Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Provable Defense Against Clustering Attacks on 3D Point Clouds

Lately, the literature on adversarial robustness spans from images to other domains such as point clouds. In this work, we consider clustering attacks on 3D point clouds and devise a provable defense mechanism to counter them. Speciﬁcally, we adopt a randomized smoothing strategy for 3D point clouds and derive a robustness certiﬁcate based on the cluster radius rather than the number of adversarial points. Our experiments on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN datasets using the Point-Net classiﬁer demonstrate the effectiveness of our defense mechanism against targeted and untargeted clustering attacks with a large number of adversarial points.
Robust Fine-Tuning and Evaluation of Neural Question Generation Models

Question Generation (QG) consists of gener-001 ating a question given a context, and has a 002 wide range of real-world applications, such 003 as question answering (QA), educational sys-004 tems, and information extraction. Recently, it 005 has served to improve QA systems with few 006 available human annotations, such as for unsu-007 pervised, adversarial, and domain adaptation 008 scenarios. However, QG itself is less stud-009 ied, with little justification given for choosing 010 certain model architectures or input types. In 011 this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study 012 of neural QG models to identify important as-013 pects to be considered in their implementation. 014 First, we establish a new state-of-the-art on 015 SQuAD with T5 and BART models, outper-016 forming existing parameter-efficient models, 017 such as ERNIE-GEN and UniLM, but with less 018 parameters. Second, we show that BERTScore 019 and MoverScore have higher correlations with 020 human judgements than BLEU4 and ROUGE L , 021 which are commonly used to evaluate QG mod-022 els in various criteria. Finally, through man-023 ual assessments, we find that models trained 024 without a paragraph as context can retain gram-025 maticality and understandability , but degrade 026 answerability compared to models without the 027 answer as context. This means that the global 028 context is as important as the answer for QG 029 models to anchor the question to the answer. 1 030
Partial replacement of maize meal with high-tannin sorghum meal affects finishing and methane emissions of Pedi goats

This study was conducted to determine the effect of replacing maize meal with Sorghum vulgare meal, a high-tannin sorghum meal, in fattening diets on bodyweight and methane emissions by yearling male Pedi goats. A total of 12 yearling male Pedi goats with an average initial liveweight of 14 ± 1 kg were randomly assigned to a complete randomized design with four treatments, which were formulated such that 0%, 10%, 20% and 30% of the maize meal was replaced with Sorghum vulgare meal. The experiment was conducted over 28 days, with 21 days adaptation, followed by seven days for sample collection. Replacing maize meal with sorghum did not produce detectable (P >0.05) effects on bodyweight and live weight gain. The various replacement levels of sorghum meal had no detectable effects on the blood cell profile of Pedi goats either. However, they reduced methane emission and improved feed conversion ratio (P <0.05), which allowed for an approximation of the feed required by growing goats. These findings may assist farmers in selecting and utilizing the right feeds to maximize profitability in the small-stock farming sector.
Relevance in Dialogue: Is Less More? An Empirical Comparison of Existing Metrics, and a Novel Simple Metric

In this work, we evaluate various existing dialogue relevance metrics, find strong dependency on the dataset, often with poor correlation with human scores of relevance, and propose modifications to reduce data requirements and domain sensitivity while improving correlation. Our proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HUMOD dataset while reducing measured sensitivity to dataset by 37%-66%. We achieve this without fine-tuning a pretrained language model, and using only 3,750 unannotated human dialogues and a single negative example. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate competitive performance on four datasets from different domains. Our code, including our metric and experiments, is open sourced.
The Impact of Vaccine on the Dynamical Spread of Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract: The present study was undertaken to investigate the impact of effective COVID-19 vaccines in controlling or eradicating the disease. The proposed model was shown to be well-posed by establishing the biologically feasible regions. The qualitative analyses of the model showed that there exist both disease-free and endemic equilibria, which are globally asymptotically stable if the threshold value R0 < 1 and R0 > 1 respectively, and unstable otherwise. Sensitivity analysis and numerical simulations were carried out, and the results showed that the rates of recruitment and vaccination are very sensitive to the reproduction number; and the contact rates of the exposed individuals and environmental virus increase the infection in the population while increased rates of vaccination and recovery slow down the infection. It was therefore concluded that the influx of people into the population be reduced by placing restrictions on immigration, in order to eliminate the negative effect of the recruitment rate. Also, very effective COVID-19 vaccines and antiviral cures should be developed as these will respectively provide protection against the disease and increase recovery of any infected individual.
Adherence to test, treat and track policy for malaria control as reported by a rural district in Ghana: a five- year retrospective data review

