Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cookies ‘n’ Consent: An empirical study on the factors influencing of website users’ attitude towards cookie consent in the EU.

Since GDPR came into enforcement in 2018, various firms have been found violating or circumventing the ePrivacy Directive known as the Cookie Law which lays out the cookie consent guidelines for websites. To improve the GDPR compliance rate, several conversations are going on between EU commission, Data protection agencies, business & websites owners and ad vendors regarding their cookie policy, obtaining user consent for data collection and its usage. One of the key stakeholders who are the website users, whose privacy is in question seems to be left out from the discussions. The study aimed to understand user perception towards website cookie banners, which are mandatory under GDPR, and the influence of factors like awareness of cookies, user experience, consent banner design, privacy risk, brand trust on user’s willingness for accepting all cookies, to develop recommendations to improve customer’s motivations to give consent. Using a quantitative approach, the primary data was collected from 132 internet users residing in the EU region through an online survey questionnaire shared in social media networks. The results showed that the (i) majority of respondents had more than moderate level of awareness about cookies (ii) they are more likely to accept cookies for quick access or task completion, (iii) acceptance of cookies was varied across different categories of online activity and (iv) given a choice they are more likely to opt-out of 3rd party cookies which are widely used for targeted advertising. Since 3rd party cookies will be phased out in the near future and are likely to be replaced with more advanced customer tracking technologies which are harder to opt-out of, this study proposes a framework for Consent for Advertising Directive (CAD) to go beyond the existing Cookie Law, which will improve user data protection regardless of the tracking technology used, and help brands to improve transparency about their data collection and avoid GDPR violations.
Effect of Bis(maltolato)oxovanadium(IV) on Zinc, Copper, and Manganese Homeostasis and DMT1 mRNA Expression in Streptozotocin-Induced Hyperglycemic Rats

Simple Summary Diabetes mellitus is a disease that affects some metabolic processes, altering the metabolism of trace elements associated with the antioxidant defense system. The insulin-mimetic activity of vanadium has received attention in recent years. However, the use of vanadium as an antidiabetic agent is limited due to its pro-oxidant properties, which are probably caused by interactions with other trace elements. There is currently little information on the interactions between vanadium and zinc, copper and manganese in diabetic rats. For these reasons, the objective of this study was to examine whether diabetic rats treated with bis(maltolato)oxovanadium(IV) (BMOV(IV)) undergo alterations in zinc, copper and manganese homeostasis, and whether such changes are related to the gene expression of the divalent metal transporter 1 (DMT1). The results obtained from this study showed that the metabolism of Zn, Cu and, to a lesser extent, Mn is altered by diabetes and that BMOV(IV) administered to diabetic rats at a dose of 3 mg V/day reverted the alterations in zinc and copper homeostasis produced by diabetes. The effect of this supplementation was possibly mediated by a decrease in food intake and DMT1 gene expression. Abstract Our aim was to examine whether vanadium (IV) corrects alterations in zinc, copper and manganese homeostasis, observed in streptozotocin-induced hyperglycemic rats, and whether such changes are related to divalent metal transporter 1 (DMT1) mRNA expression, and antioxidant and proinflammatory parameters. Four groups of Wistar rats were examined: control; hyperglycemic (H); hyperglycemic treated with 1 mg V/day (HV); and hyperglycemic treated with 3 mg V/day (HVH). Vanadium was supplied in drinking water as bis(maltolato)oxovanadium(IV) for five weeks. Zinc, copper and manganese were measured in food, excreta, serum and tissues. DMT1 mRNA expression was quantified in the liver. Hyperglycemic rats showed increased Zn and Cu absorption and content in the liver, serum, kidneys and femurs; DMT1 expression also increased (p < 0.05 in all cases). HV rats showed no changes compared to H rats other than decreased DMT1 expression (p < 0.05). In the HVH group, decreased absorption and tissular content of studied elements (p < 0.05 in all cases) and DMT1 expression compared to H (p < 0.05) were observed. Liver zinc, copper and manganese content correlated positively with glutathione peroxidase activity and negatively with catalase activity (p < 0.05 in both cases). In conclusion, treatment with 3 mg V/d reverted the alterations in zinc and copper homeostasis caused by hyperglycemia, possibly facilitated by decreased DMT1 expression.
Implication of FIFA 2022 on Active Living and Environmental Changes: A Managerial Perspective

