Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Safety Performance of Construction Workers through Learning from Incidents

Learning from incidents (LFI) is a process to seek, analyse, and disseminate the severity and causes of incidents, and take corrective measures to prevent the recurrence of similar events. However, the effects of LFI on the learner’s safety performance remain unexplored. This study aimed to identify the effects of the major LFI factors on the safety performance of workers. A questionnaire survey was administered among 210 construction workers in China. A factor analysis was conducted to reveal the underlying LFI factors. A stepwise multiple linear regression was performed to analyse the relationship between the underlying LFI factors and safety performance. A Bayesian Network (BN) was further modelled to identify the probabilistic relational network between the underlying LFI factors and safety performance. The results of BN modelling showed that all the underlying factors were important to improve the safety performance of construction workers. Additionally, sensitivity analysis revealed that the two underlying factors—information sharing and utilization and management commitment—had the largest effects on improving workers’ safety performance. The proposed BN also helped find out the most efficient strategy to improve workers’ safety performance. This research may serve as a useful guide for better implementation of LFI practices in the construction sector.
Construct elaboration and validity of the Pregnancy Depression Risk Scale

ABSTRACT Objectives: to elaborate and analyze the Pregnancy Depression Risk Scale psychometric properties. Methods: methodological research, in six steps: theoretical model empirical definition; elaboration of scale items with literature review; consultation with five professional health experts and 15 pregnant women; content validity with six experts; pre-test-semantic validity with 24 pregnant women; scale factor structure definition with 350 pregnant women; pilot study with 100 pregnant women, totaling 489 pregnant women and 11 experts. Data were analyzed by content analysis, exploratory factor analysis, multitrait-multimethod analysis and internal consistency. Results: sixty-eight risk factors were identified for item formulation. The final version of the scale consisted of 24 items in five domains. The scale demonstrated satisfactory construct content, semantic, validity and reliability. Conclusions: the scale proved to be valid in terms of content and semantics, with a factor structure defined according to the adopted theoretical model and satisfactory psychometric properties.
Gene Therapy for Regenerative Medicine

The development of biological methods over the past decade has stimulated great interest in the possibility to regenerate human tissues. Advances in stem cell research, gene therapy, and tissue engineering have accelerated the technology in tissue and organ regeneration. However, despite significant progress in this area, there are still several technical issues that must be addressed, especially in the clinical use of gene therapy. The aims of gene therapy include utilising cells to produce a suitable protein, silencing over-producing proteins, and genetically modifying and repairing cell functions that may affect disease conditions. While most current gene therapy clinical trials are based on cell- and viral-mediated approaches, non-viral gene transfection agents are emerging as potentially safe and effective in the treatment of a wide variety of genetic and acquired diseases. Gene therapy based on viral vectors may induce pathogenicity and immunogenicity. Therefore, significant efforts are being invested in non-viral vectors to enhance their efficiency to a level comparable to the viral vector. Non-viral technologies consist of plasmid-based expression systems containing a gene encoding, a therapeutic protein, and synthetic gene delivery systems. One possible approach to enhance non-viral vector ability or to be an alternative to viral vectors would be to use tissue engineering technology for regenerative medicine therapy. This review provides a critical view of gene therapy with a major focus on the development of regenerative medicine technologies to control the in vivo location and function of administered genes.
Setting-up place-based and transdisciplinary research to foster agrifood system transformation: Insights from the Aliment'Actions project in western France

Many agrifood systems around the world can be characterized as unsustainable. Research is increasingly required to inform the necessary radical transformations of the ways we produce, process, transport, and consume food. This article presents the research approach and methods of an ongoing project carried out at a long-term social–ecological research site, the Zone Atelier Plaine and Val de Sèvre (western France). The research project presented here, Aliment'Actions, started in 2018 and within 10 years of its implementation seeks to study and trigger transformation to enhance the sustainability and resilience of the regional agrifood system. Its research agenda contains four types of actions: (a) backdrop actions that enhance communication and trust between researchers and local stakeholders, (b) targeted actions that are conducted in specific villages with a wide range of stakeholders to elaborate and implement various transformation levers, (c) assessment actions evaluating the effects of different interventions, and (d) communication and result from dissemination actions. Overall, these actions aim to co-produce knowledge, raise awareness regarding challenges in the food system, envision new interactions between stakeholders, collectively generate innovative ideas, and catalyze actions oriented toward agrifood system transformation. The project implementation is adaptive and iterative, from theory to practice. This Methods paper puts this ongoing project into the perspective of other place-based research initiatives and provides insights on how to foster the engagement of non-academic actors in transdisciplinary research supporting agrifood system transformation.
Evaluation of the IRI's “Net Assessment” Seasonal Climate Forecasts: 1997–2001

