Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants in First-Year Design Course

This complete research paper focuses on the effectiveness of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UGTAs) in a first-year college level design course. Engaging undergraduate students as undergraduate teaching assistants is a common practice in higher education. In a freshman level design course where creativity and open-ended problems are posed to students, we notice that our UGTAs are appreciated by students (from an end of semester survey) and have positive interactions. This study builds on previous work by investigating how and in what ways UGTAs are effective in the classroom. Through our study, we measured the perceived effectiveness of undergraduate teaching assistants (UGTAs) in the classroom using a survey and investigated what key strategies undergraduate teaching assistants use to impact the student experience using focus group data. The study followed a sequential explanatory mixed method format in which UGTAs teaching quality survey results were analyzed to find whether the UGTAs were valuable co-teachers in class. Qualitative data were collected in the form of in-depth focus group interviews to identify what made the students appreciate and value UGTAs in class and what it looks like to be effective in class. Quantitative data suggest that UGTAs are highly effective although student perception of the same UGTA varies across students and across sections. Qualitative data suggest four themes of highly effective UGTAs: they are easy to interact with, they are qualified, they immerse themselves in the work of their peers and they are overtly collegial with the instructor of the course.
Experience of covid-19 infections in neonates in tertiary care centre in North Karnataka, India: A prospective cohort study

Introduction: In neonates, COVID-19 pandemic is emerging as a new challenge to pediatricians The risk of neonatal transmission from mother during the perinatal and postnatal period is less understood Hence, we aimed to identify potential risk factors associated with transmission of neonates born to mothers positive for SARS-CoV-2 at time of delivery and to assess the outcome and thereby elucidate the best infection control clinical practices among mother neonate with COVID-19 infection Methods: This prospective observational cohort study was conducted during May to October 2020;where all neonates born to mothers positive for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of delivery were enrolled During the postnatal period, mother and neonate were kept in isolation ward together and initiated breastfeeding after ensuring adequate hand and respiratory hygiene except those requiring NICU admission At 12-72 hours of life, neonate’s samples (nasopharyngeal swabs) for SARS-CoV-2 were collected for real-time PCR Data regarding maternal and neonatal baseline characteristics and clinical presentation as well as infection control practices in the hospital was documented in structured proforma Results: During the study period, 26 (3 6%) mothers tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 of 720 deliveries;Among 28 neonates delivered, 25 neonates were shifted with mother in the isolation ward whereas 3 premature neonate’s required NICU admission Of the 28 neonates, 20 (71%) were born at term, the median gestational age was 37 6 weeks, 17 (61%) were female and 19 (68%) were born by caesarean section 20 (71%) were breast fed whereas 8 (29%) of 28 neonates were formula fed All neonates delivered to SARS-CoV-2 positive mothers tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 by rtPCR at 12-72 hours of life Conclusion: Mother and primary care providers should be educated and trained about standard respiratory and hand hygiene practices to avoid perinatal and postnatal transmission Breastfeeding and rooming-in in isolation ward are safe procedures when paired with effective and regular parental education of neonate infection protective strategies © 2021, Scientific Publishers of India All rights reserved
Three-dimensional nonlinear theory of water impact.

Original Wagner theory of water impact is generalized with the aim to account for both nonlinear effects and geometry of the impacting bodies to some extent. This has been done to improve predictions of the hydrodynamic forces acting on a body during its impact onto water surface and wave impact onto offshore structures. New model (MLM) of water impact has been developed. Within this model the wetted part of the structure and the distribution of the velocity potential in the wetted region are evaluated in the same way as in the classical Wagner theory but the pressure distribution in the wetted region is calculated by using the original nonlinear Bernoulli equation with approximate account for the impact geometry. Advantages of the present model are outlined for the ellipsoidal panels, which model yacht hulls, dropped down onto flat water surface. Experimental results for such truly 3D bodies were compared with the theoretical predictions of the body decelerations. It is shown that the new model essentially improves the classical Wagner approach and accurately predicts the hydrodynamic loads acting on structures during water impact. The new model does not require extensive numerical calculations and can be recommended for its practical use at the design stage.
STEM CELL THERAPY FOR KNEE OSTEOARTHRITIS- A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW

: Background: Knee osteoarthritis is a condition which cannot be treated easily even surgery isn’t a good option due to obesity and other comorbidities. Regenerative medicine utilizing stem cells, platelet rich plasma (PRP), amniotic fluid, and cytokine modulation is very promising in the treatment of KOA. Objective: Review of articles to calculate the current evidence about regenerative medicine therapies in the treatment of KOA. Methods: An online search of PubMed and Cochrane library database was performed to find out related literature using the keywords of “treatment, stem cell, knee osteoarthritis,” limited to the English language. Only those articles were recruited which met the inclusion criteria rest were filtered out. Results: Out of 268 articles, only 18 articles met the inclusion criteria and were included in this study. Limitation: There is still less literature about the efficacy of regenerative medicine in the treatment of KOA. Large clinical trials are required to make sure about the evidence. Conclusion: Current investigations conclude that regenerative medicine procedures have good evidence in the of knee osteoarthritis. But still in greater depth study to explore more ideal way to overcome present difficulties is required.
Quantiﬁcation of Poly(I:C)-Mediated Protection against Genital Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 Infection

Alternative strategies for controlling the growing herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) epidemic are needed. A novel class of immunomodulatory microbicides has shown promise as antiherpetics, including intravaginally applied CpG-containing oligodeoxynucleotides that stimulate toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9). In the current study, we quantiﬁed protection against experimental genital HSV-2 infection provided by an alternative nucleic acid-based TLR agonist, polyinosine-poly(C) (PIC) (TLR3 agonist). Using a protection quantiﬁcation para- digm, groups of mice were PIC treated and then subdivided into groups challenged with escalating doses of HSV-2. Using this paradigm, a temporal window of PIC efﬁcacy for single applications was deﬁned as 1 day prior to (prophylactic) through 4 h after (therapeutic) viral challenge. PIC treatment within this window protected against 10-fold-higher HSV-2 challenges, as indicated by increased 50% infectious dose values relative to those for vehicle-treated controls. Disease resolution and survival were signiﬁcantly enhanced by repetitive PIC doses. Using optimal PIC regimens, cytokine induction was evaluated in murine vaginal lavages and in human vaginal epithelial cells. Similar induction patterns were observed, with kinetics that explained the limited durability of PIC-afforded protection. Daily PIC delivery courses did not generate sustained cytokine levels in murine vaginal ﬂuids that would be indicative of local immunotoxicity. No evidence of immunotoxicity was observed in selected organs that were analyzed following repetitive vaginal PIC doses. Animal and in vitro data indicate that PIC may prove to be a valuable preventative microbicide and/or therapeutic agent against genital herpes by increasing resistance to HSV-2 and enhancing disease resolution following a failure of prevention.
Raman Spectroscopy Study of Structurally Uniform Hydrogenated Oligomers of α -Oleﬁns

: The expansion of the range of physico-chemical methods in the study of industrially signiﬁcant α -oleﬁn oligomers and polymers is of particular interest. In our article, we present a comparative Raman study of structurally uniform hydrogenated dimers, trimers, tetramers, and pentamers of 1-hexene and 1-octene, that are attractive as bases for freeze-resistant engine oils and lubricants. We found out that the joint monitoring of the disorder longitudinal acoustic mode (D-LAM) and symmetric C–C stretching modes allows the quantitative characterization of the number and length of alkyl chains (i.e., two structural characteristics), upon which the pour point and viscosity of the hydrocarbons depend, and to distinguish these compounds from both each other and linear alkanes. We demonstrated that the ratio of the contents of CH 2 and CH 3 groups in these hydrocarbons can be determined by using the intensities of the bands in the spectra, related to the asymmetric stretching vibrations of these groups. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations were applied to reveal the relations between the wavenumber and bandshape of the symmetric C–C stretching mode and a conformation arrangement of the 1-hexene and 1-octene dimers. We found that the branched double-chain conformation results in the splitting of the C–C mode into two components with the wavenumbers, which can be used as a measure of the length of branches. This conformation is preferable to the extended-chain conformation for hydrogenated 1-hexene and 1-octene dimers.
EFFECT OF PACKAGING METHOD AND STORAGE PERIOD ON FATTY ACID PROFILE AND TBARS VALUE OF TRADITIONAL SAUSAGE (PETROVSKÀ KLOBÀSA)

In this paper influence of packaging method (vacuum and MAP) on fatty acids profile, TBARS value (lipid oxidation parameter) and sensory properties of odour and taste of the traditional sausage Petrovská klobása were examined. In the end of storage period, vacuum packed sausage showed better oxidative stability. ∑PUFA and PUFA/SFA in vacuum packed sausage were higher than in both unpacked and MAP sausage. TBARS values in vacuum and MAP sausages were 0.25 mg/kg and 0.28 mg/kg, respectively and these contents were significantly lower (P<0.05), compared to unpacked sausage (0.73 mg/kg). After 2 and 7 months of storage, sausages packed in vacuum and MAP had significantly higher (P<0.05) grades for sensory properties of odour and taste compared to unpacked sausage. From the obtained results it could be concluded that vacuum and MAP packaging can contribute to better oxidative and sensory stability of dry fermented sausage (Petrovská klobása) during long storage period.
CONSUMERS' WILLINGNESS TO PAY DELIVERY FEES FOR ONLINE SHOPPING OF FOOD GROCERIES IN POLOKWANE LOCAL MUNICIPALITY, SOUTH AFRICA