Background: The WHO in 2012 recommended the T3 (Test, Treat and Track) policy in endemic countries to aid in achieving universal coverage with diagnostic testing, antimalarial treatment and malaria surveillance systems strengthening. This study, therefore, analyzed reported malaria data in the DHIMS2 database to assess the adherence of the ‘Test’, ‘Treat’ and ‘Track’ strategy in a rural district. Method: This was a retrospective cross-sectional descriptive analysis of reported OPD malaria secondary data from January 2016 to December 2020 to evaluate adherence to T3 policy in a district in Ghana. Reported DHIMS2 data by eight health facilities were extracted and analyzed to ascertain the test and treat component whilst an observational checklist was used to assess the track component of the policy. The analysis outcomes were presented on frequency tables and a chart. Findings: The overall testing rates for all ages, children under five years and pregnant women were 79.1%, 79.7% and 97.1% respectively. Presumptuous treatment among children under five years and pregnant women was 29.5% and 6.2%. Over 11% of clients were prescribed antimalarial though malaria test results proved they were negative. There was no documented evidence of malaria surveillance, though malaria data were duly reported in DHIMS2. Conclusion: Adherence to the ‘Test’ policy was consistently encouraging especially among children under five years and pregnant women. The facilities compliance with the ‘Treat’ policy was marginally low with a poor tracking malaria surveillance system.
How Does SimSiam Avoid Collapse Without Negative Samples? A Unified Understanding with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning

To avoid collapse in self-supervised learning (SSL), a contrastive loss is widely used but often requires a large number of negative samples. Without negative samples yet achieving competitive performance, a recent work has attracted significant attention for providing a minimalist simple Siamese (SimSiam) method to avoid collapse. However, the reason for how it avoids collapse without negative samples remains not fully clear and our investigation starts by revisiting the explanatory claims in the original SimSiam. After refuting their claims, we introduce vector decomposition for analyzing the collapse based on the gradient analysis of the $l_2$-normalized representation vector. This yields a unified perspective on how negative samples and SimSiam alleviate collapse. Such a unified perspective comes timely for understanding the recent progress in SSL.
Bile salt and micellar fat concentration in proximal small bowel contents of ileectomy patients Bile Salt and Micellar Fat Concentration in Proximal Small Bowel Contents of Ileectomy Patients

Studies were carried out to test the hypothesis that abnormal bile salt metabolism (interruption of the enterohepatic circulation) is responsible for steatorrhea in patients with ileal disease and (or) ileectomy. Duodenal bile salt concentration after a single, standard meal eaten at 8 a.m. was measured in 8 patients with ileectomy steatorrhea and compared with 11 normal control subjects and 7 hospitalized patients without gastrointestinal disease. Mean bile salt concentration was approximately half normal in the ileectomy group, but some of the patients fell well within the normal range, even on repeat studies. However, it was shown that the second and third meals eaten during a single day were associated with a marked depression of duodenal bile salt concentration in ileectomy patients, which suggested that the first meals in these patients flush out a large fraction of the bile salt pool. Simultaneously measured turnover studies with taurocholate- 14 C showed at t ½ of 3.1 hr in these patients compared with 29.5 and 32 hr in two control subjects, proving that the enterohepatic circulation had indeed been interrupted by ileectomy. Hepatic synthesis can apparently partially reconstitute the bile salt pool during the overnight period. Additional studies were carried out to determine the relation between bile salt and micellar fat concentration in proximal small bowel contents after ingestion of the same standard meal. Below a […] A B T R A C T Studies were carried out to test the hypothesis that abnormal bile salt metabolism (in-terruption of the enterohepatic circulation) is responsible for steatorrhea in patients with ileal disease and (or) ileectomy.
Impact of the introduction to special education course in improving attitudes among handicapped individuals

The present descriptive study aimed to survey the Faculty of Education students’ attitudes to handicapped individuals in Jordan, in a bid to explore the need for programmes to change negative attitudes to this group. The population of the study consisted of all the 123 students who registered in the introduction to special education course in the summer course in the academic year 2021-2021 or the first semester of the academic year 2021-2022 among bachelor’s degree majors of the Faculty of Education at the Arab Open University/Jordan. The sample of the study consisted of 57 students, who were selected at random of the population. The tool applied was that developed by Al-Qureiti for students’ attitudes to handicapped individuals, which was adapted for Jordan’s environment by Darwish. It consisted of 60 paragraphs of three sections on different aspects. On the other hand, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, T-test and one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) are adopted. It is found that there are statistically significant differences at 0.05≥α attributed to taking the course. There are similar statistically significant differences related to the gender factor, as female are shown to have more positive attitudes than male.
BLCTT_A_353430 17..21

