximum fruit size, whereas phytochemical traits and yield per plant were relevant in the upper parts, and Phytochemical traits and yield per plant were significantly correlated. From PCA and cluster analysis, all varieties showed the highest biochemical and antioxidant levels with moderate fruit size, except the ‘Bel’ variety that showed the smallest fruit traits with high yields, and the ‘FKbM’ and ‘FKbK’ varieties that showed the highest fruit size but low yields. This study supplies information to identify interesting cultivars with considerable levels of bioactive and phytochemical metabolites, which is useful for breeding programs of novel varieties.
Suitability of Fault Modes and Effects Analysis for Regulatory Assurance of Complex Logic in Digital Instrumentation and Control Systems

The Institut de Radioprotection et de SOret6 Nucl~aire (IRSN) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) jointly investigated and evaluated the suitability of applying fault modes and effects analysis (FMEA), as a technique for identifying faults attributable to Complex Logqic in digital instrumentation and controls for safety functions in nuclear power plants. Complex Logic refers to logic in the form of software, or in the form of programmed hardware, for which it is not practicable to ensure the correctness of all behaviors through verification alone. Whereas the term, "failure modes and effects analysis" is used in the context of the overall DI&C system, the corresponding concept for software (and other forms of complex logic) in a DI&C system is "fault modes and effects analysis. " When FMEA techniques, which have been used effectively for traditional hardware, are applied to Complex Logic, such extension does not yield a similar benefit to regulatory assurance, because of the fundamental differences in the nature of faults in traditional hardware versus Complex Logic. Whereas hardwired devices (such as electromechanical relays) have only a few predetermined fault modes, the potential fault space in Complex Logic is huge; yet the actual number of faults is an extremely small fraction of the potential fault space. Finding these faults through FMEA is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. Through analysis and examples of several real-life catastrophes, this report shows that FMEA could not have helped in the discovery of the underlying faults. The report concludes that the contribution of FMEA to regulatory assurance of Complex Logic, especially software, in a nuclear power plant safety system is marginal. Further investigations, not in the scope of the current NRC-IRSN collaborative study, are needed to understand the appropriate roles and combination of FMEA and fault tree analysis and appropriate application constraints for reliable results from such analysis techniques.
Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.
Roles of Scaling and Instruction Tuning in Language Perception: Model vs. Human Attention

Recent large language models (LLMs) have revealed strong abilities to understand natural language. Since most of them share the same basic structure, i.e. the transformer block, possible contributors to their success in the training process are scaling and instruction tuning. However, how these factors affect the models' language perception is unclear. This work compares the self-attention of several existing LLMs (LLaMA, Alpaca and Vicuna) in different sizes (7B, 13B, 30B, 65B), together with eye saccade, an aspect of human reading attention, to assess the effect of scaling and instruction tuning on language perception. Results show that scaling enhances the human resemblance and improves the effective attention by reducing the trivial pattern reliance, while instruction tuning does not. However, instruction tuning significantly enhances the models' sensitivity to instructions. We also find that current LLMs are consistently closer to non-native than native speakers in attention, suggesting a sub-optimal language perception of all models. Our code and data used in the analysis is available on GitHub.
A Survey of Federated Unlearning: A Taxonomy, Challenges and Future Directions

With the development of trustworthy Federated Learning (FL), the requirement of implementing right to be forgotten gives rise to the area of Federated Unlearning (FU). Comparing to machine unlearning, a major challenge of FU lies in the decentralized and privacy-preserving nature of FL, in which clients jointly train a global model without sharing their raw data, making it substantially more intricate to selectively unlearn specific information. In that regard, many efforts have been made to tackle the challenges of FU and have achieved significant progress. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of FU. Specially, we provide the existing algorithms, objectives, evaluation metrics, and identify some challenges of FU. By reviewing and comparing some studies, we summarize them into a taxonomy for various schemes, potential applications and future directions.
Pregnancy outcome in long- versus short-acting gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist cycles in participants with normal ovarian reserve: An RCT