This study is focused on the environmental impact of hosting FIFA 2022 in Qatar on the well-being and the active living of the residents. The primary data was collected through the questionnaire which was validated and tested using confirmatory factor analysis. The second-generation statistical analysis using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was adopted which undertakes both regression and factor analysis simultaneously using Partial Least Square Method. The results have shown that there is a significant influence of environmental factors on material-based factors, community-based factors, emotion-based factors, and health-based factors. Further, the community-based factor had significant influence on mental health, emotion-based factor has significant influence on social health, and health-based factor had significant influence on spiritual health. The environmental factors had significant influence on mental, social, and spiritual health. Surprisingly, the environmental factors and material-based factors had no significant influence on physical health. The implications of the study are in the form of suggestions to the managers of tourism industry and the strategic planners of FIFA 2022 in Qatar. Application of scenario planning tools may be required to make an estimate of the material-based factors. Optimum number of events to be hosted in the country may have to be estimated such that it contributes to the betterment of the community-based factors.
Dual benefits of polyacrylamide and other soil amendments: Mitigation of soil nutrient depletion and improvement of use‐efficiency in midland agro‐ecology, Ethiopia

Polyacrylamide (PAM) mitigates soil nutrient depletion and increases nutrient utilization; however, the effect of PAM combined with other amendments have not been tested much under field condition. The objective of our study was, therefore, to identify the best combination of amendments that can improve soil nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) balances while maximizing utilization efficiency and profitability under teff cultivation. A field experiment was carried out for 2 years in the midland agroecology of Ethiopia. A total of 24 experimental plots were designed using RCBD with three replications. The treatments were PAM (40 kg ha−1), biochar (B = 8 t ha−1), lime (L = 4 t ha−1), gypsum (G = 5 t ha−1), PAM+B, PAM+L, PAM+G, and a control. N and P inflows from atmospheric deposition, biological fixation, and fertilizers; and outflows by water erosion, leaching, gaseous emissions, and harvested products were monitored in all plots via NUTrient MONitoring approach. Results showed that all the applied soil amendments improved nutrient balances (8–134%) compared with the control. Of the measured outflows, harvested products (43–60%) and water erosion (14–31%) were the major contributors to N depletion, followed by leaching (15–23%) and gaseous emissions (11–13%). Among the soil amendments, PAM+L appreciably reduced P loss from water erosion (61%); and N losses from erosion, leaching, and emissions by 55, 10, and 3%, respectively; and increased N use efficiency by 31% compared with the control. Moreover, PAM+L provided a net benefit much higher compared with others. Thus, application of PAM+L would be an effective strategy for sustainable agriculture, especially in acidic and degraded dryland areas.
Population dynamics of bearded croaker Johnius dussumieri (Cuvier, 1830) from Pakistani waters

In this study the length frequency data of 2510 bearded croaker Johnius dussumieri (Cuvier, 1830), collected from the coast of Pakistan during 2015, were analysed. Total length of the specimens (male and female combined) varied from 4 to 25 cm with dominant individuals ranged between 12 and 15 cm whereas the body weight varied between 3 and 155 g. The length frequency data were analysed for the estimation of population dynamics and the power coefficient b of length weight relationship was estimated as 2.83. Other measurements were as follows: asymptotic length, L∞ = 26.25 cm; growth coefficient, K = 1.00 year–1; total mortality, Z = 2.43 year–1; and natural mortality, M = 1.82 year–1. The fishing mortality (F) and exploitation ratio (E) were 0.61 year–1 and 0.251 respectively. The Biological Reference Points (BRPs) with Gulland method for this fishery (Fopt) was estimated 1.82 year–1 which is higher than current fish mortality. Therefore the present study shows that the J. dussumieri fishery is safe in Pakistan.
Crowdsourcing for Speech: Economic, Legal and Ethical analysis

