Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
STUDENT PERCEPTION OF INTERACTIONS BETWEEN STUDENTS AND LECTUTERS, LEARNING MOTIVATION, AND ENVIRONMENT DURING PANDEMIC COVID-19

Online learning is one form of network utilization that can develop the way of students in the education process. The descriptive analysis of this study examined students' perceptions of online learning models related to interactions between students and lecturers, learning motivation, and student learning environments to support them produce better result from online teaching and learning activities. The sample in this study are 128 students in one of the universities in Bengkulu who have been involved in online learning during the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Based on questionnaires that have been investigated, the researchers found that students had problems interacting with other students as well as lectures. This is demonstrated by a upper percentage of 65.62% students' disapproval of statements stating that student interaction in online classes already supports them in the learning process. Meanwhile, 52.34% of students have very high learning motivation even in quarantine due to covid-19. As well as the learning environment, 70.31% of students felt that the learning environment is less supportive of them in the learning process of teaching in online learning. Therefore, in support students to increase their interactions and learning environments, lecturers can create groups on social media to communicate and improve the atmosphere of the learning environment between students and the others.
Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of People Using the Crude Extract of Andrographis paniculata (Buem. f) Nees. (Acanthaceae) on Salmonella typhi, Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus

Data on Traditional Medicine Practice (TMP) in population with access to modern medicine is not clear, though, it has gained huge popularity in all regions of developing countries over decades. This research was conducted to investigate the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) of people using Andrographis paniculata (Burm. f.) Nees as a medical herb and the effects of the crude extracts on some microbial isolates. Quantitative-based cross-sectional survey was carried out on 100 participants around Auta-Baleifi and Bingham University communities through the use of structured questionnaires. Data collected from the participants were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The plant species leaves were collected, washed and extracted by boiling, soaking and macerating using distilled water. The crude extracts were tested for its antimicrobial activities on Salmonella typhi, Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus using ciprofloxacin as the control. From the result of the KAP analysis, majority (36%) of the participants were between 19-28 years old, followed by 29 – 38 years (32%) and only 5% were 59 years and above . 91% of the participants have good knowledge of traditional medicine, while only 9% were not aware of the practice , 32.0% of the participant claimed that the use of traditional medicine preparation had no adverse effects as compared to modern medicine,, while larger percentage (68%), do not agree that traditional medicine is safer than modern medicine. , 36% of the participants claimed to have used A. paniculata, a traditional herb, for one medicinal purpose or the other, while 54% said they have never used it, but may considered using it in future,. The population in Auta-baleifi and Bingham University communities has good knowledge with high acceptability of the use of traditional medicine. Although the result of the antimicrobial showed that the crude extracts of A. paniculata had no clear zone of inhibition against the test organisms, but the plant have demonstrated effective used in traditional medicine against symptoms very similar to that of malaria.
Suspected, Surveilled, Singled-Out, and Sentenced: An Assumption of Criminality for Black Males in Early Learning

Abstract:The purpose of this study was to illuminate how Black boys are framed and engaged in early childhood education, from the narratives of the parents of Black children. Using critical race counter-storytelling, four interwoven themes emerged from this study. The stories from the narratives of the parents depicted a viewpoint that their sons were assumed to be troublemakers, surveilled by teachers, and policed for small infractions, singled-out for punishment among their peers, and subjected to harsher and more prolonged punishments for perceived wrongdoing. We characterized this experience through the moniker suspected, surveilled, singled-out, and sentenced to account for the four areas where an assumption of criminality manifests in early learning.
Knowledge Creativity and The Sustainability of Public Hospitals In South-South Nigeria: A Regression Analysis

The specific objective of the study was to ascertain the extent to which knowledge creativity influences the sustainability of public hospitals in South-South Nigeria. The study employed a correlation design. A sample of 596 respondents was selected from twelve categorized public hospitals in South-South, Nigeria. Thirty-four questions were formulated in the questionnaire in line with the stated objective of the study. A total of 596 copies of the questionnaire were administered, and 551 copies were collected, showing 92 per cent responses, ten responses were rejected, and 541 documents constituting 90 per cent of the questionnaire were analyzed. The results showed a significant positive relationship between knowledge creation and sustainability of public hospitals in South-South Nigeria. The study concluded that knowledge creativity is a tool to facilitate healthcare organizational performance and productivity towards quality service delivery. The study, therefore, recommends that the administrators in healthcare organizations should be mindful that adoption of knowledge management practices would be dependent on leadership, information technology, infrastructure, organizational behaviour and supporting policies of human resource management.
Impact of an emergency order opportunity on supply chain coordination