Abstract Background There is no agreement on which of the 2 gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonist protocols are the most efficient, neither there is any consensus on which one yields a better clinical pregnancy percentage. Objective The present study aims to compare the effectiveness of reduced dosages of long- and short-acting GnRH agonists on pregnancy outcomes. Materials and Methods In this randomized controlled clinical trial, 400 women were randomly assigned to 2 groups (n = 200/group): the reduced dosage of long-acting GnRH agonist group (group 1, 1.25 mg Decapeptyl) and the short-acting GnRH agonist group (group 2, 0.5 mg/day Buserelin Acetate). The study was conducted at Mehr Medical Institute, Rasht, Iran between July 2019 and July 2020. Biochemical and clinical pregnancy were compared between groups. Results No significant differences were observed in the endometrial lining, the total number of retrieved and metaphase-II oocytes, progesterone, and serum estradiol levels on human chorionic gonadotropin day, fertilization rate, and top-quality embryos between the groups. The duration of induction (10.8 ± 1.7 vs. 10 ± 2.1, p < 0.001) and the total dosage of gonadotropins (2939.4 ± 945.9 vs. 2441 ± 1247.1, p < 0.001) were significantly greater in group 2 than in group 1. No significant differences were observed between the 2 groups in terms of implantation rate, chemical pregnancy rate, and clinical pregnancy rate. A higher percentage of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome was observed in group 2 (p = 0.005). Conclusion Due to a lower percentage of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome in group 1 and similar assisted reproductive technology outcomes in both groups, the long protocol was found to be superior to the short protocol.
An Analysis of Factors Affecting Students ’ Use of Interactive Learning Tools in Engineering Education

In 2007, he joined Biomedical Sensing and Signal Processing research center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as a postdoctoral research associate. He also worked as a mixed-signal CMOS Integrated Circuit designer and a system engineer at NewLANS, Inc. in Acton, Massachusetts until 2010. He became a Visiting Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida in 2010. Since August 2012, he has been with the School of Engineering at Western Illinois University, Quad Cities as an Assistant Professor of Engineering.
AN ECONOMETRIC STUDY OF DEFORESTATION IN THE BRAZILâ€™S AMAZONIAN MUNICIPALITIES

Brazil has been pointed out as the number one country chop downing tropical native forest. This process takes place especially in the Amazon River Basin Area, which holds the largest tropical forest area in the World and spread over nine different Brazilian states, compounded of 782 cities. However, these cities have different economic structure and different paces of deforestation. Using both analytical and econometric frameworks, this paper evaluates the causes of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazonian municipalities from 2000 to 2004. Starting with an analytical framework, the main causes that led farmers to cut down forests and convert the soil use to other activities are highlighted. Basing on the analytical framework, an equation is developed and estimated using a dynamic panel data model. Agricultural prices, rural credit and government expenditure on transport have played important roles as stimulators for deforestation as well as an inertial process of deforestation has taken place. The article ends by suggesting some policies to restrain deforestation without reducing the income of farmers and the accessibility of the local population.
Nutrient Requirements of Sheep

Nutrient requirements of all livestock are based on the size of the animal, how active the animal is, the body growth rate, and/or the animal’s level of milk production and fat content in milk produced. Maintenance requirements are for low levels of activity as when being fed in a dry lot situation. When animals are on pasture activity increases and these the requirements may be as much as 25% higher due to this increased activity.
Short Implant and Heavy Smokers as Predictors for Failure of Immediate Implants: a Retrospective Study

Background The possibility of installing implants in fresh sockets was first proposed as a viable treatment option in the 1970s. Objective: to assess the relationships of subject-level and implant-level characteristics on the failure of immediate implants installed in sites that contained teeth associated or not with chronic apical periodontitis. Material and Methods A retrospective study was undertaken with data from patients who received immediate implants with a minimum follow-up of 12 months after loading. The Generalized Estimating Equation, applying a multiple logistic regression model, was employed to investigate the association between predictor variables/co-variables and failure of the immediate implants. Results Four hundred and twenty-three implants were installed (208 uninfected/215 infected sites) in 186 patients (92 men/96 women) with a mean age of 57.1 years old. The survival rate of implants was 91%. Approximately half (215/50.8%) of the alveoli that received immediate implants had chronic apical periodontitis associated with the extracted teeth, and 191 (88.8%) of these survived until the last follow-up visit. When the infection-free sites were analyzed, this frequency was higher (93,3%), but the presence of chronic apical periodontitis did not show statistical significance in the implant failure (p=0.167). Smokers with a consumption of more than 20 cigarettes/day and short implants had more failures (OR:7.66, p=0.012; OR:14.06, p=0.002; respectively). Conclusions Short implants and consumption of more than 20 cigarettes/day were important predictors for failure of immediate implants, regardless of presence of chronic apical periodontitis. Key words:Osseointegration, dental implant, smokers, study, immediate dental implant loading.
One General Teacher for Multi-Data Multi-Task: A New Knowledge Distillation Framework for Discourse Relation Analysis

