Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beneficial effects of reactance in health-related behavior? The effects of fear appeals on defensive and accepting reactions of smokers with different levels of self-esteem

In this study, the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) served as a theoretical background for explaining the persuasive effects of fear appeals on smokers. Based on the self-consistency theory, self-esteem was included as a moderator in this model for understanding in more detail under which circumstances, a fear appeal leads to accepting responses or to reactance. An online experiment was conducted, participating smokers read an article that contained either a neutral picture or a fear appeal. Including self-esteem in the EPPM revealed that in contrast to smokers with high self-esteem, smokers with low self-esteem increased perceived susceptibility and intention to quit, as well as reactance to a fear appeal. Moreover, reactance could not be considered a negative reaction to the fear appeal message, because for individuals with low self-esteem it was positively associated with the intention to quit. Results suggest that additionally considering smokers’ self-esteem can contribute to a more accurate prediction of the persuasive effects of fear appeals. The impact of self-esteem and reactance in health-related behavior is discussed, as are the implications for health-related messages and future research.
Ten Years of Satellite Infrared Radiance Monitoring With the Met Office NWP Model

Satellite sounder infrared radiances are among the most important contributions to the global observing system and have been assimilated into global numerical weather prediction (NWP) analyses for many years. They are also used as fundamental climate data records for climate monitoring. Prior to assimilation or producing climate records, the radiances should have all residual instrument biases removed. One way of estimating the mean biases is to continuously monitor the measured radiances against the NWP model equivalent radiances. This article is an extension of one published in 2012 which documented these biases for three years but now the time span of the monitoring has extended to beyond ten years, allowing the long-term stability of the instruments to be assessed. Data from high-resolution infrared sounder (HIRS), Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR), and Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI), radiometers; atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS), a spectrometer; and infrared atmospheric sounding interferometer (IASI), an interferometer, were included. Changes in mean biases and standard deviations were used to investigate the temporal stability of the bias and radiometric noise of the instruments over ten years. A double difference technique was employed to remove the effect of changes or deficiencies in the NWP system and radiative transfer (RT) model, which can contribute to the biases. The IASI and AIRS radiances were stable but with a different bias between the two instruments due to different versions of the RT model used. The SEVIRI radiometers were stable in most channels with the exception of the 13.4 $\mu \text{m}$ channel. The HIRS instruments were subject to sudden changes in bias and increases in standard deviation compared with NWP simulations during the past decade.
Altered bone cell biology associated with Type Two Diabetes Mellitus : consequences for periodontal disease

Periodontitis is a widely spread disease, affecting about 80% of the worldwide population, resulting in teeth loss, a heavy impact on patients in terms of function and aesthetic. Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is described to be linked to the exacerbation of periodontitis and delayed healing. This link between these two diseases, however, is not fully evaluated and the mechanisms are yet to be fully elucidated. Osteopontin (OPN) is described to inhibit mineral crystal formation. Herein, it has been hypothesized that increased OPN in diabetic healing bone may be the causative factor of delayed healing in periodontitis and subsequent deterioration, leading to teeth loss. This project aims to gain a greater understanding of the effect of high glucose (HG) levels on mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and macrophages, their ability to synthesise OPN and hence, its effects on MSCs to synthesise new bone tissue. Further, the influence of Porphyromonas gingivalis lipopolysaccharides (Pg-LPS) on these cells was analyzed, in an attempt to create a model to study the healing in the presence of periodontitis and T2DM. Investigating the MSCs isolated from the rat compact bone (CB-MSCs) during the growth in culture, revealed two main populations; a heterogenous population appeared with predominantly mature characteristics at PD15. This population then demonstrated a change in its heterogeneity and became more immature in nature at PD50. These two main populations differed in their growth rate and capability of osteodifferentiation. HG environments exerted significant decreases in osteogenic differentiation on PD15, but not PD50. Addition of pg-LPS showed inhibitory effects on osteodifferentiation on PD15 cells more than PD50. Conversely, in the combined presence of HG and pg-LPS, PD50 showed a significant decrease in osteodifferentiation. OPN levels demonstrated a gradual decrease in CB-MSCs in both normal and HG conditions. Investigating OPN levels secreted by macrophages, however, revealed interesting results. Synergistic effects of both HG and pg-LPS exhibited a significant increase in OPN levels in both pro-inflammatory M1 macrophages and in repair related M2 macrophages. In conclusion, HG was mainly reported to inhibit osteogenic differentiation of the mature cell population, whereas the immature population was found to be affected by combined pg-LPS and HG. OPN levels in HG conditions were shown to decrease along the osteodifferentiation period. However, macrophages showed increase secretion of OPN by the synergistic effects of both pg-LPS and HG in both M1 and M2 and by pg-LPS effects in M2 macrophages. These outcomes as far as we are aware, are novel and disclose a new mechanism of bone resorption in the case of T2DM patients concurrently with periodontal disease
COMO: Efficient Deep Neural Networks Expansion With COnvolutional MaxOut

