Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tactical Extremism

We provide an instrumental theory of extreme campaign platforms. By adopting an extreme platform, a previously mainstream party with a relatively small probability of winning further reduces its chances. On the other hand, the party builds credibility as the one most capable of delivering an alternative to mainstream policies. The party gambles that if down the road voters become dissatisfied with the status quo and seek something different, the party will be there ready with a credible alternative. In essence, the party sacrifices the most immediate election to invest in greater future success. We call this phenomenon tactical extremism. We show under which conditions we expect tactical extremism to arise and we discuss its welfare implications.
Effect of Carbon Coating on Electrochemical Performance of Treated Natural Graphite as Lithium‐Ion Battery Anode Material

Carbon-coated natural graphite has been prepared by thermal vapor decomposition treatment of natural graphite at 1,000 C. Natural graphite coated with carbon showed much better electrochemical performance as an anode material in both propylene carbonate-based and ethylene carbonate-based electrolytes than bare natural graphite. The effect of carbon coating on the electrochemical performance was investigated by solid-state {sup 7}Li-NMR in conjunction with standard electrochemical techniques.
Iron Nutrition of Strawberries Grown in Peat Bags

Abstract Plants of short-day strawberry cultivar ‘Elsanta’ (Fraga-ria X ananassa Duch.) were grown in peat bags with six rates of iron (Fe) in the nutrient solution (0,10, 20, 30, 60 and 120 μmol/liter). A Fe leaf value lower than 45 ppm on a dry matter basis was associated with deficiency symptoms. A minimum concentration of 10 μmol/liter Fe in the nutrient solution was considered satisfactory for growth and good fruit production of ‘Elsanta’ grown on peat bags.
Dependence of perceived aggregate size on pixel resolution using an imaging method

In order to assess the experimental artefacts associated with image-based characterization of aggregates, tests were performed to evaluate the effects of aggregate size and shape, relative to the pixel resolution of the imaging device. The basic motivation for the study was to further the understanding of particle separation processes in water treatment and specific goals were to: (1) analyse flocs developed from coagulation and flocculation processes using a non-intrusive measurement technique; and (2) develop relationships between measured aggregate characteristics and accuracy in an imaging method. The main objective of this study was to investigate the dependence of perceived aggregate size on pixel resolution using an imaging method. Analysis of fractal dimensions as a means of quantifying aggregate shape and other geometric properties was used to illustrate the consequences of potential measurement errors that might be generated, based on a given pixel resolution. A variety of pixel resolutions might be realized in an experimental setting by using different camera lenses and magnifications, and this variety is related to the desired degree of measurement accuracy. A relationship between the expected measurement error and the particle properties is established as a function of pixel resolution for both a single spherical particle and a cluster of three spheres. Results of this study provide an estimate to quantify the error in measurements due to pixel resolution obtained from an imaging method depending on the size of the aggregates of interest, and to assess the appropriateness of a particular pixel resolution depending on the desired degree of accuracy for a given analysis.
Interactions between Crude Oil and Patagonian Soil as a Function of the Soil Clay-Water Content

The interactions of crude oil, with soils having different clay and water contents were studied as a function of time, as a contribution to the understanding of the influence that sorption and desorption effects might have in the efficiency and effectiveness of the remediation techniques. Characteristic Patagonian soils have low amounts of organic matter, (usually less than 1%), and high clay contents; therefore, they are convenient media to study the influence of clay in sorption, avoiding interactions with organic matter. It was found that addition of clays to the soil changed the rate and extent of the interactions and favored the sorption; linear sorption uptake isotherms were observed. The partition coefficients, Kd, of the different samples are correlated with the clay and water contents in the soil, were the multiparametric equation obtained had a satisfactory predictive value. On the other hand, the data obtained with the different oil fractions are consistent with competitive interactions of the different types of chemical species for accessing to active sites. To evaluate the model, similar studies were carried out with simulated samples of known chemical composition. In spite of the complexity of the oil system, results obtained with the simulated samples were consistent with the sorption model. The parameters determined are useful for the design of remediation techniques.
Controlled Integration of Nanocrystals in Inverted Hexagonal Nano‐Pits at the Surface of Light‐Emitting Heterostructures

Spontaneously formed nano-pits are exploited to effectively control the incorporation of gold nanocrystals (NCs) at the surface of light emitting InGaN/GaN heterostructures. Nano- engineering either the NCs size, or pit size, allows the number of NCs incorporated in each pit to be controlled, thus enabling research of well-defined assemblies of few gold NCs using an optically and electrically active substrate (see figure). The development of new nano-devices based on such hybrid nanostructures is briefly discussed.
Progressive Domain Adaptation from a Source Pre-trained Model.

