Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
‘Just notes’: Young musicians’ perspectives on learning expressive performance

Expressiveness is an important aspect of an excellent music performance as it adds quality and interest to the playing and listening experience. Although several studies have investigated tertiary students’ learning of expressiveness, little is known about effective approaches for teaching children to perform expressively. In the present project, 16 young musicians (aged 9–16, with performance levels at Pre-Grade 1 – Grade 8) took part in a video-stimulated recall interview after an experimental investigation which had featured methods for teaching and facilitating expressiveness. The interviews explored pupils’ perspectives on that instruction, which included practice of difficult sections, scales practice, improvisation, and questions and dialogue regarding musical character. Participants who had been taught via dialogic teaching indicated that the questions relating to musical character and expressive tools had been helpful for their understanding of the ‘musicality’ of their pieces and thus for their learning of performance expression. The questions regarding musical character were seen as helpful, as this had facilitated pupils’ reflection on, and understanding of the interpretation, thus contributing to their learning of expressiveness. This demonstrates the importance of teachers’ enquiry and pupils’ reflection for young musicians’ learning of expressive performance.
Channel–Spatial fusion aware net for accurate and fast object Detection

A major challenge of object detection is that accurate detector is limited by speed due to enormous network, while the lightweight detector can reach real-time but its weak representation ability leads to the expense of accuracy. To overcome the issue, we propose a channel–spatial fusion awareness module (CSFA) to improve the accuracy by enhancing the feature representation of network at the negligible cost of complexity. Given a feature map, our method exploits two parts sequentially, channel awareness and spatial awareness, to reconstruct feature map without deepening the network. Because of the property of CSFA for easy integrating into any layer of CNN architectures, we assemble this module into ResNet-18 and DLA-34 in CenterNet to form a CSFA detector. Results consistently show that CSFA-Net runs in a fairly fast speed, and achieves state-of-the-art, i.e., mAP of 81.12% on VOC2007 and AP of 43.2% on COCO.
Electrochemical Noise Measurements of Advanced High-Strength Steels in Different Solutions

Advanced high-strength steels (AHSS), are commonly used in the manufacture of car bodies, as well as in front and rear rails, and safety posts. These components can be exposed to corrosive environments for instance, in countries where de-icing salts are used. In this work, the corrosion behavior of four AHSS steels with dual-phase [ferrite-martensite (DP) and ferrite-bainite (FB)] steels were studied by means of electrochemical noise (EN) measurements according to the ASTM G199-09 standard in NaCl, CaCl2 and MgCl2 aqueous solutions at room temperature. The direct current (DC) trend data from EN were removed by a polynomial method of statistical and spectral analysis. According to the noise resistance (Rn) values obtained for the DP and FB dual-phase steels, both the martensite/bainite content and morphology of the phase constituents have an important effect on the corrosion behavior of these steels. The L.I. (localization index) (0.00054 to 0.15431), skewness (−6.18 to 7.35) and kurtosis (high values 37.15, 74.84 and 106.52) were calculated. In general, the results indicated that the main corrosion process is related to uniform corrosion. Corrosion behavior of AHSS steels exposed in NaCl solution could be related to the morphology of the phase constituents exposed in NaCl, CaCl2 and MgCl2 solutions.
Efficacy of cytological examination in comparision with gold standard histopathology in various palpable & non-palpable lesions- A study of 483 cases in a tertiary care centre

