Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coping Resources for Distress and Well-Being of Filipino Catholic Migrants in Taiwan: An Incremental Validity Analysis

Globalization has led to a rapid increase in migration, placing an extraordinary stress on the migrants and their families, which may give rise to comparable increases in all types of mental illness. Mental health problems or distress for migrants result from a complex interplay between biological, psychological, social and environmental factors. One group of people that have been migrating in great numbers are the Filipinos. Currently, Taiwan has about 94,892 migrant workers from the Philippines. Research indicated that the coping styles of Filipinos, nested in a collectivist culture, may not always work in other settings. Religion and prayer are generally used by the Filipino migrants to cope with distress. This study, therefore, used the data from 378 participants and employed incremental validity analysis to look at the significance of psycho-social and religiousspiritual coping resources in buffering mental distress and promoting wellbeing of the Filipino Catholic migrants in Taiwan. After controlling for the relevant demographics in the hierarchical regression analyses, the subsequent steps indicated that Mastery in Step 2, Social Connectedness in Step 3, Positive Religious Coping in Step 4, and finally Spiritual Meaning in Step 5 significantly predicted both distress and well-being. Although entered in Step 4 and Step 5 of the regression equation, both Religious Coping and Spiritual Meaning, respectively, made a significant incremental contribution to coping with distress and promoting well-being. These significant results suggest that the individuals and church communities, social welfare organizations and policy makers on migrant issues should take into consideration the psycho-social and religious-spiritual resources that help the migrants cope with distress and promote well-being.
Perception and Attitude of Staff Nurses towards Electronic Health Records.

A descriptive study was done to assess the perception and attitude of staff nurses towards Electronic Health Records (EHR). The study setting was Sri Ramakrishna Hospital. Using convenient sampling technique, 134 staff nurses were selected for the study. Data was collected using a questionnaire. The questionnaire contained demographic data and questions on the perception of nurses towards EHR. The attitude of nurses was assessed using Modified Stronge and Brodt Attitude scale.
High-Dimensional Errors-in-variables Models

Several new estimation methods have been recently proposed for the linear regression model with observation errors in the design. Different assumptions on the data generating process have motivated different estimators and analysis. In particular, the literature considered (1) observation errors in the design uniformly bounded by some δ̄, and (2) zero-mean independent observation errors. Under the first assumption, the rates of convergence of the proposed estimators depend explicitly on δ̄, while the second assumption has been essentially applied when an estimator for the second moment of the observational error is available. This work proposes and studies two new estimators which, compared to other procedures for regression models with errors in the design, exploit an additional `∞-norm regularization. The first estimator is applicable when both (1) and (2) hold but does not require an estimator for the second moment of the observational error. The second estimator is applicable under (2) and requires an estimator for the second moment of the observation error. Importantly, we impose no assumption on the accuracy of this pilot estimator, in contrast to the previously known procedures. As the recent proposals, we allow the number of covariates to be much larger than the sample size. We establish the rates of convergence of the estimators and compare them with the bounds obtained for related estimators in the literature. These comparisons show interesting insights on the interplay of the assumptions and the achievable rates of convergence.
Relationship between Study Habits and Academic Achievement among Hostel Living and Day Scholars' University Students

Present study designed to explore the relationship between the study habits and academic achievement of day scholars and hostel living male and female university students. For the measurement of study habits a standardized 49 items inventory developed by a Dennis H. Congos was used. A random sale of 200 male and female university students was collected from leading public sector universities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Results show that there is a positive correlation between study habits and academic achievement. Female university students possess more effective study habits and higher academic achievement than male university students. Day scholars have better study habits and higher academic achievement than those living students.
Soil water dynamics and litter production in eucalypt and native vegetation in

High productivity of eucalypt plantations is the result of advances in research that have led to gradual improvements in intensive silvicultural technology. High productivity notwith- standing, eucalypt plantations remain the focus of environmental concerns. Our study aimed to compare the soil water regime, litter fall and nutrients dynamics either in a fragment of native forest or in an adjacent stand of growing eucalypt. We took field measurements during the first three years of eucalypt plantation in a sandy soil in the southeastern region of Brazil. Soil mois- ture and internal drainage were higher during the early stages of growth of the eucalypt stand, as compared with native vegetation. However, one and a half years after planting, available soil water was similar in both vegetations. Higher water availability under the eucalypt stand during the first year occurs because of silvicultural operations (soil preparation and weed control) and the small size of eucalypt trees; these factors increase water infiltration and decrease transpira - tion. Total leaf fall, over the study period, was similar for both ecosystems; however, differences were observed in the winter and early spring of 2010. The transfer of nutrients to soil by leaf fall was similar except for N and S, which was higher in native vegetation. Nitrogen concentration in the soil solution was higher in native vegetation, but K was higher under the eucalypt stand, mainly to a depth of up to 0.2 m.
Sensorized Cardiac Radiofrequency Ablation System for Lesion Depth Assessment

