Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cultural Bias in Explainable AI Research: A Systematic Analysis

For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI (XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and that many popular XAI designs implicitly and problematically assume that Western explanatory needs are shared cross-culturally. Additionally, we systematically reviewed over 200 XAI user studies and found that most studies did not consider relevant cultural variations, sampled only Western populations, but drew conclusions about human-XAI interactions more generally. We also analyzed over 30 literature reviews of XAI studies. Most reviews did not mention cultural differences in explanatory needs or flag overly broad cross-cultural extrapolations of XAI user study results. Combined, our analyses provide evidence of a cultural bias toward Western populations in XAI research, highlighting an important knowledge gap regarding how culturally diverse users may respond to widely used XAI systems that future work can and should address.
Understanding and Mitigating Human-Labelling Errors in Supervised Contrastive Learning

Human-annotated vision datasets inevitably contain a fraction of human mislabelled examples. While the detrimental effects of such mislabelling on supervised learning are well-researched, their influence on Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that human-labelling errors not only differ significantly from synthetic label errors, but also pose unique challenges in SCL, different to those in traditional supervised learning methods. Specifically, our results indicate they adversely impact the learning process in the ~99% of cases when they occur as false positive samples. Existing noise-mitigating methods primarily focus on synthetic label errors and tackle the unrealistic setting of very high synthetic noise rates (40-80%), but they often underperform on common image datasets due to overfitting. To address this issue, we introduce a novel SCL objective with robustness to human-labelling errors, SCL-RHE. SCL-RHE is designed to mitigate the effects of real-world mislabelled examples, typically characterized by much lower noise rates (<5%). We demonstrate that SCL-RHE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art representation learning and noise-mitigating methods across various vision benchmarks, by offering improved resilience against human-labelling errors.
Vitamin C as Scavenger of Reactive Oxygen Species during Healing after Myocardial Infarction

Currently, coronary artery bypass and reperfusion therapies are considered the gold standard in long-term treatments to restore heart function after acute myocardial infarction. As a drawback of these restoring strategies, reperfusion after an ischemic insult and sudden oxygen exposure lead to the exacerbated synthesis of additional reactive oxidative species and the persistence of increased oxidation levels. Attempts based on antioxidant treatment have failed to achieve an effective therapy for cardiovascular disease patients. The controversial use of vitamin C as an antioxidant in clinical practice is comprehensively systematized and discussed in this review. The dose-dependent adsorption and release kinetics mechanism of vitamin C is complex; however, this review may provide a holistic perspective on its potential as a preventive supplement and/or for combined precise and targeted therapeutics in cardiovascular management therapy.
Unraveling the Mystery of Scaling Laws: Part I

Scaling law principles indicate a power-law correlation between loss and variables such as model size, dataset size, and computational resources utilized during training. These principles play a vital role in optimizing various aspects of model pre-training, ultimately contributing to the success of large language models such as GPT-4, Llama and Gemini. However, the original scaling law paper by OpenAI did not disclose the complete details necessary to derive the precise scaling law formulas, and their conclusions are only based on models containing up to 1.5 billion parameters. Though some subsequent works attempt to unveil these details and scale to larger models, they often neglect the training dependency of important factors such as the learning rate, context length and batch size, leading to their failure to establish a reliable formula for predicting the test loss trajectory. In this technical report, we confirm that the scaling law formulations proposed in the original OpenAI paper remain valid when scaling the model size up to 33 billion, but the constant coefficients in these formulas vary significantly with the experiment setup. We meticulously identify influential factors and provide transparent, step-by-step instructions to estimate all constant terms in scaling-law formulas by training on models with only 1M~60M parameters. Using these estimated formulas, we showcase the capability to accurately predict various attributes for models with up to 33B parameters before their training, including (1) the minimum possible test loss; (2) the minimum required training steps and processed tokens to achieve a specific loss; (3) the critical batch size with an optimal time/computation trade-off at any loss value; and (4) the complete test loss trajectory with arbitrary batch size.
The Effect of Musical Environments on Designers’ Attention: Persistent Music Listening Interferes with Attention