Background: It has become important to diagnose the pathology of any site in early stage to improve the prognosis of the disease process since there is limited resources in our country. Since FNAC is easy to perform, simple, cost effective procedure requiring minimal setup, we conducted this study to evaluate its diagnostic accuracy, sensitivity and specificity in comparison to histopathology. Materials and Methods: This was a retrospective and prospective study carried out for a duration of 4 years and included total of 483 cases referred to Pathology Department. Biopsy was performed in all cases after FNAC and the findings were correlated. Results: Of the 483 cases, patients belonged to age group of 10 to 70 years. In case of breast lesions all were females, in lymph node, lung & miscellaneous lesions there was male preponderance while in thyroid female preponderance was observed. The sensitivity & specificity of cytopathology in Breast was 98.87% & 78.26%, in Lung 98.18% & 86.66%, in Lymph node 93.93% & 85.71%, in Thyroid 93.18% & 85.71%, while in Miscellaneous 93.33% & 87.5% respectively. Conclusion: FNAC can be used safely and can be relied upon in diagnosis of various pathologies even in centres with limited facilities & it can be set up at OPD level also, thus aiding in timely management of the patient. The overall Sensitivity and Specificity of cytopathological examination was good. PPV & NPV were within acceptable range. Keywords: Biopsy, Breast, FNAC, Lung, Lymph node, Thyroid, Miscellaneous.
Cooperative Learning Strategy and Students Performance in Mathematics in Junior High School in Hohoe Municipality, Ghana

The study investigated the effect of cooperative learning strategy on student’s performance in mathematics at selected Junior High School in Volta Region of Ghana. The study adopted a quasi-experimental research design. The sample for the study consisted of two hundred and sixty-six (266) Junior High School 2 mathematics students selected from two Junior High Schools in Hohoe municipality of Volta Region in Ghana. The instrument for data collection was Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT). The instrument was validated by two experts and has reliability index of 0.87 obtained through the use of Pearson Product Moment Correlation. Two objectives and two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The data collected were analyzed using adjusted mean and standard deviation to answer the objectives while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null hypothesis at alpha level of 0.05. The finding of the study confirmed that students performed better using cooperative learning strategy irrespective of their ability level than those students who were taught using the traditional method. The test of interaction showed that gender had no significant interaction with teaching strategy on students mean performance. The study concluded that cooperative learning strategy is a good teaching method for teaching mathematics. The study recommended that mathematics teachers should adopt the cooperative learning strategy in order to improve students’ performance, social interaction skills and foster meta-cognition in students. The study also recommended that workshops should be organized by educational bodies to emphasize and enlighten teachers and mathematics educators on the importance of using cooperative learning strategy in the learning and teaching in Junior High schools in Ghana.
Further properties of linear prediction sufficiency and the BLUPs in the linear model with new observations

A linear statistic Fy is called linearly sufficient for the estimable parametric function of X * β under the linear model M = {y,X β, V} if there exists a matrix A such that AFy is the best linear unbiased estimator, BLUE, for X* β . The concept of linear sufficiency with respect to a predictable random vector is defined in the corresponding way but considering best linear unbiased predictor, BLUP, instead of BLUE. In this paper, we consider the linear sufficiency of Fy with respect to y * , X * β , and ∈ * , when the random vector y* comes from y* = X β + ∈ * , and the prediction is based on the linear model M . Our main results concern the mutual relations of these sufficiencies. In addition, we give an extensive review of some interesting properties of the covariance matrices of the BLUPs of ∈ * . We also apply our results into the linear mixed model. Keywords: Best linear unbiased estimator; Best linear unbiased predictor; Linear sufficiency; Linear mixed model; Transformed linear model
Exploration of Canine Mesenchymal Stromal Cells and Cell Reprogramming for Future Immunotherapy and Cartilage Repair