In the past few decades radiofrequency catheter ablation has become the primary treatment of choice for a number of cardiac arrhythmia types, in case the patient does not respond to medication. This endocardial approach offers minimally invasive percutaneous entry into the heart, which is associated with reduced length of hospitalization, low expenses and reasonably low morbidity and mortality. Since lesion recovery has been a major cause of failure and recurrence of arrhythmia, creating sufficiently deep lesions and achieving transmurality are key issues with regard to procedural efficacy. It is technically challenging to determine precisely and repeatedly the lesion dimensions in a tissue being ablated, especially in real-time intra-operative scenarios. Current measures of radiofrequency ablation lesion depth include impedance measurement and electrode-tissue interface temperature monitoring, which are influenced by a number of factors difficult to control, such as cavitary blood flow, coagulum on the tip and electrode orientation. Technological advances in catheter design and sensor technologies have led to extensive research on techniques that are appropriate for accurate and reliable real-time lesion size assessment intraoperatively. Some novel catheter designs aim to estimate the depth of tissue coagulation using contact force and ultrasound based techniques including conventional sonography and advanced image processing methodologies as well. This thesis aims to investigate the feasibility of in vitro lesion size assessment with a custom-developed radiofrequency catheter tip featuring integrated multi-axial force sensing and M-mode ultrasound imaging capabilities. To this end, two miniature multi-axial force sensors have been developed. The EulerBernoulli sensor is easy to manufacture and it has smaller diameter, whereas the Butterfly concept offers superior isotropy. The latter one has been integrated into a catheter tip together with a commercially available ultrasound transducer. In order to make synchronization possible between radiofrequency
Structural and behavior changes of herbaceous and hardwood biomass during steam explosion pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis

Steam explosion (SE) was used to pretreat rice straw (RS) and Caragana korshinskii Kom. (CKK). Enzymatic hydrolysis of pretreated RS and CKK, and a pure cellulose (bacterial cellulose, BC) were performed and compared. The characteristics and changes of different substrates during pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis were observed. After SE pretreatment, the hemicellulose content of RS and CKK was decreased from 21.7% to 4.9% and 17.9% to 6.2%, respectively. The cellulose percent of RS and CKK was increased to 45.1% and 38.4%, and the enzymatic hydrolysis conversion of cellulose was increased 1.1 times and 0.9 times, respectively. Although the composition and enzymatic yield of different substrates varied, their enzymatic hydrolysis rates showed a similar declining trend during enzymatic hydrolysis. The adsorption capacities of substrates on the enzyme were increased by pretreatment. The enzymatic hydrolysis efficiency was closely related to the enzyme adsorption capacities of substrates at the initial stage (1 h). The BC and SE pretreated RS first adsorbed and subsequently desorbed the enzyme, while the untreated RS and CKK had weak adsorption capacity and formed irreversible adsorption with the enzyme. The changes in crystallinity after enzymatic hydrolysis suggested that there was no direct correlation between the crystallinity and digestibility of cellulose.
Violence Detection Through Deep Learning

Detecting violence in videos through automatic means is significant for law enforcement and analysis of surveillance cameras with the intent of maintaining public safety. Moreover, it may be a great tool for protecting children from accessing inappropriate content and help parents make a better informed decision about what their kids should watch. However, this is a challenging problem since the very definition of violence is broad and highly subjective. Hence, detecting such nuances from videos with no human supervision is not only technical, but also a conceptual problem. With this in mind, in this work we will explore how to better describe the idea of violence for a convolutional neural network. Initially by breaking it into more objective and concrete related concepts, such as fights, explosions, blood, etc, for later fusing them in a meta-classification to describe violence. We will also explore ways to represent time-based events for the network, since many violent acts are described in term of movement. And finally we will explore how to localize violent events, since many video streams do not contain only violence, but is a mixture of violent and non-violent scenes.
Food knowledge, attitudes and preferences and BMI in children: The Gateshead Millennium Study