We consider a manufacturer-retailer supply chain in the pre-selling and selling seasons, whereby the manufacturer can offer the retailer an emergency order opportunity with a limited commitment quantity in addition to the regular order from the retailer before the selling season. Due to the short lead time for the emergency order, the manufacturer needs to prepare for it in the pre-selling season by producing more than the regular order or reserving its capacity for the responsive production. Through mathematically modelling and analyzing the supply chain, we found that, when the emergency order opportunity is provided, the manufacturer might be worse off, although the retailer is always better off. We derive the conditions whereby both the manufacturer and retailer can benefit from the emergency order, and the supply chain profit can be maximised. Further, we show that the supply chain can be coordinated by setting only the unit price and maximum commitment quantity for the emergency order. We also prove that Pareto improvement can be always achieved by setting the unit price for the regular order in addition to the unit price and maximum commitment quantity for the emergency order.
Validation of an Empirical Subwaveform Retracking Strategy for SAR Altimetry

The sea level retrievals from the latest generation of radar altimeters (the SAR altimeters) are still challenging in the coastal zone and areas covered by sea ice and require a dedicated fitting (retracking) strategy for the waveforms. In the framework of the European Space Agency’s Baltic + Sea Level (ESA Baltic SEAL) project, an empirical retracking strategy (ALES + SAR), including a dedicated sea state bias correction, has been designed to improve the sea level observations in the Baltic Sea, characterised by a jagged coastline and seasonal sea ice coverage, without compromising the quality of open ocean data. In this work, the performances of ALES + SAR are validated against in-situ data in the Baltic Sea. Moreover, variance, crossover differences and power spectral density of the open ocean data are evaluated on a global scale. The results show that ALES + SAR performances are of comparable quality to the ones obtained using physical-based retrackers, with relevant advantages in coastal and sea ice areas in terms of quality and quantity of the sea level data.
A Novel Potent Crystalline Chitin Decomposer: Chitin Deacetylase from Acinetobacter schindleri MCDA01

Chitosan is a functional ingredient that is widely used in food chemistry as an emulsifier, flocculant, antioxidant, or preservative. Chitin deacetylases (CDAs) can catalyze the hydrolysis of acetyl groups, making them useful in the clean production of chitosan. However, the high inactivity of crystalline chitin catalyzed by CDAs has been regarded as the technical bottleneck of crystalline chitin deacetylation. Here, we mined the AsCDA gene from the genome of Acinetobacter schindleri MCDA01 and identified a member of the uraD_N-term-dom superfamily, which was a novel chitin deacetylase with the highest deacetylation activity. The AsCDA gene was expressed in Escherichia coli BL21 by IPTG induction, whose activity to colloidal chitin, α-chitin, and β-chitin reached 478.96 U/mg, 397.07 U/mg, and 133.27 U/mg, respectively. In 12 h, the enzymatic hydrolysis of AsCDA removed 63.05% of the acetyl groups from α-chitin to prepare industrial chitosan with a degree of deacetylation higher than 85%. AsCDA, as a potent chitin decomposer in the production of chitosan, plays a positive role in the upgrading of the chitosan industry and the value-added utilization of chitin biological resources.
Exclusionary Citizenship: Public Punitiveness and Support for Voting Restrictions

Abstract Much scholarship has discussed how the expansion of the carceral state in the U.S. has consequences for other facets of the democracy. Specifically, felony disenfranchisement laws create a class of “carceral citizens” comprised disproportionately of racially minoritized individuals, and voter ID laws likewise closely mirror racialized segregation efforts that parallel the effects of justice system policies. Despite these clear theoretical linkages, little research has examined whether the anti-welfarism, anti-immigrant attitudes, and symbolic racism which fuel public punitiveness similarly increase support for voting restrictions. Further, it is unknown whether punitiveness itself intervenes in these relationships. Analyses of data from the 2020 American National Election Survey (N = 7,453) reveal considerable overlap between the sources of both punitiveness and voting restriction policies, and punitiveness sets an indirect path through which these social sensibilities influence support for voting restrictions. Further, party-specific analyses reveal that these associations generally are stronger for Democrats than Republicans.
Uniform convergence of the Schwarz alternating method for solving singularly perturbed advection-di%