Domain adaptation assumes that samples from source and target domains are freely accessible during a training phase. However, such an assumption is rarely plausible in the real-world and possibly causes data-privacy issues, especially when the label of the source domain can be a sensitive attribute as an identifier. To avoid accessing source data that may contain sensitive information, we introduce progressive domain adaptation (PrDA). Our key idea is to leverage a pre-trained model from the source domain and progressively update the target model in a self-learning manner. We observe that target samples with lower self-entropy measured by the pre-trained source model are more likely to be classified correctly. From this, we select the reliable samples with the self-entropy criterion and define these as class prototypes. We then assign pseudo labels for every target sample based on the similarity score with class prototypes. Furthermore, to reduce the uncertainty from the pseudo labeling process, we propose set-to-set distance-based filtering which does not require any tunable hyperparameters. Finally, we train the target model with the filtered pseudo labels with regularization from the pre-trained source model. Surprisingly, without direct usage of labeled source samples, our PrDA outperforms conventional domain adaptation methods on benchmark datasets. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.
Prevalence of Smoking and Its Associated Risk Factors Among Secondary School Students in Kelantan, Malaysia

Introduction: Minimizing smoking initiation among adolescents has been identified as a strategy to reduce the prevalence of tobacco induced diseases among Malaysian adults. The aims of this study were to investigate the prevalence and factors associated with smoking among secondary schoolgoing adolescents in the state of Kelantan, Malaysia. Methods: A school-based survey was carried out in Kelantan to determine the prevalence and associated factors of smoking among Kelantanese adolescents. Two-stage cluster sampling was used to ensure the representativeness of the sample. A self-administered validated questionnaire was utilised to obtain data from the selected respondents. Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to determine the factors associated with smoking behaviour among school-going adolescents. Results: The study revealed that 10.1% (95 CI 8.5-11.9%) of the selected respondents were current smokers. The prevalence of male who smoked was significantly higher compared to female. MLR revealed that, males, respondents with at least one smoking parent/guardian, as well as the respondents with less supportive parents/ guardian were more likely to smoke. However, by having a few numbers of close friends and helpful peers in the school had shown no significant association for being the current smokers. Conclusion: The study showed that the prevalence of smoking was a bit lower than the national prevalence, and smoking behaviour was predominant among male adolescents in Kelantan state. Comprehensive measures with the involvement of parents/guardians were imperative to tackle smoking habits among adolescents by targeting high-risk groups identified in the study.
Pressure Ulcer Injury in Unstructured Clinical Notes: Detection and Interpretation

Hospital-acquired pressure ulcer injury (PUI) is a primary nursing quality metric, reflecting the caliber of nursing care within a hospital. Prior studies have used the Braden scale and structured data from the electronic health records to detect/predict PUI while the informative unstructured clinical notes have not been used. We propose automated PUI detection using a novel negation-detection algorithm applied to unstructured clinical notes. Our detection framework is on-demand, requiring minimal cost. In application to the MIMIC-III dataset, the text features produced using our algorithm resulted in improved PUI detection when evaluated using logistic regression, random forests, and neural networks compared to text features without negation detection. Exploratory analysis reveals substantial overlap between key classifier features and leading clinical attributes of PUI, adding interpretability to our solution. Our method could also considerably reduce nurses' evaluations by automatic detection of most cases, leaving only the most uncertain cases for nursing assessment.
Investigation of varicella-zoster virus immunoglobulin G levels in general health checkup subjects and patients with the Ramsay Hunt syndrome for a diagnosis of zoster sine herpete

n Japan, publicly supported routine vaccination for varicella-zoster virus (VZV) was not administered until 2014; therefore, chickenpox was common and was almost exclusively acquired during childhood. Hence, most adults have VZV IgG antibodies in their serum. Herpes zoster (HZ) and Ramsay Hunt syndrome, also known as, herpes zoster oticus, are caused by VZV reactivation. Risk factors for HZ were largely unknown, older age and diminished cell-mediated immunity were well-documented risk factors but cannot fully explain the epidemiology of HZ. Detection of serum IgM and PCR are of limited value for the confirmation of HZ. However, the relationship between the levels of serum Original Contribution Kitasato Med J 2020; 50: 138-144
TRENDS IN HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICE: A PERSPECTIVE FROM PRACTITIONERS IN LOGISTICS ORGANIZATION, SELANGOR, MALAYSIA