Childhood overweight (OW) and obesity (OB) are global public health concerns in urgent need of effective preventive strategies. Interventions that are family based offer potential for success in OW and OB prevention but the evidence to inform approach and content of interventions is limited. The Gateshead Millennium Study (GMS) is a longitudinal study of 1029 children born in Gateshead in 1999/ 2000. A wealth of data were collected on the GMS cohort when the children were aged 6–8 years to identify potentially modifiable factors for the prevention of childhood OW and OB. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between parental food knowledge and attitudes, child food knowledge and preferences and child BMI. Questionnaires were completed by parents which included questions from the ‘Health in England 1995’ survey to explore their knowledge of and attitudes to food. Responses were used to generate a score for both parental food knowledge and food attitude. Children completed the ‘Thinking about Food Questionnaire’ and the data collected were used to generate a score for child food knowledge and food preference. Child height and weight were measured and BMI [weight(kg)/height(m)] calculated. Spearman’s correlations were used to examine the relationships between the food knowledge, attitude and preference scores as well as their relationships to child BMI. Data from 509 parents (mostly mothers) and their children were included in the analysis. A weak but significant positive correlation was found between parent food knowledge and parent food attitude. Both parent food knowledge and parent food attitude were associated with child food knowledge. Children’s food knowledge was also associated with their reported food preference. However, no significant associations were found between any of the scores and child BMI.
Pathogenesis and treatments of humoral hypercalcemia of malignancy in adult T -cell leukemia /lymphoma induced by human T -lymphotropic virus type 1

ii Dedication. vi Acknowledgments. vii Vita. ix List of Tables. xiv List of Figures. xv Chapters 1: Literature review: Mechanisms of humoral hypercalcemia of malignancy in leukemia/lymphoma Introduction. 1 Overview of humoral hypercalcemia of malignancy. 2 Factors involved in the mechanisms of HHM. 3 HHM in leukemia/lymphoma in humans and animals . 14 Therapy of HHM in leukemia/lymphoma. 17 Development of the in vivo models of HHM in leukemia/lymphoma. 22 Conclusion. 25 Chapter 2: A novel bioluminescent mouse model and effective therapy for adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma Abstract. 29 Introduction. 30 Materials and methods. 32 Results. 36 Discussion. 40 Chapter 3: Mechanisms of osteolytic bone resorption in adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma xiii Abstract. 59 Introduction. 60 Materials and methods. 62 Results. 66 Discussion. 72 Chapter 4: Roles of parathyroid hormone-related protein and macrophage inflammatory protein-1α in adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma Abstract. 95 Introduction. 96 Materials and methods. 97 Results. 100 Discussion. 104 Chapter 5: Synopsis and future directions. 122 Bibliography. 126
Second trimester abortion- mifepristone and misoprostol or misoprostol alone?

Background: From historical times termination of pregnancy was practiced with or without legal and social sanctions. Over the last few years, induced abortions have gained more popularity because of safe techniques and medications available. Induced abortion means willful termination of pregnancy before the period of viability. Medical abortion in the second trimester with misoprostol alone has been shown to be affective, although in comparison with the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, misoprostol-only protocols have required higher doses, side effects are more common and the time to complete the abortion is longer. Methods: Total of 50 eligible women were enrolled for this study and were divided in two groups of 25 each of the case group and control group. This study was conducted in the Dhiraj General Hospital, Piparia, Waghodia. Women in the case group were given Tablet Mifepristone (200 mg) orally followed by Tablet Misoprostol (200 mcg) vaginally after 24 hours which may be repeated every 6 hrs till 5 doses. Women in control group were given Tablet Misoprostol (200 mcg) vaginally which may be repeated every 6 hrs till 5 doses. Results: The combination of mifepristone and misoprostol is now an established and highly effective and safe method for medical method second trimester abortion. The combination of mifepristone with misoprostol significantly reduces the abortion to induction interval and also have fewer side effects and complications and also reduces the dose of misoprostol. Where mifepristone is not available or affordable, misoprostol alone has also been shown to be effective, although a higher total dose is needed and efficacy is lower than for the combined regimen. Therefore, whenever possible, the combined regimen should be used. Conclusions: Mifepristone followed by misoprostol was more effective and has a shorter IAI and fewer side effects.
Teachers’ assessment of perceived foreign accent and comprehensibility in adolescent EFL oral production in Study Abroad and Formal Instruction contexts: A mixed-method study

Research on second language acquisition has long been interested in analyzing different learning contexts that language learners experience when trying to improve their target languages (Collentine & Freed 2004) such as formal instruction (FI), study abroad (SA), and, more recently, different types of immersion (Pérez-Vidal 2017). The aim of the present study is to examine two of these contexts, SA and FI at home, in the case of English as a foreign language adolescent learners having Catalan and Spanish as their first languages, an age band which has received comparatively less attention than others (but see Llanes 2012; Llanes & Muñoz 2013). We focus on the learners’ foreign accent and comprehensibility, as judged by a group of non-native listeners, with the objective of assessing progress and the relationship between both dimensions, following Trofimovich & Isaacs (2012). Most centrally, we are interested in analyzing the aspects of each speech dimension of focus which have reportedly affected the judges’ ratings. In order to do that, speech
An exploration of factors influencing the initiation of breastfeeding among South Asian immigrant women