Cerebral glucose hypometabolism (CGHM) is characterized by diffuse or focal reduction in uptake of glucose by the brain as determined on a FDG PET-CT. We report a case of lymphoma-associated cerebral glucose hypometabolism (LA-CGHM) in a patient with hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma (HSTCL) whose neuropsychiatric symptoms were resolved with glucose supplementation. PET-CT scan showed diffuse cerebral hypometabolism in addition to focal hypermetabolism in the liver related to lymphomatous involvement. He responded rapidly to infusion of 10% dextrose with complete resolution of neurological symptoms on two separate occasions and was later maintained on oral glucose without relapse. While his neuropsychiatric symptoms improved, his aggressive lymphoma and chemo-refractory disease ultimately led to his demise. We suggest that LA-CGHM can cause neuropsychiatric manifestations which can be reversed by intensive glucose supplementation.
Gender Disparity in Land Ownership: An Invitation to National Underdevelopment

Issues of gender inequalities and denial of women rights to land have attracted widespread attention both at national, regional and international levels. This will continue to remain in the public domain for as long as the land tenure system and reform programs of the third world nations support the existing system of land holding. The paper assessed the system of land ownership and the place of women in a traditional Idoma setting in order to examine the recent shift in land holding, the level of gender disparity as well as suggesting ways for achieving gender parity in land holding within the community. To achieve the aim set for the study, proper identification of land acquisition or ownership system in the communities was done, policy gaps identified and its impact examined. A survey of 145 respondents comprising of village heads/chiefs, family heads and women was embarked on. Findings of the research work revealed significant level of land ownership disparity between men and women in the area. Out of the total sampled population, 131 land holders were men, representing 90% of the sampled population while the remaining 10% are women. High rate of rural women illiteracy, finance, archaic custom/ inheritance system among other factors were identified to be the causative factors for gender disparity in land holding. The paper recommended gender parity through the promotion of gender inclusiveness and full participation in family and community decision making. This can be achieved through the overhauling of the existing custom, land policies and the reformation of land management system and development programs in the country.
Dodging the Data Bottleneck: Automatic Subtitling with Automatically Segmented ST Corpora

Speech translation for subtitling (SubST) is the task of automatically translating speech data into well-formed subtitles by inserting subtitle breaks compliant to specific displaying guidelines. Similar to speech translation (ST), model training requires parallel data comprising audio inputs paired with their textual translations. In SubST, however, the text has to be also annotated with subtitle breaks. So far, this requirement has represented a bottleneck for system development, as confirmed by the dearth of publicly available SubST corpora. To fill this gap, we propose a method to convert existing ST corpora into SubST resources without human intervention. We build a segmenter model that automatically segments texts into proper subtitles by exploiting audio and text in a multimodal fashion, achieving high segmentation quality in zero-shot conditions. Comparative experiments with SubST systems respectively trained on manual and automatic segmentations result in similar performance, showing the effectiveness of our approach.
Evaluation of Game Resources as a Purpose of Cyber Attacks for Educational Games

Game tasks are vulnerable to methods of gaining an advantage based on the results of attacks on game resources. In such conditions, it is critical to identify, monitor, and evaluate the possibility of such attacks. It is also advisable to choose methods of preventing them in advance, designing the game environment accordingly. An example of the use of training technologies that form users' awareness of information security issues for the task of predicting the choice of an attacker's attack vector is given. The algorithm of actions of an attacker in a game environment to gain an advantage or bypass (violate) the logic of the training game is shown. Possible criteria for the selection of game resources as targets of an attack are shown. The scheme of actions for determining the target resource and the features that reduce its protection against various types of attacks are briefly described. The application of the approach is possible for multi-user games built on the simulation of various processes, including for training games of various directions.
Modeling human-like morphological prediction

We test a model of morphological prediction based on analogical deduction using phonemic similarity by applying it to German plural sufﬁx prediction for a set of 24 nonce forms for which McCurdy et al. (2020) elicited human judgements, and which they found were poorly matched by productionsof an encoder-decoder model of Kirov and Cotterell (2018). Their results raise the question of what kinds of models best mirror human judgements. We show that the predictions of the analogical models we tested mirror human judgementsbetter than the encoder-decoder model.
Intervention of the Syndrome-PositionPoint SelectionMethod on Idiopathic Tinnitus of Phlegm-Fire Stagnation Pattern: A Randomized Controlled Study

Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, e Second Affiliated Hospital of Bengbu Medical College, Bengbu City 233000, Anhui Province, China Department of Medicine, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou City 311121, Zhejiang Province, China Department of Otolaryngology, Yueyang Integrated Traditional Chinese andWesternMedicine Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai City 200437, China
MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD FOR SPARSE DIRECTED ACYCLIC GRAPHS