Human resource management practitioners from nine logistics organizations in the Klang Valley, Selangor, Malaysia were interviewed in person using a structured interview method. Participants identified global competition in logistics industry, emerging of partnership strategy, demographics of the logistics workforce and high quality of services expected from customers as trends they faced in logistics industry. Important points were highlighted as human resource policy, training and development specifically for logistics human resource management that covered these trends.
Transformer-based Meta-Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Imitation learning has been considered as one of the promising approaches to enable a robot to acquire competencies. Recently, one-shot imitation learning has shown encouraging results for executing variations of initial conditions of a given task without requiring task-speciﬁc engineering. However, it remains inefﬁcient for generalizing in variations of tasks involving different reward or transition functions. In this work, we aim at improving the generalization ability of demonstration based learning to unseen tasks that are signiﬁcantly different from the training tasks. First, we introduce the use of transformer-based sequence-to-sequence policy networks trained from limited sets of demonstrations. Then, we propose to meta-train our model from a set of training demonstrations by leveraging optimization-based meta-learning. Finally, we evaluate our approach and report encouraging results using the recently proposed framework Meta-World which is composed of a large set of robotic manipulation tasks organized in various categories.
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Rainwater Collected in a Tropical Polluted Urban Area

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons present in rainwater were studied in two distinct areas in Mexico City Metropolitan Area throughout the rainy season. The results showed no significant difference between the two sites, thus suggesting a more regional phenomenon driving the dissolution of the PAHs in the rain. The PAHs concentration ranged from 1.7–30.2 ngL−1with the predominance of phenanthrene, fluoranthene, and pyrene. The PAH sources were traced predominantly to vehicular emission with signature PAHs, diagnostic ratios, and cluster statistical analyses. On the other hand, the temporal analysis of the PAHs showed that the fluxes of the Total PAH were slightly different for both sites. The urban-industrial site showed fluxes that ranged from 145–3263 ng m−2d−1, while the urban site ranged from 134–3139 ng m−2d−1, with the urban site having a moderate rate at which the total PAHs diminished throughout the rainy season while the urban-industrial showed no change throughout the rainy season. This study also addressed two occurrences when studying PAHs in rain: the degradation of PAHs in the samples with acidic rain and the dilution of the PAH in the samples with continued collection of rain.
Investigating Multiple Pedagogical Perspectives through MIMIC (Multiple Intelligent Mentors Instructing Collaboratively)

In this exploratory experimental study, 135 pre -service teachers developed an instructional plan for a case study within a computer-based environment. Three-dimensional, animated pedagogical computer agents, representing constructivist and instructivist perspectives of instructional design, operationalized instructional theory within the environment. The research design was a two-factor ANOVA with the instructivist agent (present, not present) and constructivist agent (present, not present) serving as the two factors, leading to four combinations of agent conditions. Agents (if present) were available to provide suggestions. It was hypothesized that the agents would influence pre -service teachers’ perspective of instructional planning, performance, reflections, and dispositions regarding instructional planning. A main effect for the constructivist agent indicated that when the constructivist agent was present participants reported a change in their perspective of instructional planning, developed more constructivist-oriented lesson plans, and reflected less on their thinking. A main effect for the instructivist agent indicated that when the instructivist agent was not present, participants reported more positive attitudes regarding instructional planning. There were no significant effects of agents on performance. For those participants receiving both agents ( N =43), qualitative results indicated that students were metacognitively aware of the difference between two agents, yet there were no significant differences in their ratings of agent usefulness or tendency to provoke thought.
The Prevalence of Postpartum Depression and the Correlation of Perceived Social Support and Quality of Life with Postpartum Depression: A Longitudinal Study.

OBJECTIVE Postpartum depression (PPD) has negative effects on the mothers who experience it. The aims of the study described herein were to determine the prevalence of PPD and to determine the correlations between PPD and perceived social support, quality of life, and the risk factors for PPD. METHODS Data were collected using a questionnaire prepared by the researchers and that included the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, the Beck Depression Scale, the Quality of Life scale, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and questions regarding the sociodemographic characteristics and PPD risk factors of the mother. RESULTS The prevalences of PPD were found to be 3.9% in the 4th week postpartum and 5.9% in the 6th week postpartum. Being a primary school (and no higher) graduate, being stressed in daily life, experiencing health problems during the delivery and the postpartum period, and not thinking of oneself as a good mother were all determined to be risk factors for PPD. Although the mean score for social support was higher in women with low PPD risks, this difference was not significant. According to a linear regression model, PPD negatively affected the social and psychological qualities of life of the mothers in the 4th week postpartum. CONCLUSION Along with a trend suggesting a correlation between high social support and low PPD risk in women, a correlation between low PPD risk and high quality of life was also found.
Experimental Study on Higher Order Reflection by Monodomain Cholesteric Liquid Crystals

Abstract Reflection spectra have been measured in the spectral region of the second and the third order selective reflections for monodomain cholesterics of various cell thicknesses at various angles of incidence. Thicker cells give rise to higher reflectance at larger angles of incidence. The second order reflection region consists of three bands which show characteristic polarization correlation: The central band is a total reflection band, where incident light of any polarization is reflected. The reflected light is a polarized when it polarized light is incident and vice versa. Contrary to the central band, two side bands are selectively reflected; σ(π) polarized light is reflected in the longer (shorter) wavelength band retaining its polarization. The third order reflection bands observed for the first time have been found to give the same polarization characteristics as that of the second order reflection bands.
Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on a Regional Stroke Thrombectomy Service in the United Kingdom