There is some evidence suggesting that the rate of breastfeeding initiation is lower among particular ethnic or cultural groups who have immigrated to Canada and South Asian women comprise one of these groups. Given the evidence that breastfeeding is important in promoting infant health and maternal health, it is important to understand factors that influence breastfeeding initiation among South Asian immigrant women. This descriptive exploratory study investigated the following research question: What are South Asian women's perceptions about the social, socio-economic, personal and acculturation factors that influence their initiation of breastfeeding? The study explored factors that could influence the initiation of breastfeeding among primiparous South Asian immigrant women who have immigrated to Canada. It was informed in part by the conceptual framework used by Kong and Lee (2004), whose study investigated factors that influenced 252 first-time mothers in their decision-making about whether or not to breastfeed. A convenience sample of 15 subjects was interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide with 10 questions. Data were transcribed and analyzed using inductive constant comparative analysis. The following themes emerged: the representation of breastfeeding, vicarious learning about breastfeeding, family influences, spiritual connection, breaking with tradition, resisting the moral mandate, deferring to medical authority, transition to work and cultural mores. With respect to the findings, implications are discussed for nursing research, theory and education.
Local Tracking and Mapping for Direct Visual SLAM

Recently, direct approaches to Visual Odometry (VO) have shown great accuracy and robustness, outperforming feature-based methods in some scenarios [13]. Such direct VO systems have been combined with both feature-based place recognition techniques and pose-graph optimization in order to reduce the accumulated drift when revisiting already mapped areas [20]. However, in this line of work the front-end odometry estimator does not incorporate the updated map information. Inspired by the recent Direct Sparse Mapping (DSM) [64], in this thesis we present a direct SLAM system that localizes the camera in a local map similarly to ORB-SLAM’s [47] local tracking and mapping, but leveraging direct image alignment and photometric bundle adjustment instead of features. We implement and describe in detail all major components, including direct image alignment (in its forward additive and inverse compositional variants), map point selection and depth initialization, keyframe and landmark management (in particular the reuse of previously mapped regions to ensure a consistent representation of the scene), and local window Photometric Bundle Adjustment (PBA), which are combined into a modular and flexible direct SLAM framework. A coarse-to-fine scheme and a robust error function (based on the t-distribution) further ensure the stability of both tracking and PBA. Additionally, our system is not limited to the pinhole model. Unlike other existing implementations, it can work directly on distorted images, thus being suitable for fish-eye lenses, much like Omnidirectional DSO [42]. Experiments on realistic synthetic data from a game-engine-based simulator with both pose and structure ground-truth allow us to validate the individual components of the system as well as the overall performance. With this thesis we contribute a proof of concept for a direct SLAM system that locally reuses map point information, as well as an extensible framework for further research in this field.
Screening for Changes on Iris germanica L. Rhizomes Following Inoculation with Arbuscular Mycorrhiza Using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

Iris germanica L. is an ornamental and medicinal plant used since ancient times for their rhizomes, still utilized today to obtain orris butter highly valued in perfumery. Iris germanica presents special root adaptations, which confers certain tolerance to water and salt stress, making it a good option in the context of the current climate trend. Aim of this study was to prospect the potential for biofortification of rhizomes using commercial arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM) application in field conditions for six Iris germanica cultivars. Plants presented Paris-type AM colonization. Rhizome samples collected after nine months from treatment and maturated, presented FT-IR (fourier transform infrared spectroscopy) spectra variation between experimental variants. Presence of the main metabolites in rhizome could be confirmed based on literature. Screening focused on two rhizome quality markers: carbohydrates, which influence plant development, and fatty acids, which are extractable from rhizome. Results suggest potential to enhance their accumulation in certain cultivars, such as ‘Pinafore Pink’ following AM application.
Title of the article: Effect of formalin on pulmonary function : a nine months longitudinal study

Formalin is used in gross anatomy laboratories as a preservative of biological specimen as well as cadavers. Medical students specially 1 st year are exposed to vapours emitted during dissection.To study the long term effect of formalin exposure(during dissection practical) on pulmonary function of 1 st year MBBS students.This is a longitudinal study which comprises of nine months duration.Ninety six medical students [Mean (SD) age of 20.45(1.68)years] were assessed using MIR Spirolab for PFTs within 7 days of admission to their college and reexamined at the interval of three, six and nine months. Analysis was done by one way Anova test.Significant effect was seen in Forced Vital Capacity (FVC), FEV1, PEFR and FEF 25-75% at the end of nine months,however no significant change was seen over the duration of three and six month.Formalin is having adverse effects on the respiratory system over a period of nine months and we recommend a need of precautionary measures to be taken so as to decrease the exposure and also a need for multiple longitudinal studies to be done. Page: 211