Abstract The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI) net assessment seasonal temperature and precipitation forecasts are evaluated for the 4-yr period from October–December 1997 to October–December 2001. These probabilistic forecasts represent the human distillation of seasonal climate predictions from various sources. The ranked probability skill score (RPSS) serves as the verification measure. The evaluation is offered as time-averaged spatial maps of the RPSS as well as area-averaged time series. A key element of this evaluation is the examination of the extent to which the consolidation of several predictions, accomplished here subjectively by the forecasters, contributes to or detracts from the forecast skill possible from any individual prediction tool. Overall, the skills of the net assessment forecasts for both temperature and precipitation are positive throughout the 1997–2001 period. The skill may have been enhanced during the peak of the 1997/98 El Nino, particularly for t.
Assessment of Drug Use in a Tertiary Hospital in Southeast Nigeria Based on Who Core Drug Use Indicators

Background: Irrational use of medicines is a global phenomenon and an issue of concern with so many undesirable consequences. The complex nature of the pharmaceutical care process is an indication for an essential tool that investigates drug use pattern in health facilities. The WHO released the core drug use indicators to address these issues. The study assessed drug use in a tertiary hospital in southeast Nigeria based on WHO core drug use indicators. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used and the study was conducted from October 2021 to June 2022. Retrospectively, 300 prescriptions were selected and reviewed using systematic random sampling for a year from 2020 -2021 to investigate prescribing indicators. A total of 120 randomly selected patients and pharmacy personnel were observed and interviewed to investigate the patient-care and facility-specific indicators. The WHO/INRUD core drug use indicators were used to assess the patterns of drug use in comparison to the result gotten. Results: The average number of drugs per encounter was 2.76, the Percentage of drugs prescribed by generic names was 78.02%, the Percentage of antibiotics prescribed was 33.33%, and the Percentage of injections prescribed was 1.67%. Average consulting time in minutes was 17.5 minutes, the average dispensing time in seconds was 92.1 seconds, the Percentage of drugs actually dispensed was 76.97%, Percentage of adequately labeled was 100%, and the percentage of patients’ knowledge of correct dosage was 90%. The facility did not have an Essential Drug List but had all (100%) the key drugs listed by the WHO drug list. Conclusion: All of the prescribing indicators deviated from the WHO/INRUD recommended optimal values. Patient-care and facility-specific indicators deviated from the optimal values except that of the average consultation time, average dispensing time, percentage of drugs adequately labeled, and 100% availability of key drugs. Although a few of the WHO benchmark for rational drug use were met, the outcomes were not satisfactory and required interventions to improve rational drug use in the facility.
Multigenerational physiological compensation and body size reduction dampen the effects of warming on copepods

Under the current ocean warming scenario, multigenerational studies are essential to address possible adaptive changes in phenotypic traits of copepod populations. In this study, we exposed the calanoid copepod Paracartia grani, reared in the laboratory at 19°C, to warmer conditions (22°C and 25°C) to investigate the changes in key phenotypic traits in the 1st, 10th, and 11th generations. Development rates and adult body size were inversely related to temperature in all generations. We also found a decline in copepod egg size at higher temperatures. Temperature had positive effects on the ingestion and egg production rate of females in the first generation, but the thermal response of the copepods diminished significantly in the consecutive generations. The decrease in thermal effects on feeding and egg production rates after multigenerational exposure cannot be explained only by the shrinkage in body size at warmer temperatures, but also involves the action of physiological compensation. These adaptive processes did not appear to have a significant cost on other traits, such as egg hatching success, gross growth efficiency, and sex ratio. Our findings have implications for the prediction of ocean warming effects on copepod activity rates and highlight the importance of physiological adaptation processes after multigenerational exposure.
Glycerol Droplet Spreading on Growing Bacillus Subtilis Biofilms

Bacterial biofilm is a three-dimensional matrix composed of a large number of living bacterial individuals. The strong bio-interaction between the bacteria and its self-secreted matrix environment strengthens the mechanical integrity of the biofilm and the sustainable resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. As a soft surface, the biofilm is expected to present different dynamical wetting behavior in response to shear stress, which is, however, less known. Here, the spreading of liquid droplet on Bacillus subtilis biofilm at its different growing phases was experimentally investigated. Due to the viscoelastic response of the biofilm to fast spreading of the droplet, three stages were identified as inertial, viscous stages, and a longer transition in between. The physical heterogeneity of growing biofilm correlates with the spreading scaling within the inertial stage, followed by the possible chemical variation after a critical growing time. By using the duration of inertial spreading, the characteristic time scale was successfully linked to the shear modulus of the elastic dissipation of the biofilm. This measurement suggests a facile, non-destructive and in vivo method to understand the mechanical instability of this living matter.
Robots and Workers: Evidence from the Netherlands