Our purpose in this paper is to study the convergence rate of some variants of the Schwarz alternating method for solving two types of singularly perturbed advection-diffusion equations, one in which the advection term (first-order term) dominates, and the other in which the lowest-order term (zeroth-order term) dominates. For such problems, boundary or other layer regions may be present. For singular perturbation problems in which the advection dominates, we choose two overlapping subregions, one corresponding to an outer or elliptic region and the other corresponding to an inner or hyperbolic region. Our main result for this problem shows that if the subdomains can be chosen to "follow the flow," i.e., if the boundary interface of one of the subdomains corresponds to an outflow boundary for the streamlines of the flow, then the Schwarz iterates converge in the maximum norm with an error reduction factor per iteration that exponentially decays with increasing overlap or decreasing diffusion. For the singular perturbation problem in which the lowest-order term dominates, we consider many overlapping subregions, with no special requirement on outflow or inflow boundaries. Our main result here, which is valid for two variants of the classical Schwarz algorithm, shows that the error reduction factor per iteration decays exponentially in the maximum norm with increasing overlap and increasing dominance of the zeroth-order term. For both problems, our proofs rely on the maximum principle and the construction of barrier functions.
Uncovering the Role of Surface-Attached Ag Nanoparticles in Photodegradation Improvement of Rhodamine B by ZnO-Ag Nanorods

ZnO nanorods decorated with metal nanoparticles have sparked considerable interest in recent years thanks to their suitability for a wide range of applications, such as photocatalysis, photovoltaics, antibacterial activity, and sensing devices. In this study, we prepared and investigated the improved solar-light-assisted photocatalytic activity of ZnO nanorods (NRs) decorated with Ag nanoparticles (NPs) using a conventional rhodamine B (RB) dye as a model water pollutant. We showed that the presence of Ag NPs on the surface of ZnO NRs significantly increases the degradation rate of RB dye (~0.2432 min−1) when compared to bare ZnO NRs (~0.0431 min−1). The improved photocatalytic activity of ZnO-Ag was further experimentally tested using radical scavengers. The obtained results reveal that ˙OH and ˙O2− radicals are main active species involved in the RB dye photodegradation by ZnO-Ag NRs. It was concluded that efficient charge separation plays a major role in photocatalytic activity improvement.
Localization in Structured Environments with UWB Devices without Acceleration Measurements, and Velocity Estimation Using a Kalman–Bucy Filter

In this work, a novel scheme for velocity and position estimation in a UWB range-based localization system is proposed. The suggested estimation strategy allows to overcome two main problems typically encountered in the localization systems. The first one is that it can be suitable for use in environments where the GPS signal is not present or where it might fail. The second one is that no accelerometer measurements are needed for the localization task. Moreover, to deal with the velocity estimation problem, a suitable Kalman–Bucy filter is designed and it is compared, experimentally, with a particle filter by showing the features of the two algorithms in order to be used in a localization context. Additionally, further experimental tests are carried out on a suitable developed test setup in order to confirm the goodness of the proposed approach.
Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio and Cut-off Values as Predictor of Severity and Mortality in COVID-19 Patients in Millennium COVID-19 Care Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Background Early identification of patients at high risk of poor clinical outcomes is the key to success in saving the lives of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio (NLR) is an easily available and cheap surrogate inflammatory marker, its baseline NLR role in African COVID-19 patients remains to be investigated. The objective of the study aimed to evaluate the role of NLR as a predictor of severity and mortality of COVID-19 patients admitted at the Millennium COVID 19 care center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted on patients with COVID-19 admitted to the Millennium COVID-19 care center from August 1 to October 30, 2021. Receiver Operating Characteristic curve analysis was used to calculate the area under the curve to assess the predictive capacity of NLR on mortality and severity. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was done to identify the association between independent variables and disease outcomes with an Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR), P-value, and 95% CI for AOR were used for testing significance. Results The NLR of 9.47 was identified as the optimal cut-off value for predicting mortality with a sensitivity of 88.7% and a specificity of 95.4% (Area Under the Curve (AUC):0.95, 95% CI 0.92–98; P<0.001) and the NLR of 5.86 was an effective threshold value in predicting the severity of disease with a sensitivity of 92.2% and a specificity of 75% (AUC:0.85, 95% CI 0.800–0.905; P<0.001). In multivariable logistic regression analysis, after adjusting for confounding factors, NLR of more than 9.47 and 5.86 was significantly associated with all‐cause of in‐hospital mortality (AOR=4.73, 95% CI, 1.19–33.68; P<0.02), and severity of disease (AOR=12.98, 95% CI 3.85–43.80; P=0.001), respectively. Conclusion NLR greater than 9.47 and 5.86 effectively predict mortality and severity of the disease, respectively. It provides an objective input for early decision-making in inpatient management especially in resources limited area.
The effectiveness of tax incentives to encourage private savings