With respect to spoken language resource production, Crowdsourcing - the process of distributing tasks to an open, unspecified population via the internet - offers a wide range of opportunities: populations with specific skills are potentially instantaneously accessible somewhere on the globe for any spoken language. As is the case for most newly introduced high-tech services, crowdsourcing raises both hopes and doubts, certainties and questions. A general analysis of Crowdsourcing for Speech processing could be found in (Eskenazi et al., 2013). This article will focus on ethical, legal and economic issues of crowdsourcing in general (Zittrain, 2008a) and of crowdsourcing services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (Fort et al., 2011; Adda et al., 2011), a major platform for multilingual language resources (LR) production.
Camouflaged Object Detection via Context-Aware Cross-Level Fusion

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify the objects that conceal themselves in natural scenes. Accurate COD suffers from a number of challenges associated with low boundary contrast and the large variation of object appearances, e.g., object size and shape. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{C}^{2}\text{F}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-Net), which fuses context-aware cross-level features for accurately identifying camouflaged objects. Specifically, we compute informative attention coefficients from multi-level features with our Attention-induced Cross-level Fusion Module (ACFM), which further integrates the features under the guidance of attention coefficients. We then propose a Dual-branch Global Context Module (DGCM) to refine the fused features for informative feature representations by exploiting rich global context information. Multiple ACFMs and DGCMs are integrated in a cascaded manner for generating a coarse prediction from high-level features. The coarse prediction acts as an attention map to refine the low-level features before passing them to our Camouflage Inference Module (CIM) to generate the final prediction. We perform extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets and compare <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{C}^{2}\text{F}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-Net with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. The results show that <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{C}^{2}\text{F}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-Net is an effective COD model and outperforms SOTA models remarkably. Further, an evaluation on polyp segmentation datasets demonstrates the promising potentials of our <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{C}^{2}\text{F}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-Net in COD downstream applications. Our code is publicly available at: <uri>https://github.com/Ben57882/C2FNet-TSCVT</uri>
Effect of CaCl2 Treatment on Enzymatic Browning of Fresh-Cut Luffa (Luffa cylindrica)

Enzymatic browning is a major issue that reduces the commercial value of Luffa cylindrica during storage, processing, and transportation. Our results showed that 1% CaCl2 treatment was optimal for reducing the surface browning of fresh-cut luffa. After storage at 25 °C for four days, the treated luffa had a significantly higher total phenolic (TP) content than the untreated luffa. At the end of the storage period, the calcium treatment showed low malondialdehyde (MDA) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) accumulation in the luffa. The treated luffa maintained higher superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL) activities and lower polyphenol oxidase (PPO) activity as compared to the untreated luffa. Furthermore, the genes regulating SOD (e.g., SOD1, SOD2, and SOD3), CAT (e.g., LcCAT1 and CAT2), and PAL (e.g., PAL1 and PAL2) in calcium-treated luffa were upregulated to varying degrees, suggesting that Ca2+ inhibited the browning of fresh-cut tissue by regulating the activities of those enzymes. Ultrastructure images showed that the treated luffa could maintain the relative integrity of the cell membrane and organelles. Therefore, Ca2+ might act as a second messenger to reduce ROS oxidative damage and maintain the cell membrane integrity. This study provides new insights into the breeding of new luffa varieties that are resistant to browning and post-harvest treatments to reduce the browning of luffa tissue.
Growth in children with congenital Zika syndrome: a 4-years longitudinal cohort study