Online purchase of food groceries has experienced notable development in the past few years. However, the potentials of online purchase of food groceries have not been fully explored given retailers’ charging of some delivery fees. This paper analyzed consumers’ willingness to pay some specified delivery fees for online food groceries’ shopping. Data were collected from 173 households using pre-tested structured questionnaire and analyzed with Logistic regression using the double bounded dichotomous choice approach. The results showed that majority of the respondents were from rural areas (71.0%), single (74.0%), had at least primary education (99.4%), had access to a computer or mobile phone connected to the internet (86.7%) and aware of online shopping of food groceries (57.2%). The results further revealed that that a high percentage of respondents (76.3%) was willing to pay R50 as delivery fee. The Logit regression results showed that age, location, level of education and perceived online risk had a statistically significant relationship (p< 0.05) with consumers’ willingness to pay delivery fees. It was among others recommended in order to facilitate online shopping, adequate trainings on delivery modality and utilization of online platforms would increase consumers’ knowledge and reduce their levels of perceived risks.
NSS_A_322459 1411..1418

1Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences, 2School of Nursing, 3Knight Cardiovascular Institute, School of Medicine, 4OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR, 97239, USA Purpose: Sedentary behavior and suboptimal sleep increase risks for chronic diseases. We hypothesized that sedentary behavior and sleep affect each other and that an underlying sleep disorder would alter these relationships. To test these hypotheses, we studied the bidirectional relationships between sedentary behavior and sleep (duration and efficiency) in healthy controls (HC) and people with untreated obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Patients and Methods: Fifty-two volunteers (18 HC, 19 mild OSA [apnea/hypopnea index [AHI] range 5–14.9/hour], 15 moderate OSA [AHI range 15–29.9/hour]) were studied with actigraphy and sleep diaries across ~9 consecutive nights of self-selected consistent ~8-hour sleep episodes at home (range 4–21/nights per person). We analyzed whether total time asleep and sleep efficiency affected the subsequent daytime sedentary duration while controlling for body mass index and whether the severity of OSA altered this relationship. We also tested the reverse relationship, namely whether daytime sedentary duration affected the subsequent night’s sleep and if any such relationship differed with OSA severity. Results: Overnight sleep duration and efficiency negatively predicted the subsequent day’s sedentary duration in HC (p<0.02), but not in people with mild or moderate OSA (p>0.05). There was no significant reverse relationship between daytime sedentary duration and the subsequent night’s sleep duration or efficiency (p≥0.2). Conclusion: In healthy adults, short nighttime sleep predicts a longer duration of sedentary behavior on a subsequent day, but we did not observe this relationship in people with OSA. The mechanisms underlying this association in healthy individuals and its disruption in the presence of OSA need to be studied.
A Study of Birth Order, Learning Styles and Academic Performance of Senior Secondary School Science Students in Osun State, Nigeria.

: This study examined the relationship between birth order, learning style and academic performance in core science subjects-Biology, Chemistry and Physics among senior secondary school students. Three research questions and objectives are enumerated and achieved. The study employed descriptive correlational research design. The research instrument tagged-Birth order and learning style indicators was used with reliability of 0.65 Cronbach Coefficient alpha values to assess students’ learning styles. And the students’ scores in core science subjects-Biology, Chemistry and Physics were used to proxy academic performance. The result revealed that there was a significant relationship between birth order and learning styles (Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic) which was in favour of only child. Also, significant difference existed between birth order and academic performance of students in sciences. Finally, positive and significant correlation existed between visual and kinaesthetic learning styles and academic performance in both Biology and Physics. However, positive insignificant correlation was found between auditory and academic performance in Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
Sencal, Harun & Asutay, Mehmet (2021). Ethical Disclosure in the Shari’ah Annual Reports of Islamic Banks: Discourse on Shari’ah Governance, Quantitative Empirics and Qualitative Analysis. Corporate Governance