EXPLORATION OF CANINE MESENCHYMAL STROMAL CELLS AND CELL REPROGRAMMING FOR FUTURE IMMUNOTHERAPY AND CARTILAGE REPAIR Keith Andrew Russell Advisor: University of Guelph, 2017 Thomas G. Koch There are an estimated 6.4 million dogs living in 34% of Canadian households. Dogs suffer from many conditions where only poor to no treatments exist. For example, cartilage injury, osteoarthritis, and other inflammatory disorders have been inadequately remedied by traditional medical care. Increasing effort has been put toward the innovation and optimization of cell-based therapies for tissue regeneration and immune modulation. Approaches include the use of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), and other cell engineering techniques such as gene over-expression in somatic cells. The hypothesis was that canine cells with immunomodulatory and chondrogenic properties can be isolated from adipose tissue (AT), bone marrow (BM), or articular cartilage (AC) and utilized to generate canine iPSC. The objectives were: 1) to assess the immunomodulatory and chondrogenic properties of canine ATand BM-MSC and 2) to generate iPSC from canine MSC or chondrocytes and verify their pluripotency and chondrogenesis. Canine MSC were derived from AT and BM. Isolation success and proliferation rates were compared when using two different culture supplements: fetal bovine serum (FBS) and platelet lysate (PL). Despite the fact that PL is slowly displacing use of the increasingly expensive and xenogeneic FBS in human MSC culture, PL proved detrimental to canine MSC. It did not support isolation or long-term culture of MSC and showed evidence of inducing spontaneous adipogenesis. MSC source was also investigated. Few differences were found pertaining to differentiation and immunomodulation. Both MSC populations have good adipogenic and osteogenic, but poor chondrogenic potential, and have proficient lymphocyte suppressive properties. What distinguished ATfrom BM-derived MSC were higher proliferation rates. SinceMSCwere found to be poorly chondrogenic, both canineMSC and chondrocytes were used to generate iPSC. Some signs of reprogramming were apparent. However, the conditions needed to stabilize reprogrammed cells were not yet identified. In conclusion, AT is the recommended source of canine MSC for immunotherapy. A practical source of chondrogenic cells for canine cartilage engineering strategies has not yet been established, but this work is a promising starting point for further study.
Growth, behaviour and carcass characteristics of egg-type cockerels compared to male broilers

In the present study, male layers and broilers were subjected to different housing (lighting period) and fattening conditions (duration of fattening and feed energy density) to compare their growth rate, feed efficiency, behaviour, carcass composition and meat quality. Males of light or medium heavy egg-type hybrids cannot compete with the growth intensity and the carcass performance of male broilers under common intensive production systems. More suitable for fattening egg-type cockerels may be extensive conditions, i.e. extended fattening periods with lower feeding intensity. For limited niche markets male layers can claim low mortality, good health condition, low abdominal fat, high intramuscular protein content and organoleptic preferences for the meat of light hybrids at an older age.
De la bibliometría al emprendimiento: un estudio de estudios

Bibliometric studies of entrepreneurship as a discipline have contributed fundamentally to the creation of a certain order in an apparently chaotic and contradictory literature, examining how the discipline has developed, giving a comprehensive vision of the structure of the field, observing its social networks, detecting trends, discovering knowledge gaps and helping to plan future research lines. The purpose of this article is to explore this special type of research. In terms of methodology, it uses an adaptation of the Systematic Literature Review, and a content analysis using text-mining software in order to look deeper into objectives, conclusions and limitations. Among the main findings, there is some evidence that indicates that the image presented to date about entrepreneurship has not considered the multidisciplinary nature of the field and could, therefore, be distorted. At the same time, a series of inherent problems have been detected, and it has become evident that there is a need to incorporate the latest advances in bibliometrics and to improve collaboration between experts from both fields in order to solve those mentioned issues and move towards future progress.
A New Fossil Vertebrate Locality of the Jetmore Chalk Member of the Upper Cretaceous Greenhorn Limestone in North-Central Kansas, U.S.A.