Research indicates that music can influence human cognitive functions. Diverse musical settings can affect alertness, orientation, and executive control of attention in various populations. Exploring the relationship between designers with highly creative thinking and music environments can provide new research perspectives for the cognitive field. A total of 94 students, consisting of 61 design majors and 33 non-design majors, completed the Attention Network Test (ANT) on a computer under three test environments: cheerful music, melancholic music, and silence. The study results indicated that the alerting network effect between the design professional group and the control group was marginally significant. However, there were no significant differences between the groups in the orienting subsystem and the executive control subsystem. Within the design professional group, the attentional network data indicated that participants showed improved performance in alerting and orienting attention in a music-free environment compared to cheerful and melancholic music environments (pa = 0.028, po = 0.008). Nevertheless, executive control attention did not show significant differences across the music environments. In conclusion, existing research confirms that designers are more susceptible to distraction from external stimuli; thus, music-free environments assist them in concentrating.
Are we still far from a reliable solution? Comment on “Structural position of the Upper Cretaceous sediments in the Považský Inovec Mts. (Western Carpathians)”

The protracting debate about the position and tectonic affiliation of the Upper Jurassic to Upper Cretaceous sediments occurring in the Považský Inovec Mts has got a revived impulse by a new interpretation presented in the recent paper of Pelech et al. (2016). We discuss several aspects of their alternative explanation which considers the wedge-top position of Upper Cretaceous strata overlying the Tatric substratum, with Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous rocks occurring as olistoliths. In particular, we question the inferred transgressive character of the Upper Cretaceous clastic deposits and the olistolithic nature of Upper Jurassic radiolarites, as well as we emphasize the metamorphic imprint and related deformation structures recorded in rocks under consideration.
The Physical and Psychosocial Impact of Fatigue among Patients with Sjogren’s Syndrome: A Systematic Review

Background: Primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) is a complex autoimmune disorder characterized by organ-specific symptoms in the salivary and lacrimal glands, as well as systemic manifestations. Fatigue, a prominent aspect, significantly influences the overall quality of life for individuals with pSS. Methods: This review seeks to evaluate the impact of fatigue by exploring its consequences, potential causes, and effects on physical and psychological well-being, while also investigating its management strategies. Following the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)” guidelines, our systematic literature review involved a five-step algorithm. Initially identifying 78 articles in reputable international medical databases, we applied eligibility criteria and removed duplicates, resulting in 19 articles for qualitative synthesis. Results: This review delves into the predictive factors for heightened fatigue in pSS, encompassing rheumatoid factor levels, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and immunoglobulin G levels. Sleep disturbances, specifically nighttime pain and nocturia, emerged as determinants of persistent daytime fatigue. Cognitive impairment in pSS involves deteriorations in global memory, executive functioning, and attentional resources. Furthermore, functional limitations in pSS impact patients’ quality of life. Conclusions: The significance of fatigue in pSS, its consequences, and profound influence on the quality of life necessitate further research for a more comprehensive understanding of this complex issue.
On various notions of distance between subalgebras of operator algebras

Given any irreducible inclusion $\mB \subset \mA$ of unital $C^*$-algebras with a finite-index conditional expectation $E: \mA \to \mB$, we show that the set of $E$-compatible intermediate $C^*$-subalgebras is finite, thereby generalizing a finiteness result of Ino and Watatani (from \cite{IW}). A finiteness result for a certain collection of intermediate $C^*$-subalgebras of a non-irreducible inclusion of simple unital $C^*$-algebras is also obtained, which provides a $C^*$-version of a finiteness result of Khoshkam and Mashood (from \cite{KM}). Apart from these finiteness results, comparisons between various notions of distance between subalgebras of operator algebras by Kadison-Kastler, Christensen and Mashood-Taylor are made. Further, these comparisons are used satisfactorily to provide some concrete calculations of distance between operator algebras associated to two distinct subgroups of a given discrete group.
Opening of the South China Sea and Upwelling of the Hainan Plume

Opening of the South China Sea and upwelling of the Hainan Plume are among the most challenging issues related to the tectonic evolution of East Asia. However, when and how the Hainan Plume affected the opening of the South China Sea remains unclear. Here we investigate the geochemical and isotopic features of the ~25 Ma mid‐ocean ridge basalt (MORB) in the Kenting Mélange, southern Taiwan, ~16 Ma MORB drilled by the IODP Expedition 349, and ~9 Ma ocean island basalt‐type dredged seamount basalt. The ~25 Ma MORBs reveal a less metasomatic depleted MORB mantle‐like source. In contrast, the Miocene samples record progressive mantle enrichment and possibly signal the contribution of the Hainan Plume. We speculate that MORBs of the South China Sea which could have recorded plume‐ridge source mixing perhaps appear since ~23.8 Ma. On the contrary, the Paleocene‐Eocene ocean island basalt‐type intraplate volcanism of the South China continental margin is correlated to decompression melting of a passively upwelling fertile asthenosphere due to continental rifting.
Torrential rainfall processes associated with a landfall of Typhoon Fitow (2013): A three‐dimensional WRF modeling study