ABSTRACT To describe and analyze the changes in anthropometric parameters in children with congenital Zika syndrome (CZS) from birth to four years of age. This prospective study evaluated 117 children diagnosed with CZS. Anthropometric indices evaluated annually were classified with respect to presence of microcephaly and adequacy of weight-for-age, length/height for-age and body mass index-for-age (BMI-for-age). At birth, 69.6% of the children had microcephaly, 90.2% had adequate weight and 72.1% had adequate length. The following year, an increase occurred in the proportion of children with microcephaly, with a reduction of those with adequate weight. In the second year, the proportion of children with microcephaly increased again, while those with adequate BMI decreased. In the third to fourth years of life, a reduction was found in the proportion of children with adequate height. Anthropometric indices are affected in children with CZS over the first four years of life and appear to be potentiated over time.
Potential use of bamboo in the phytoremediation in of heavy metals: A review

There are many literature sources focusing on the phytoremediation of woody plants, but there are only few dealing with the phytoremediation of bamboo plants. Phytoremediation technology has the advantages of little disturbance to the environment and low remediation cost. Bamboo mainly exists in tropical and subtropical regions. As an energy plant, bamboo has a fast growth cycle, large biomass, simple cultivation, high economic efficiency, and convenient harvesting, which highlights the advantages of bamboo in phytoremediation. In addition, bamboo plants have good tolerance and uptake ability to heavy metals and have high application potential and development value in uptaking heavy metal contaminated soil. However, due to climate, temperature and other reasons, bamboo cannot be widely planted in most countries. Research status of remediation of heavy metal contaminated soil by bamboo plants is summarized. The feasibility of its application in heavy metal contaminated soil is discussed in this paper. Aiming at the shortcomings of existing research, bamboo plants have a prospect in the field of plant phytoremediation for the future.
Size at maturity, maturity stages, and sex ratio of Micropterus salmoides (Lacepède, 1802) in Zimbabwe’s largest inland reservoir, Tugwi Mukosi: a baseline study

Size at maturity, sex ratio and maturity stages are key population parameters that are important in fisheries management of exploited stocks as they influence survival of fish populations. The introduced largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides has successfully colonised freshwater bodies in southern Africa. In Tugwi Mukosi Dam, Zimbabwe’s largest reservoir, largemouth bass is a fish of importance as it provides tourism, food and income for the local communities. This study investigated population parameters of M. salmoides in Tugwi Mukosi Dam. The study revealed that the size at 50% sexual maturity (L50) value for male and female was 204 mm and 261 mm respectively. The logistic equation for female largemouth bass was M(L) = 1 / [1 + exp (–0.256L + 6.402)]. For male largemouth bass the logistic equation was M(L) = 1 / [1 + exp (–0.1375L + 4.129)]. The results showed that reproductive activity peaked in October. The male to female ratio was 1:1.04 which is typical of healthy populations. More research and monitoring of the population parameters of largemouth bass is needed so as to be able to predict long term effects of overexploitation and enable responsible authorities to protect the fish stock from collapsing.
Declining metabolic scaling parallels an ontogenetic change from elongate to deep-bodied shapes in juvenile Brown trout

Abstract Body shape and metabolic rate can be important determinants of animal performance, yet often their effects on influential traits are evaluated in a non-integrated way. This creates an important gap because the integration between shape and metabolism may be crucial to evaluate metabolic scaling theories. Here, we measured standard metabolic rate in 1- and 2-years old juvenile brown trout Salmo trutta, and used a geometric morphometrics approach to extricate the effects of ontogeny and size on the link between shape and metabolic scaling. We evidenced near-isometric ontogenetic scaling of metabolic rate with size, but also a biphasic pattern driven by a significant change in metabolic scaling, from positive to negative allometry. Moreover, the change in metabolic allometry parallels an ontogenetic change from elongate to deep-bodied shapes. This is consistent with the dynamic energy budget (DEB) and surface area (SA) theories, but not with the resource transport network theory which predicts increasing allometric exponents for trends towards more robust, three-dimensional bodies. In addition, we found a relationship between body shape and size independent metabolic rate, with a positive correlation between robustness and metabolic rate, which fits well within the view of Pace-of-Life Syndromes (POLS). Finally, our results align with previous studies that question the universality of metabolic scaling exponents and propose other mechanistic models explaining the diversity of metabolic scaling relationships or emphasizing the potential contribution of ecological factors.
Examining Relationships between Physical Environments and Behaviors of Residents with Dementia in a Retrofit Special Care Unit