In this paper, we extend the classic MaxOut strategy, originally designed for Multiple Layer Preceptors (MLPs), into COnvolutional MaxOut (COMO) — a new strategy making deep convolutional neural networks wider with parameter efficiency. Compared to the existing solutions, such as ResNeXt for ResNet or Inception for VGG-alikes, COMO works well on both linear architectures and the ones with skipped connections and residual blocks. More specifically, COMO adopts a novel split-transform-merge paradigm that extends the layers with spatial resolution reduction into multiple parallel splits. For the layer with COMO, each split passes the input feature maps through a 4D convolution operator with independent batch normalization operators for transformation, then merge into the aggregated output of the original sizes through max-pooling. Such a strategy is expected to tackle the potential classification accuracy degradation due to the spatial resolution reduction, by incorporating the multiple splits and max-pooling-based feature selection. Our experiment using a wide range of deep architectures shows that COMO can significantly improve the classification accuracy of ResNet/VGG-alike networks based on a large number of benchmark datasets. COMO further outperforms the existing solutions, e.g., Inceptions, ResNeXts, SE-ResNet, and Xception, that make networks wider, and it dominates in the comparison of accuracy versus parameter sizes.
Teachers’ Technology Integration Into English Instructions: SAMR Model

– Technology integration has been acknowledged to support instructional activities in and outside classrooms. In English instruction context, previous researchers revealed that technology use contributes to the enhancement and longer retention of students’ learning. This study is aimed at exploring kinds of technology to facilitate learning and evaluating how teachers integrate the technology into English instructions. Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition (SAMR) model by Puentedura (2006, 2013) was used as the framework to evaluate technology integration. Two English teachers of senior high schools in Central Java, Indonesia and their respected students were involved in this study. Classroom observation, interview, questionnaire, and document review were used to obtain the research data. This case study employed Thematic Analysis by Braun and Clarke (2006) as the data analysis method. The findings show that the teachers and students have utilized various types of technology and its integration has undergone four levels of Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.
Hallucinations in a Patient with Alzheimer’s Disease During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Case Study

While social distancing may be deemed necessary in order to avoid COVID-19 infections, the lockdown may impact mental health of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We present a case study involving hallucinations in a patient with AD who lives in a nursing home during the COVID-19 crisis. We compared this patient’s hallucination scores before and during the lockdown. We observed increased hallucinations during, compared to before, the lockdown. These increased hallucinations can be attributed to a number of elements such as the decreased in daily activities, social distancing, lack of physical contact with family members, and loneliness during the lockdown.
Remote Work Revolution: Current Opportunities and Challenges for Organizations

Remote work, telework, homeworking or work from home (WFH) and even work from anywhere (WFA): all these words and expressions describe an increasingly adopted practice by organizations around the world. Thanks to innovations in information and computer-mediated communication technologies that support remote work and make it possible, more and more companies adhere to it to some extent. The growth of this movement â€“ a true revolution in the way we work and its practicalities â€“ stems from the assumption that remote work can guarantee a winwin situation for employers and employees. The general aim of this article is to find evidence for this assumption or arguments to refute it. To do that, we examine current trends and challenges in organizational approaches to remote work as portrayed by the literature covering this phenomenon over the past decade. We are thus discussing the multifaceted motivations and drawbacks to remote work, both from the organizational and the individual perspective. Our focus addresses the ingredients for a successful implementation of remote work and the psychological impact of remote work on employees. Looking ahead to the future of remote work, we propose strategies to mitigate its proven risks and challenges and to enhance the many benefits it can still foster within organizations.
Flow Experience Detection and Analysis for Game Users by Wearable-Devices-Based Physiological Responses Capture

Relevant research has shown the potential to understand the game user experience (GUX) more accurately and reliably by measuring the user’s psychophysiological responses. However, the current studies are still very scarce and limited in scope and depth. Besides, the low-detection accuracy and the common use of the professional physiological signal apparatus make it difficult to be applied in practice. This article analyzes the GUX, particularly flow experience, based on users’ physiological responses, including the galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate (HR) signals, captured by low-cost wearable devices. Based on the collected data sets regarding two test games and the mixed data set, several classification models were constructed to detect the flow state automatically. Hereinto, two strategies were proposed and applied to improve classification performance. The results demonstrated that the flow experience of game users could be effectively classified from other experiences. The best accuracies of two-way classification and three-way classification under the support of the proposed strategies were over 90% and 80%, respectively. Specifically, the comparison test with the existing results showed that Strategy1 could significantly reduce the negative interference of individual differences in physiological signals and improve the classification accuracy. In addition, the results of the mixed data set identified the potential of a general classification model of flow experience.
Prescription of pharmacotherapy and blood pressure control among hypertensive outpatients in two semi-urban hospitals in Cameroon: a cross-sectional study