Automatically identifying the discourse relations can help many downstream NLP tasks such as reading comprehension and machine translation. It can be categorized into explicit and implicit discourse relation recognition (EDRR and IDRR). Due to the lack of connectives, IDRR remains to be a big challenge. A good number of methods have been developed to combine explicit data with implicit ones under the multi-task learning framework. However, the difference in linguistic property and class distribution makes it hard to directly optimize EDRR and IDRR with multi-task learning. In this paper, we take the first step to exploit the knowledge distillation (KD) technique for discourse relation analysis. Our target is to train a focused single-data single-task student with the help of a general multi-data multi-task teacher. Specifically, we first train one teacher for both the top and second level relation classification tasks with explicit and implicit data. We then transfer the feature embeddings and soft labels from the teacher network to the student network. Moreover, we develop an adaptive knowledge distillation module to reduce the number of hyper-parameters and also to stimulate the potential of the student on autonomous learning. Extensive experimental results on the popular PDTB dataset proves that our model achieves a new state-of-the-art performance. We also show the effectiveness of our proposed KD architecture through detailed analysis.
Homologous Recombination and Repair Functions Required for Mutagenicity during Yeast Meiosis

Several meiotic events reshape the genome prior to its transfer (via gametes) to the next generation. The occurrence of new meiotic mutations is tightly linked to homologous recombination (HR) and firmly depends on Spo11-induced DNA breaks. To gain insight into the molecular mechanisms governing mutagenicity during meiosis, we examined the timing of mutation and recombination events in cells deficient in various DNA HR-repair genes, which represent distinct functions along the meiotic recombination process. Despite sequence similarities and overlapping activities of the two DNA translocases, Rad54 and Tid1, we observed essential differences in their roles in meiotic mutation occurrence: in the absence of Rad54, meiotic mutagenicity was elevated 8-fold compared to the wild type (WT), while in the tid1Δ mutant, there were few meiotic mutations, nine percent compared to the WT. We propose that the presence of Rad54 channels recombinational repair to a less mutagenic pathway, whereas repair assisted by Tid1 is more mutagenic. A 3.5-fold increase in mutation level was observed in dmc1∆ cells, suggesting that single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) may be a potential source for mutagenicity during meiosis. Taken together, we suggest that the introduction of de novo mutations also contributes to the diversification role of meiotic recombination. These rare meiotic mutations revise genomic sequences and may contribute to long-term evolutionary changes.
Assessing Community Participation in A Rural Collaborative Placemaking: Case of Trucuk Sub-village, Bantul Regency, Indonesia

To address poverty, many rural communities mobilized tourism at the grassroots level in Indonesia. Such manners raised the government’s concern about potential social-environmental problems, motivating them to collaborate with academia to develop responsible tourism through placemaking. Meanwhile, studies evaluating the success/failures of placemaking in the rural context remain limited. This article aims at qualitatively assessing the capacity of rural placemaking to motivate community participation by using the Trucuk sub-village in Bantul Regency as the case study. Methods employed are semi-structured interviews, observations, and document reviews. Using the theories of Arnstein, Innes and Booher, and Project for Public Space as its framework, this study found that the lack of community participation from the ground rules establishment and negotiations of power redistribution, awareness development of making use of local capital to affect outcomes, and diverse opinions in planning led to declining interest of the community in participating. Future planning should address those issues by ensuring the involvement of diverse groups within the community, employing innovative and interactive methods to foster participation, evaluating the representativeness of the tourism awareness group, and setting a considerable limit on the authority’s dominance in the planning.