Specialized Care Units (SCUs) in nursing home facilities offer care for individuals with late–stage dementia primarily when care in the home no longer supports physical and sociobehavioral needs. Prior research has primarily examined new facilities; however, due to market demand and financial constraints, many SCUs are retrofits of existing nursing homes. The purpose was to determine the capacity of the physical environment to enhance person–centered care (PCC) and identify potential design opportunities to help patients adapt to and cope with dementia progression to maintain quality of life (QoL). Grounded in empirical knowledge and best practices for SCU design, an instrumental case study of a retrofit SCU in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States examined relationships between the physical environment and the behavior of residents and staff. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected through a spatial inventory, staff e–survey, and behavioral observations in the unit's public spaces. Data indicate that even (less than ideal) retrofit SCU designs have the potential to support PCC goals significantly, and some physical conditions found to undermine PCC goals could be remedied by simple (low–cost) design interventions, suggesting staff may lack awareness of the capacity for the SCU physical environment to improve residents’ QoL. By linking design features from empirical studies and best practices with observed behaviors in a retrofit SCU, the primary contribution of our exploratory study is a framework of roles design features play in adaptation–coping and maladjustment–stress for people managing progressive dementia conditions. This framework suggests directions for future research and evolving methods to better understand the impacts of environmental designs on users’ QoL over the course of progressive illnesses, like dementia.
Behavioural differences between breeding and nonbreeding pairs of protandry monogamous false clown anemonefish Amphiprion ocellaris

Anemonefishes are some of the most popular marine ornamental fishes. Due to the adverse impacts of commercial fishing on the wild populations of anemonefishes, a more suitable and efficient captive breeding programme must be promoted. In the wild, anemonefishes are protandrous sex-changing fish, but when two immature individuals with ambisexual gonads are raised together in captivity, the two differentiate directly into a male and a female, to form a breeding pair. However, not all the formed pairs spawn, explaining the great care required in captive breeding. This behaviour appears to be counter-adaptative, as anemonefish social groups form randomly in the wild, and such phenomenon would disturb their breeding success. This study evaluated the behavioural and physiological differences between breeding and nonbreeding pairs of false clown anemonefish Amphiprion ocellaris under captive conditions. Behavioural observations revealed that nonbreeding females monopolized the shelter provided, whereas breeding females allowed breeding males to use the shelter and the pair frequently stayed together in the shelter. Both nonbreeding and breeding females possessed mature ovarian tissue and similar level of plasma estradiol concentrations, but nonbreeding males had a smaller amount of testicular tissue and lower plasma 11-ketotestosterone levels compared to breeding males.
Financial Literacy among the Youth in Switzerland

While many resources are available for people to increase their financial knowledge in Switzerland, recent studies indicate that the level of financial literacy is relatively low across nations. To gather the data, a quantitative online survey was conducted among young people in Switzerland. Overall, important demographic differences in financial literacy levels were found for the gender and education variables. Firstly, young men show a higher financial literacy score than women and invest more than women. In addition, individuals with a university degree scored better at the financial literacy questions than those without and were more likely to invest. However, no conclusion could be made about the relationship between income and financial literacy. The main reason why people did not invest constitutes a lack of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, individuals with lower financial literacy tend to make more financial mistakes, save less for retirement, and accumulate less wealth in their lives.