ABSTRACT This study examines the impact of tax incentives for long-term savings on total private savings using data for Latvia contained in HFCS 2014 and 2017. The survey shows that contributions to tax-favoured savings plans are not associated with lower consumer spending and therefore do not contribute to an increase in private savings. Instead, these savings are achieved by lowering other, non-tax-favoured savings. This substitution effect on non-tax-favoured savings remains statistically significant even when excluding households with very low consumption levels and the ones whose reference person is relatively young/old and with a low level of education. However, the observed effect is not significant at the very bottom of the distribution of non-tax-favoured savings. The results of this study raise concerns that without additional measures to encourage retirement savings, particularly in the lower segment of the savings distribution, income inequality among retirees will continue rising.
Competing for the Future

Everybody knows that digital technology has revolutionized our economy and our lifestyles. But how many of us really understand the drivers behind the technology – the significance of going digital; the miniaturization of electronic devices; the role of venture capital in financing the revolution; the importance of research and development? How many of us understand what it takes to make money from innovative technologies? Should we worry about manufacturing going offshore? What is the role of India and China in the digital economy? Drawing on a lifetime’s experience in the industry, as an engineer, a senior manager, and as a partner in a global venture capital firm, Henry Kressel offers an expert personalized answer to all these questions. He explains how the technology works, why it matters, how it is financed, and what the key lessons are for public policy.
Understanding barriers and facilitators to clinic attendance and medication adherence among adults with hypertensive urgency in Tanzania

Hypertensive urgency is a major risk factor for cardiovascular events and premature deaths. Lack of medication adherence is associated with poor health outcomes among patients with hypertensive urgency in resource-limited settings. To inform the development of tailored interventions to improve health outcomes in this population, this study aimed at understanding facilitators and barriers to clinic attendance and medication adherence among Tanzanian adults with hypertensive urgency. We conducted in-depth interviews with 38 purposively selected participants from three groups: 1) patients with hypertension attending hypertension clinic, 2) patients with hypertension not attending hypertension clinic, and 3) clinic health workers. Interviews were conducted using a semi-structured guide which included open-ended questions with prompts to encourage detailed responses. In their narrative, patients and healthcare workers discussed 21 types of barriers/facilitators to clinic attendance and medication adherence: 12 common to both behaviors (traditional medicine, knowledge and awareness, stigma, social support, insurance, reminder cues, symptoms, self-efficacy, peer support, specialized care, social services, religious beliefs); 6 distinct to clinic attendance (transport, clinic location, appointment, patient-provider interaction, service fragmentation, quality of care); and 3 distinct to medication adherence (drug stock, side effects, medicine beliefs). The majority of identified barriers/facilitators overlap between clinic attendance and medication adherence. The identified barriers may be surmountable using tailored supportive intervention approaches, such as peer counselors, to help patients overcome social challenges of clinic attendance and medication adherence.
Treatment Adherence among Adolescent Cystic Fibrosis Patients

ABSTRACT Cystic fibrosis (CF), an autosomal recessive monogenic disorder, leads to abnormal exocrine gland secretions. The complex treatment regimen is time-consuming, burdensome, and costly. Poor treatment adherence may result in increased morbidity and mortality, increased healthcare costs, and hospitalizations, resulting in school absenteeism, decreased productivity, impaired well-being, and decreased quality of life in adolescent CF patients. This non-experimental descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out with the objective to assess the level of treatment adherence, perceptions, and reasons for non-adherence on 30 adolescents with a documented diagnosis of CF in a Pediatrics Chest Clinic of a tertiary care facility in Northern India using the purposive sampling technique from June 2019 to February 2020. Data were collected using standard CF specific self-report questionnaires. The majority of the adolescents were boys (66.7%) with a mean age of 14.90 ± 2.09 years. Most of the adolescents were adherent to physiotherapy, vitamins, and enzyme supplementations. The most common reason for not doing physiotherapy (36.7%) and exercises (26.7%) was lack of time. For vitamins (46.7%) and enzyme supplementations (60.0%) adolescents with CF reported that they simply forget to take medications. The majority of adolescent felt about right about the physiotherapy (63.3%), vitamin (86.7%), and enzyme supplementations (83.3%). More than half of the participants felt that their exercise level was not enough (53.3%). Majority of adolescent CF patients were having positive perception regarding treatment adherence (86.66%). Treatment adherence is common problem among adolescent CF patients that needs regular reinforcement by healthcare team members on vital components of treatment.