The Jetmore Chalk Member of the Greenhorn Limestone is a Late Cretaceous rock unit deposited under the Western Interior Seaway in North America. We here report an assemblage of vertebrate fossils collected through surface collecting and bulk sampling at a new Jetmore Chalk locality in Republic County, Kansas, U.S.A. Taxonomically, it consists of diverse carnivorous fish taxa (e.g., Ptychodus, Cretoxyrhina, Squalicorax, Pachyrhizodus, and Plethodidae), indicating that the marine paleoecology during the deposition of the Jetmore Chalk was quite complex. The fossil assemblage also includes the first record of the aquatic lizard, Coniasaurus cf. C. crassidens, from the Jetmore Chalk, as well as the first record of a ‘billfish’-type bony fish, Cylindracanthus sp. , from Kansas that also represents the oldest fossil record for the genus. Whereas the overall taxonomic composition of known fossil vertebrates from the Jetmore Chalk is consistent with typical Cenomanian-Santonian vertebrate assemblages of the Western Interior Seaway, this study demonstrates the presence of local differences in the relative abundance of fossils across different fish taxa between a known Jetmore Chalk locality and the new Jetmore Chalk locality described in this study.
Perceived risk for acceptance of E-wallet platform in Malaysia among youth: Sem approach

The payment technology such as e-wallet is important in this century for both consumers and providers. Following the trend, the e-wallet providers quickly connect with the banks to develop banking applications activities. As e-wallet is closely linked to online transaction, the trust of risk issue is prominent whereby most studies present a challenge in providing e-wallet solutions to encourage user acceptance. Therefore, this study investigates the perceived risk that reflects customer emotions on the uncertainty of possible adverse effect on the use of new technologies. 231 young adults in a range of 18 to 30 years old were involved in this study. The analysis started with distribution of the questionnaire and getting the factors involved by adopting Exploratory Factor Analysis. Structural equation modelling and existing technology acceptance model is used in order to determine the significant factors that been accepted by the users among young generation. Results found that there are several factors that have significant relationship with the acceptance of e-wallet platform, which are behavioral intention, perceived privacy risk, perceived usefulness, trust, perceived overall risk, and perceived performance risk. More respondents should be selected in the future to give their opinion on this e-wallet issue. Besides that, more factors should be investigated in order to provide in depth view of e-wallet to the providers and consumers.
Apical extrusion of bacteria following the use of reciprocating single-file and rotary multi-file instrumentation systems in oval root canals

Objective: All instrumentation techniques and instruments are associated with apical extrusion during chemomechanical preparation, and this causes postoperative pain and flare-up. However, it is controversial whether reciprocal systems or rotary systems cause more apical extrusion. The objective of this in vitro study was to determine the differences in the amounts of apically extruded bacteria (AEB) associated with nickel-titanium rotary and reciprocating systems when used in oval-shaped root canals. Material and Methods: Seventy human mandibular premolar teeth with oval-shaped canals were randomly assigned to four experimental groups (15 teeth in each group) and one control group (10 teeth). The root canals were contaminated with Enterococcus faecalis and instrumented using two full-sequence rotary instruments (ProTaper Universal [PTU] and ProTaper Next [PTN]) and two reciprocating single-file instruments (Reciproc [R] and WaveOne [WO]). A 0.9% NaCl solution was used as an irrigant, and the bacterial extrusion was quantified as the number of colony-forming units for each sample. The results were statistically analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance and the Mann-Whitney U test, and the statistical significance level was set at p 0.05). Conclusions: All instrumentation techniques caused apical bacterial extrusion. The instrument design and preparation techniques affect the number of extruded bacteria.KEYWORDS Apical extrusion; Bacteria; Endodontics; Root canal preparation.
Planar Reachability Under Single Vertex or Edge Failures