Purpose: As an essential component of Islamic governance for ensuring religious compliance, Shari’ah Annual Reports (SARs) play an important role in providing communication between Shari’ah Board (SB) members and stakeholders. This research, hence, aims at determining the ethical disclosure in SARs to identify how close the Shari’ah disclosure to the standards set by AAOIFI and also substantive morality of Islam. The research also aims to examine the factors determining disclosure performance. Design/Methodology/Approach: Two disclosure indices are developed to generate data from the SARs: (i) the AAOIFI standards for Shari’ah governance index for form related approach, (ii) an Islamic ethicality augmented index reflecting on substantive morality approach. The sample consists of 41 Islamic banks from 15 different countries for the period of 2007-2014. Sampled 305 SARs were examined through disclosure analysis in line with the two indices developed for this study. An econometric analysis was run to identify the factors determining disclosure performance. Findings: The findings suggest that AAOIFI guidelines have an influence on the level of disclosure, even if Islamic banks have not adopted them. However, the level of disclosure for the ethically augmented index is found to be very limited with reliance on general statements in most of the cases. As part of determining factors, the popularity of Shari’ah scholars is significant for both indices, while the existence of an internal Shari’ah auditing department holds some explanatory power. The adoption of AAOIFI standards at the country level, the regulatory quality and the duration of Shari’ah compliance are particularly deterministic factors in terms of complying with AAOIFI standards for SARs. Originality/Value: Although Shari’ah Board is the most crucial division of corporate governance in Islamic banks in terms of securing the ‘Islamic’ identity of these institutions, their most important communication instrument, namely, SAR, has not been explored sufficiently, alongside an insufficient attempt to constitute ICG. Initially, this study attempted to constitute an Islamic corporate governance framework as a theoretical construct which provides context for the empirical part of the research, and this should be considered a novel approach. Secondly, the empirical part of the research aims to fill the gap observed in the literature, such as small sample size and index construction related matters. This research is conducted with a larger sample size as compared to the available studies in the literature, and it has developed two indices for disclosure analysis along with developing Islamic morality-based index beside an index based on AAOIFI standards.
On the generalization of learning algorithms that do not converge

Generalization analyses of deep learning typically assume that the training converges to a fixed point. But, recent results indicate that in practice, the weights of deep neural networks optimized with stochastic gradient descent often oscillate indefinitely. To reduce this discrepancy between theory and practice, this paper focuses on the generalization of neural networks whose training dynamics do not necessarily converge to fixed points. Our main contribution is to propose a notion of statistical algorithmic stability (SAS) that extends classical algorithmic stability to non-convergent algorithms and to study its connection to generalization. This ergodic-theoretic approach leads to new insights when compared to the traditional optimization and learning theory perspectives. We prove that the stability of the time-asymptotic behavior of a learning algorithm relates to its generalization and empirically demonstrate how loss dynamics can provide clues to generalization performance. Our findings provide evidence that networks that"train stably generalize better"even when the training continues indefinitely and the weights do not converge.
Multimodal Lecture Presentations Dataset: Understanding Multimodality in Educational Slides

Lecture slide presentations, a sequence of pages that contain text and figures accompanied by speech, are constructed and presented carefully in order to optimally transfer knowledge to students. Previous studies in multimedia and psychology attribute the effectiveness of lecture presentations to their multimodal nature. As a step toward developing AI to aid in student learning as intelligent teacher assistants, we introduce the Multimodal Lecture Presentations dataset as a large-scale benchmark testing the capabilities of machine learning models in multimodal understanding of educational content. Our dataset contains aligned slides and spoken language, for 180+ hours of video and 9000+ slides, with 10 lecturers from various subjects (e.g., computer science, dentistry, biology). We introduce two research tasks which are designed as stepping stones towards AI agents that can explain (automatically captioning a lecture presentation) and illustrate (synthesizing visual figures to accompany spoken explanations) educational content. We provide manual annotations to help implement these two research tasks and evaluate state-of-the-art models on them. Comparing baselines and human student performances, we find that current models struggle in (1) weak crossmodal alignment between slides and spoken text, (2) learning novel visual mediums, (3) technical language, and (4) long-range sequences. Towards addressing this issue, we also introduce PolyViLT, a multimodal transformer trained with a multi-instance learning loss that is more effective than current approaches. We conclude by shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in multimodal understanding of educational presentations.
Casual Indoor HDR Radiance Capture from Omnidirectional Images

We present PanoHDR-NeRF, a neural representation of the full HDR radiance field of an indoor scene, and a pipeline to capture it casually, without elaborate setups or complex capture protocols. First, a user captures a low dynamic range (LDR) omnidirectional video of the scene by freely waving an off-the-shelf camera around the scene. Then, an LDR2HDR network uplifts the captured LDR frames to HDR, which are used to train a tailored NeRF++ model. The resulting PanoHDR-NeRF can render full HDR images from any location of the scene. Through experiments on a novel test dataset of real scenes with the ground truth HDR radiance captured at locations not seen during training, we show that PanoHDR-NeRF predicts plausible HDR radiance from any scene point. We also show that the predicted radiance can synthesize correct lighting effects, enabling the augmentation of indoor scenes with synthetic objects that are lit correctly. Datasets and code are available at https://lvsn.github. io/PanoHDR-NeRF/.