Introduction: We examined the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on our regional stroke thrombectomy service in the UK. Methods: This was a single-center health service evaluation. We began testing for COVID-19 on 3 March and introduced a modified “COVID Stroke Thrombectomy Pathway” on 18 March. We analyzed the clinical, procedural and outcome data for 61 consecutive stroke thrombectomy patients between 1 January and 30 April. We compared the data for January and February (“pre-COVID,” n = 33) versus March and April (“during COVID,” n = 28). Results: Patient demographics were similar between the 2 groups (mean age 71 ± 12.8 years, 39% female). During the COVID-19 pandemic, (a) total stroke admissions fell by 17% but the thrombectomy rate was maintained at 20% of ischemic strokes; (b) successful recanalization rate was maintained at 81%; (c) early neurological outcomes (neurological improvement following thrombectomy and inpatient mortality) were not significantly different; (d) use of general anesthesia fell significantly from 85 to 32% as intended; and (e) time intervals from onset to arrival, groin puncture, and recanalization were not significantly different, whereas internal delays for external referrals significantly improved for door-to-groin puncture (48 [interquartile range (IQR) 39–57] vs. 33 [IQR 27–44] minutes, p = 0.013) and door-to-recanalization (82.5 [IQR 61–110] vs. 60 [IQR 55–70] minutes, p = 0.018). Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the stroke admission numbers but not stroke thrombectomy rate, successful recanalization rate, or early neurological outcome. Internal delays actually improved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further studies should examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on longer term outcome.
Non-targeted metabolomics analyses by mass spectrometry to explore metabolic stress after six training weeks in high level swimmers.

ABSTRACT The objective was to compare the metabolic responses of high-level national swimmers to threshold or polarised training. 22 swimmers (n = 12 males and 10 females) participated in a 28-week cross-over intervention study consisting of 2 × 6 period weeks of training. Swimmers were assigned randomly to either training group for the first period: polarised (POL) (81% in energetic zone 1: blood lactate [La]b ≤ 2 mmol.L−1; 4% in zone 2: 2 mmol.L−1 <[La]b ≤ 4 mmol.L−1; 15% in zone 3: [La]b > 4 mmol.L−1) or threshold (THR) (65%/25%/10%). Before and after each training period, urine samples were collected for non-targeted metabolomics analysis. Mixed model analysis was performed on metabolomics data including fatigue class factors and/or training and/or interaction. Ion intensities of 6-keto-decanoylcarnitine (+31%), pregnanediol-3-glucuronide (+81%), P-cresol sulphate (+18%) were higher in the threshold group (P < 0.05) indicating higher glycogenic depletion and inflammation without alteration of the neuroendocrine stress axis. 4-phenylbutanic acid sulphate was 200% higher in less fatigued swimmers (P < 0.01) linking the anti-inflammatory activity at the cell membrane level to the subjective perception of fatigue. This research suggests the importance of replenishing glycogen stores and reducing inflammation during high thresholds training loads.
Synergistic protective effects between docosahexaenoic acid and omeprazole on the gastrointestinal tract in the indomethacin‐induced injury model

Nonsteroidal anti‐inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are the most commonly used drugs due to their antipyretic, anti‐inflammatory, and analgesic properties. However, NSAIDs can cause adverse reactions, mainly gastrointestinal damage. Omeprazole (OMP) exhibits gastroprotective activity, but its protection is limited at the intestinal level. For this reason, it is essential to utilize a combination of therapies that provide fewer adverse effects, such as the combined treatment of OMP and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega‐3 polyunsaturated fatty acid with anti‐inflammatory, analgesic, and gastroprotective activities. The objective of this study was to evaluate the pharmacological interaction between DHA and OMP in a murine model of indomethacin‐induced gastrointestinal damage. The gastroprotective and enteroprotective effects of DHA (0.3–10 mg/kg, p.o.), OMP (1–30 mg/kg, p.o.), or the combination treatment of both compounds (3–56.23 mg/kg, p.o.) were evaluated in the indomethacin‐induced gastrointestinal damage model (30 mg/kg, p.o.). Since DHA and OMP exhibited a protective effect in a dose‐responsive fashion, the ED30 for each individual compound was determined and a 1:1 combination of DHA and OMP was tested. Isobolographic analysis was used to determine any pharmacodynamic interactions. Since the effective experimental dose ED30 (Zexp) of the combined treatment of DHA and OMP was lower than the theoretical additive dose (Zadd; p < .05) in both the stomach and small intestine their protective effects were considered synergistic. These results indicate that the synergistic protective effects from combined treatment of DHA and OMP could be ideal for mitigating damage generated by NSAIDs at the gastrointestinal level.