In this paper we present an efficient reachability oracle under single-edge or single-vertex failures for planar directed graphs. Specifically, we show that a planar digraph $G$ can be preprocessed in $O(n\log^2{n}/\log\log{n})$ time, producing an $O(n\log{n})$-space data structure that can answer in $O(\log{n})$ time whether $u$ can reach $v$ in $G$ if the vertex $x$ (the edge~$f$) is removed from $G$, for any query vertices $u,v$ and failed vertex $x$ (failed edge $f$). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data structure for planar directed graphs with nearly optimal preprocessing time that answers all-pairs queries under any kind of failures in polylogarithmic time. We also consider 2-reachability problems, where we are given a planar digraph $G$ and we wish to determine if there are two vertex-disjoint (edge-disjoint) paths from $u$ to $v$, for query vertices $u,v$. In this setting we provide a nearly optimal 2-reachability oracle, which is the existential variant of the reachability oracle under single failures, with the following bounds. We can construct in $O(n\log^{O(1)}{n})$ time an $O(n\log^{3+o(1)}{n})$-space data structure that can check in $O(\log^{2+o(1)}{n})$ time for any query vertices $u,v$ whether $v$ is 2-reachable from $u$, or otherwise find some separating vertex (edge) $x$ lying on all paths from $u$ to $v$ in $G$. To obtain our results, we follow the general recursive approach of Thorup for reachability in planar graphs [J.~ACM~'04] and we present new data structures which generalize dominator trees and previous data structures for strong-connectivity under failures [Georgiadis et al., SODA~'17]. Our new data structures work also for general digraphs and may be of independent interest.
Conotrachelus1 Species of Agricultural and Quarantine Importance for Mexico

Abstract. The genus Conotrachelus Dejean is a large, diverse group in which some pest species are associated with fruit with high commercial value. Nevertheless, there are few morphological studies focused on differentiating the species. In Mexico, the species Conotrachelus perseae Barber, Conotrachelus aguacatae Barber, Conotrachelus dimidiatus Champion, Conotrachelus copalensis Salas and Romero, Conotrachelus crataegi Walsh, and Conotrachelus eburneus Champion cause damage and loss in fruit of economic importance. For this reason, this paper describes the most distinctive morphological characteristics of the species, considering easily observed external traits, as well as the aedeagus and Sternite VIII, and provides an illustrated taxonomic key.
Support Vector Machine Versus Random Forest for Remote Sensing Image Classification: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review

Several machine-learning algorithms have been proposed for remote sensing image classification during the past two decades. Among these machine learning algorithms, Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have drawn attention to image classification in several remote sensing applications. This article reviews RF and SVM concepts relevant to remote sensing image classification and applies a meta-analysis of 251 peer-reviewed journal papers. A database with more than 40 quantitative and qualitative fields was constructed from these reviewed papers. The meta-analysis mainly focuses on 1) the analysis regarding the general characteristics of the studies, such as geographical distribution, frequency of the papers considering time, journals, application domains, and remote sensing software packages used in the case studies, and 2) a comparative analysis regarding the performances of RF and SVM classification against various parameters, such as data type, RS applications, spatial resolution, and the number of extracted features in the feature engineering step. The challenges, recommendations, and potential directions for future research are also discussed in detail. Moreover, a summary of the results is provided to aid researchers to customize their efforts in order to achieve the most accurate results based on their thematic applications.
Walk or Run to Quit: a 3-year evaluation of a physical activity-based smoking cessation intervention

Walk or Run to Quit was a national program targeting smoking cessation through group-based running clinics. Increasing physical activity may facilitate smoking cessation as well as lead to additional health benefits beyond cessation.To evaluate the impact of Walk or Run to Quit over 3 years.Adult male and female participants (N = 745) looking to quit smoking took part in 156 running-based cessation clinics in 79 locations across Canada. Using a pre-post design, participants completed questionnaires assessing physical activity, running frequency and smoking at the beginning and end of the 10-week program and at 6-months follow-up. Carbon monoxide testing pre- and post- provided an objective indicator of smoking status and coach logs assessed implementation.55. 0% of program completers achieved 7-day point prevalence (intent-to-treat = 22.1%) and carbon monoxide significantly decreased from weeks 1 to 10 (P < 0.001). There was an increase in physical activity and running from baseline to end-of-program (P's<0.001). At 6-month follow-up, 28.9% of participants contacted self-reported prolonged 6-month abstinence (intent-to-treat = 11.4%) and 35.6% were still running regularly.Although attrition was a concern, Walk or Run to Quit demonstrated potential as a scalable behaviour change intervention that targets both cessation and physical activity.