Introduction several international guidelines are available on drug treatment for hypertension, but the control of hypertension remains very poor in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We investigated the commonly prescribed antihypertensive drugs and their association with blood pressure (BP) control in adult Cameroonians. Methods we consecutively recruited hypertensive outpatients attending the Buea and Limbe Regional Hospitals (southwest region of Cameroon). Controlled BP was defined as BP < 140/90mmHg in hypertensive patients aged 60 years or younger, diabetics or patients with chronic kidney disease or a BP < 150/90mmHg in non-diabetic hypertensive patients older than 60 years of age (JNC8). Results of the 408 participants included (mean age 61.1 years), 67% were female. The median duration of hypertension was 6 years and the median duration of the current treatment was 22 weeks. Commonly prescribed antihypertensives were calcium channel blockers (CCB, 35.1%), thiazide/thiazide-like diuretics (TD/TLD, 26.1%) and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI, 19.5%). The median monthly cost of antihypertensive was 10279.6 CFA (approximately equal to US$ 172). Seventy percent (70%) of participants were receiving at least 2 drugs, with ACEI+TD/TLD, CCB+TD/TLD, and ACEI+CCB+TD/TLD being the most frequent combination. The rate of BP control was 52% overall, and 60% in participants on monotherapy. Conclusion CCBs were the most prescribed single antihypertensive drugs in this setting while ACEI+TD/TLD was the most common combination. About half of patients were at target BP control levels Improving availability and affordability of these medications may improve hypertension management and control.
Etude thermodynamique et expérimentale du cycle géochimique du soufre dans les bassins sédimentaires

Sulfur occurs in petroleum systems as both organic compounds and minerals as well as under different oxidation states. It is involved in a number of redox reactions which may impact the quality of crude oils (through sulfurization or desulfurization reactions) and natural gas (through the generation of H2S during thermochemical sulfate reduction), as well as the petrophysical properties of reservoir rocks (through the dissolution of anhydrite and the precipitation of elemental sulfur and pyrobitumen). These reactions are controlled by temperature (and to a lesser extent pressure), the redox conditions, and the overall chemical composition of the system representing the petroleum reservoir. The thesis consists of three parts: (1) a thermodynamic study of chemical reactions involving sulfur which occur in sedimentary basins; (2) an experimental simulation of sulfurization and desulfurization reactions of organic compounds, as well as of thermochemical sulfate reduction; and (3) a petrographic and fluid inclusion study of carbonate rock samples from a sulfur-rich hydrocarbon reservoir of the northern Caspian Sea
Equilibrium Data Mining and Data Abundance

We model of the search for predictors by speculators (active asset managers) and use it to analyze how the improvement in data processing power and the growth in available data ("data abundance") affect the diversity of trading signals used by speculators, the dispersion of their profits and the similarities of their holdings. Our central message is that data abundance and computing power do not have the same effects. In particular, an improvement in computing power always raises the bar for the quality of predictors that managers consider good enough to exploit while more data lower it when data becomes sufficiently abundant. When this happens, the diversity of speculators' signals and the dispersion of their trading profits increase in equilibrium while their holdings become less correlated.
PoisonGAN: Generative Poisoning Attacks Against Federated Learning in Edge Computing Systems

Edge computing is a key-enabling technology that meets continuously increasing requirements for the intelligent Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. To cope with the increasing privacy leakages of machine learning while benefiting from unbalanced data distributions, federated learning has been wildly adopted as a novel intelligent edge computing framework with a localized training mechanism. However, recent studies found that the federated learning framework exhibits inherent vulnerabilities on active attacks, and poisoning attack is one of the most powerful and secluded attacks where the functionalities of the global model could be damaged through attacker’s well-crafted local updates. In this article, we give a comprehensive exploration of the poisoning attack mechanisms in the context of federated learning. We first present a poison data generation method, named Data_Gen, based on the generative adversarial networks (GANs). This method mainly relies upon the iteratively updated global model parameters to regenerate samples of interested victims. Second, we further propose a novel generative poisoning attack model, named PoisonGAN, against the federated learning framework. This model utilizes the designed Data_Gen method to efficiently reduce the attack assumptions and make attacks feasible in practice. We finally evaluate our data generation and attack models by implementing two types of typical poisoning attack strategies, label flipping and backdoor, on a federated learning prototype. The experimental results demonstrate that these two attack models are effective in federated learning.
An Investigation of the Routes to Certification and Turnover Intentions of Wisconsin Agriculture Teachers