We consider the problem of regularized maximum likelihood estimation for the structure and parameters of a high-dimensional, sparse directed acyclic graphical (DAG) model with Gaussian distribution, or equivalently, of a Gaussian structural equation model. We show that the (cid:2) 0 -penalized maximum likelihood estimator of a DAG has about the same number of edges as the minimal-edge I-MAP (a DAG with minimal number of edges representing the distribution), and that it converges in Frobenius norm. We allow the number of nodes p to be much larger than sample size n but assume a sparsity condition and that any representation of the true DAG has at least a ﬁxed proportion of its nonzero edge weights above the noise level. Our results do not rely on the faithfulness assumption nor on the restrictive strong faithfulness condition which are required for methods based on conditional independence testing such as the PC-algorithm.
Control of apple snail with copper chelate and ozonated water in rice cultivation at field level

The pest that has caused the most problems in rice (Oriza sativa L.) in recent years is the apple snail, Pomacea canaliculata (Lamarck); this pest is considered among the 100 worst invasive species in the world. The present work is an experimental trial at the field level where different doses of copper chelate and ozonated water were applied to control the apple snail in rice cultivation; for which a randomized complete block design (RCBD) was used, with five treatments, including the control and four repetitions. The experimental site was located on a farm in the Salitre canton, in the Guayas province, Ecuador, with tropical climate. The mortality rate of the snails against the proposed treatments was evaluated. Treatment T4, which corresponded to the dose of 2 L ha of copper chelate mixed with ozonated water with a concentration of 2 ppm, was the treatment were the best apple snail control was observed, resulting in 94% mortality.
CAD / CAM ceramics , hybrid ceramics and resins-A new era ( non-metal tooth replacement options )-A Review

Micro structure of dental restorative materials along with elastic constants gives an intuition of mechanical behaviour of the materials. Accuracy, quick esthetic restoration delivery, strength and durability made ceramics as the most chosen material of esthetic importance. The combination duo of CAD/CAM and numerous advanced ceramic materials ameliorated the esthetics, precision milling making ceramics as the best choice of prosthesis delivery chair side. Newer breakthrough ceramics with more mechanically resistant properties, softer materials with higher fracture resistance have evolved that made milling more rapid and error free which included adhesive ceramic, high strength ceramic, resin reinforced ceramic and many more. The objective of this article is to classify chairside CAD/ CAM materials and to define their characteristics and indications.
The Compensatory CO2 Fertilization and Stomatal Closure Effects on Runoff Projection From 2016–2099 in the Western United States

Water availability in the dry western United States (US) under climate change and increasing water use demand has become a serious concern. Previous studies have projected future runoff changes across the western US but ignored the impacts of ecosystem response to elevated CO2 concentration. Here, we aim to understand the impacts of elevated CO2 on future runoff changes through ecosystem responses to both rising CO2 and associated warming using the Noah‐MP model with representations of vegetation dynamics and plant hydraulics. We first validated Noah‐MP against observed runoff, leaf area index (LAI), and terrestrial water storage anomaly from 1980 to 2015. We then projected future runoff with Noah‐MP under downscaled climates from three climate models under Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5. The projected runoff declines variably from the Pacific Northwest by −11% to the Lower Colorado River basin by −92% from 2016 to 2099. To discern the exact causes, we conducted an attribution analysis of the modeled evapotranspiration from two additional sensitivity experiments: one with constant CO2 and another one with static monthly LAI climatology. Results show that surface “greening” (due to the CO2 fertilization effect) and the stomatal closure effect are the second largest contributors to future runoff change, following the warming effect. These two counteracting CO2 effects are roughly compensatory, leaving the warming effect to remain the dominant contributor to the projected runoff declines at large river basin scales. This study suggests that both surface “greening” and stomatal closure effects are important factors and should be considered together in water resource projections.
Incorporating the oxic‐settling‐anaerobic (OSA) process into an anoxic–oxic system for sewage sludge reduction and nutrient removal

The production of sludge in biological wastewater treatments is a growing problem worldwide as it entails economic, environmental, and health problems. The oxic‐settling‐anaerobic (OSA) process is one of the techniques that have been developed to reduce the sludge produced in the activated sludge process (ASP). This article reports the feasibility of the application of the OSA process in a nutrient removal system, specifically, in an anoxic–oxic (A) process. The results reveal TN removal in the A + OSA system of 68.84% and 69.91% (for 7 and 11 h of sludge anaerobic exposure time, SAET, respectively) versus 38.02% and 32.47% in the OSA system with similar SAET. The percentage sludge reductions obtained were, respectively, 22.41% and 31.93% in the OSA system and 23.53% and 32.49% in the A + OSA system compared to the sludge produced in the conventional ASP. The study confirms the suitability of the application of the OSA process in a nutrient removal system, as nutrient removal performances are not affected, while at the same time achieving higher sludge reduction. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 37: 1068–1074, 2018