In this study, Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) with triply nested grid and the finest grid size of 3 km is utilized to simulate Typhoon Fitow (2013). The simulation is verified with available observations. The model well captures the track, eyewall, and rainband structures and also reproduces radar reflectivity and vertical profiles of temperature, water vapor mixing ratio, and winds. Area mean budget shows that water vapor convergence leads to condensation, which produces rainfall through accretion of cloud water by rain and melting of graupel. Over convective regions, water vapor convergence generates condensation, which feeds convective rainfall and supports transport of raindrops to stratiform regions through accretion of cloud water by rain. Over stratiform regions, melting of graupel and the transport of raindrops from convective regions are major sources for stratiform rainfall. The results are further strengthened by the analysis of the data in a storm‐following coordinate using different convective‐stratiform rainfall separation schemes.
Ray Launching-Based Computation of Exact Paths with Noisy Dense Point Clouds

Point clouds have been a recent interest for ray tracing-based radio channel characterization, as sensors such as RGB-D cameras and laser scanners can be utilized to generate an accurate virtual copy of a physical environment. In this paper, a novel ray launching algorithm is presented, which operates directly on noisy point clouds acquired from sensor data. It produces coarse paths that are further refined to exact paths consisting of reflections and diffractions. A commercial ray tracing tool is utilized as the baseline for validating the simulated paths. A significant majority of the baseline paths is found. The robustness to noise is examined by artificially applying noise along the normal vector of each point. It is observed that the proposed method is capable of adapting to noise and finds similar paths compared to the baseline path trajectories with noisy point clouds. This is prevalent especially if the normal vectors of the points are estimated accurately. Lastly, a simulation is performed with a reconstructed point cloud and compared against channel measurements and the baseline paths. The resulting paths demonstrate similarity with the baseline path trajectories and exhibit an analogous pattern to the aggregated impulse response extracted from the measurements. Code available at https://github.com/nvaara/NimbusRT
Comparative Study of Untreated and Ozonated Well Water from Bhaktapur Municipality, Nepal

Availability of water for human consumption is decreasing everyday, eventually growing pollution and discharge of more than 80% of sewage without treatment results water pollution despite the effort to improve its quality in developing countries (WWAP, 2009). Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) is one of the emerging technologies suitable for wastewater treatment (Eliasson et al., 1978). Water purification by conventional methods are either costly or have limited efficiency, similarly researches have revealed that many years of chlorine use for water disinfection has been concluded to be harmful for human health. This has raised concern for an effective method of water treatment (Subedi et al., 2012). Water purification by ozone synthesis is an industrially accepted application of electrical discharges (Bubnov et al., 2004; Chang & Wu 1997; Eliasson et al. 1987). Conventional chlorination process is being replaced by ozonation process due to its strong oxidising and effective disinfectant nature without any side effect (Kurica et al., 2004, Malik et al., 2001). This technology avoids chemical storage and handling; its by-products have no adverse effects to human health and environment, it safely destroys broader range of organic contaminants and removes colour, odour and suspended solid materials (Rajeshwari et al., 2001). Moreover, ozone is highly efficient in killing bacteria, viruses, spores and cysts (Malik et al., 2001). Abstract: This study is based on comparison of the quality of well water before and after ozonation. The study was conducted in eight different sites of Bhaktapur Municipality in November 2016 to February 2017. Different water quality parameters such as Temperature, pH, Electric Conductivity, Dissolved Oxygen, BOD, Total hardness, Ca-hardness, Mg-hardness, Iron, Total coliform, Fecal coliform and Non-coliform were analyzed. The study determined physico-chemical and microbial quality of well water sources before and after treatment. There were no significant changes in conductivity of water from eight different sources before and after treatment. Conductivity values remained stable before and after treatment. pH of water after treatment varied slightly with respect to pH of untreated water. DO of all samples increased significantly after ozonation. BOD of samples decreased after ozonation. There was overall decrease in Total hardness, Magnesium hardness and Calcium hardness after treatment. Iron in its ferrous state had charge of 2+. When ozone was passed through the solution containing ferrous salts, it contributed oxygen atom that reacted with Fe 2+ resulted to ferric salt and hence concentration of Fe 2+ decreased. There was overall decrease in microbial parameters (Total coliform, Fecal coliform and Non-coliform).
Law enforcement perceptions of job stress and barriers to supportive resources when working child sexual abuse cases in the southern United States

PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to examine law enforcement officers' perspectives on job stress and barriers to supportive resources when working child sexual abuse cases in a large southern state. It is well documented in the literature that professionals who work in healthcare, emergency services and law enforcement face tremendous amounts of stress and consequences to their physical and mental health. Little research has been done to examine how child sexual abuse investigations impact law enforcement, and how these specialized officers perceive access to supportive resources.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative study was part of a larger quantitative study and included 20 law enforcement officers who participated in anonymous, semi-structured phone interviews.FindingsFindings included (1) child sexual abuse cases are difficult, specialized and disturbing (2) barriers to supportive resources include law enforcement culture, the stigma of asking for help, awareness and accessibility of resources and leadership as gatekeeper to the resources and (3) officers perceive both formal and informal resources to be helpful and at best should be proactively available to all officers in the state. A model of the findings was developed to illustrate the implications for practitioners and scholars.Research limitations/implicationsThis study was not without weaknesses, specifically the small number of participants, volunteer sampling does not represent the general population and the sampling technique means some demographics may have been missed by researchers.Practical implicationsThis study adds to the literature on law enforcement mental health, occupational health and mental health resources. It confirms established research in the literature and provides insight into officer perspectives about barriers that prevent access to informal and formal supports that could improve their emotional well-being.Originality/valueThis study is the first of its kind, to our knowledge, that asks detectives and investigators of child abuse cases about mental health resources. These law enforcement officers are at high-risk for traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and burnout due to the specialized cases they investigate.
Sex Differences in Short- and Long-Term Survival after Acute Type A Aortic Dissection

Background and Objectives: Acute type A aortic dissection (AAD) is a life-threatening disease. No differences between men and women have been made in the treatment of AAD so far and knowledge about sex differences regarding long-term outcomes is limited. Materials and Methods: Between 01/2004 and 12/2021, 874 patients were operated on for AAD, including 313 (35.8%) women and 561 (64.2%) men. Clinical and surgical records, including long-term follow-up information, were obtained and analyzed retrospectively. To account for differences in the outcome determined by different preoperative life expectancies, a subgroup analysis for a set of patients matched according to their remaining life expectancy was performed. Results: At the time of AAD, women were older than men (69.1 ± 13.0 vs. 61.8 ± 13.3 years, p < 0.001) and had a shorter remaining statistical life expectancy (18.6 ± 10.8 vs. 21.4 ± 10.4 years, p < 0.001). Significantly more DeBakey type II AAD was found in women (37.1% vs. 25.7%, p < 0.001). Comorbidities and preoperative status at the time of presentation were similar in women and men. More hemiarch procedures (63.3% vs. 52.0%, p < 0.001) and less arch replacements (8.6% vs. 16.6%, p < 0.001) were performed in women, resulting in shorter cross-clamp times for women (92 ± 39 vs. 102 ± 49 min, p < 0.001). The in-hospital mortality was similar in women and men (11.5% vs. 12.7%, p = 0.618). Long-term survival was significantly shorter in women compared to men (9.8 [8.1–11.5] vs. 15.1 [11.9–18.4] years, p = 0.011). A matched subgroup analysis revealed that when comparing groups with a similar remaining life expectancy, the long-term survival showed no significant differences between women and men (9.8 [7.9–11.6] vs. 12.4 [10.1–14.7] years, p = 0.487). Conclusions: There are sex differences in AAD, with DeBakey type II dissection being more frequent in women. The seemingly worse long-term outcome can mostly be attributed to the shorter remaining statistical life expectancy at the time of presentation.
Decreasing Photoreactivity and Concurrent Change in Dissolved Organic Matter Composition With Increasing Inland Water Residence Time

Photochemical degradation of dissolved organic matter (DOM) has been the subject of numerous studies; however, its regulation along the inland water continuum is still unclear. We aimed to unravel the DOM photoreactivity and concurrent DOM compositional changes across 30 boreal aquatic ecosystems including peat waters, streams, rivers, and lakes distributed along a water residence time (WRT) gradient. Samples were subjected to a standardized exposure of simulated sunlight. We measured the apparent quantum yield (AQY), which corresponds to DOM photomineralization per photon absorbed, and the compositional change in DOM at bulk and individual compound levels in the original samples and after irradiation. AQY increased with the abundance of terrestrially derived DOM and decreased at higher WRT. Additionally, the photochemical changes in both DOM optical properties and molecular composition resembled changes along the natural boreal WRT gradient at low WRT (<3 years). Accordingly, mass spectrometry revealed that the abundance of photolabile and photoproduced molecules decreased with WRT along the boreal aquatic continuum. Our study highlights the tight link between DOM composition and DOM photodegradation. We suggest that photodegradation is an important driver of DOM composition change in waters with low WRT, where DOM is highly photoreactive.