The purpose of this study was to examine the routes to certification and turnover intentions of agriculture teachers to identify differences between alternatively and traditionally certified teachers. The population consisted of a census of early career agriculture teachers in Wisconsin with fewer than three years of teaching (N = 67) with a response rate of 52% (n = 35). The majority of respondents were traditionally certified (71%) through a bachelor’s degree program, and 29% were alternatively certified through three different routes. Respondents had moderately low turnover intentions to leave the agriculture classroom as a teacher with no statistical difference (U = 130.50, p = .843) between traditionally and alternatively certified teachers. Additionally, there was no correlation between turnover intentions and traditional and alternative certification routes. While this study is not generalizable to other populations, it does provide the first insight into agricultural education research on how teachers are being alternatively certified. The results of this study prompt the need for further research on alternative certification in agricultural education, focusing on the types of programs and preparation, as well as the impact of certification route on turnover.
Effect of First Aid Management of Dental Avulsion Posters on Primary School Teachers’ Knowledge

Objective: To investigate the effect of deploying a “First Aid Management of Dental Avulsion” poster in a primary school setting to improve teachers’ knowledge. Material and Methods: The present study was conducted at public primary schools in central Jakarta, with 54 teachers meeting the inclusion criteria. The questionnaire contained 13 questions, divided into two sections. The first section consisted of questions about sex, age, education, length of service, field of education, and whether the teacher had received first aid management education before. The second section consisted of 7 questions about the teacher’s knowledge regarding dental avulsion and its management. Baseline knowledge was defined by using a questionnaire and then teachers were shown the educational poster covering the first aid management of dental avulsion. Next, the teachers answered a post-education questionnaire, which included the same questions as the first questionnaire. A paired t-test or Wilcoxon’s signed-rank test was used based on the distribution of data to determine the significance of the differences between before and after education. Results: The median score before reading the poster was 5, while the median score after reading it was 10. The difference was statistically significant. Conclusion: “First Aid Management of Dental Avulsion” poster could improve the knowledge of primary school teachers in Jakarta.
A Calibration-Free, Reference-Buffer-Free, Type-I Narrow-Pulse-Sampling PLL With −78.7-dBc REF Spur, −128.1-dBc/Hz Absolute In-Band PN and −254-dB FOM

This letter presents a type-I narrow-pulse-sampling (NPS) phase-locked loop (PLL). It features a circuit technique: NPS phase detector + T-shape switch, to address the main spur-related nonidealities. Fabricated in 28-nm CMOS, the NPS-PLL operating at 3.3-GHz measures a −78.7-dBc reference spur and a −128.1-dBc/Hz absolute in-band phase noise at 1-MHz offset for a jitter-power figure-of-merit (FOM) of −254 dB, without the need of calibration and reference buffer.
Covert Information Embedded Spatial Modulation

In this letter, we propose a new convert information embedded spatial modulation (SM) system for secure communications, in which the transmitter tries to send covert information to the specific receiver while keeping the unintended receiver unaware of the transmission. In the proposed system, the covert information bits are conveyed via the activated antenna index while the common information bits are via the modulation symbols. Specifically, the convert information modulation is achieved by carefully designing the space-time mapping principle so that it is disguised as a conventional SM antenna index. Furthermore, an efficient detection scheme is designed for the proposed system. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme with the developed receiver can offer nearly the same performance gain as conventional SM, whereas the unintended receiver can hardly detect the information correctly. Moreover, the average bit error rate (BER) is analyzed, which also validates our simulation results.
The effectiveness of a positively vs. negatively valenced PSA against sexually transmitted diseases – evidence from an experimental study

This study examines the effects of positive compared to negative appeals in persuasive health communication about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The theoretical background draws on the Extended Parallel Process Model, which is mainly used to ex- plain the processing of negative appeals (fear) in these contexts. Participants (N = 160; Mage = 22.59, SD = 2.48, 57.4% female; mainly students) took part in a one-factorial experiment by viewing an advertisement promoting the use of condoms that was emotionally framed as either humorous (positive) or threatening (negative) to induce an emotional experience of joy or fear, respectively. Emotional experiences were tested as predictors for health behavior-related outcomes by means of hierarchical regression analyses. Data pro- vides evidence for the beneficial effect of positive emotional appeals on message judgment and attitudes towards the proposed behavior. The threatening appeal reduced perceptions of efficacy and led to an increase in reactance. These findings provide further evidence for carefully using fear appeals in persuasive health communication and speak in favor of integrating positive emotional appeals in these contexts.