We estimate the effects of robot adoption on firm-level and worker-level outcomes in the Netherlands using a large employer-employee panel dataset spanning 2009-2020. Our firm-level results confirm previous findings, with positive effects on value added and hours worked for robotadopting firms and negative outcomes on competitors in the same industry. Our worker-level results show that directly-affected workers (e.g., bluecollar workers performing routine or replaceable tasks) face lower earnings and employment rates, while other workers indirectly gain from robot adoption. We also find that the negative effects from competitors’ robot adoption load on directly-affected workers, while other workers benefit from this industry-level robot adoption. Overall, our results highlight the uneven effects of automation on the workforce. Keywords—robots, workers, technology, productivity, the Netherlands JEL codes—D63, E22, E23, E24, J24, O33 We thank Matt Cole, Francesco Esposito, Maarten Goos, Ted Pinchbeck, James Rockey, Anna Salamons, Benedikt Vogt, Ulrich Zierahn, and participants at seminars in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht for valuable feedback. Daron Acemoglu acknowledges funding from the Hewlett Foundation and National Science Foundation. Ceren Ozgen gratefully acknowledges Birmingham Business School research funding and University of Birmingham Covid support fund. Department of Economics, MIT, email: daron@mit.edu. Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, email: h.koster@vu.nl; Tinbergen Institute and Centre for Economic Policy Research. Corresponding author. Department of Economics, University of Birmingham, University House 1105, B15 2TT Birmingham, UK; IZA and GLO. e-mail: c.ozgen@bham.ac. uk.
Decentralized stabilization of complex systems with delayed feedback

Abstract The paper studies the problem of decentralized state feedback control design for a class of continuous-time complex systems. These systems are composed of identical nominal subsystems, symmetric nominal interconnections, and nonlinear perturbations. We consider local time-varying delayed feedback at each channel. Single delay as well as multiple delay cases are considered. By exploiting the special structure of the systems, sufficient conditions are derived for the gain matrix selection performed on the design system of reduced dimension under linear matrix inequality approach constraints. It is shown that the robust delay-dependent stability of the global multiple delay closed-loop system is guaranteed when implementing the gain matrix into the global decentralized controller. Moreover, sufficient conditions are derived for the tolerance of local control channel failures in such a global closed-loop system. The fault tolerance can be effectively tested on systems of reduced dimensions.
Detection of Material on a Tray in an Automatic Assembly Line Based on Convolution Attention and Multitask Loss

This paper proposes an end-to-end first-stage pallet detection algorithm with short training time and high detection accuracy based on the pre-detection staged material detection algorithm. Not only can it detect known materials, blank areas and fixed material areas on pallets, but also unknown and unwanted materials that are mixed and misplaced on pallets on automated assembly lines. It employs ResNet18 as the backbone network, incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to improve model stability and accuracy, and optimizes the detection model using the multitask loss function based on Complete-IoU(CIoU) and cross entropy. The experimental results show that when compared to the original phased detection algorithm using YOLOv5s trained on four NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for 18 h, the phased detection algorithm used in this study's first stage material detection algorithm achieves 98% overall recognition accuracy, which is 7% higher than the original phased algorithm (91%). It also greatly reduces the model training time and allows rapid model deployment.
Does Being Ignored on WhatsApp Hurt? A Pilot Study on the Effect of a Newly Developed Ostracism Task for Adolescents

(1) Background: Many studies have used a well-known social exclusion task, namely Cyberball, to assess the psychophysiological reactions to ostracism in laboratory settings. However, this task has been recently criticized for its lack of realism. Instant messaging communication platforms are currently central communication channels where adolescents conduct their social life. These should be considered when recreating the emotional experiences that fuel the development of negative emotions. To overcome this limitation, a new ostracism task, namely SOLO (Simulated On-Line Ostracism), recreating hostile interactions (i.e., exclusion and rejection) over WhatsApp was developed. The aim of this manuscript is to compare adolescents’ self-reported negative and positive affect, as well as physiological reactivity (i.e., heat rate, HR; heart rate variability, HRV) exhibited during SOLO to Cyberball. (2) Method: A total of 35 participants (Mage = 15.16; SD = 1.48; 24 females) took part in the study. The first group (n = 23; transdiagnostic group), recruited at an inpatient and outpatient unit of a clinic for children and adolescent psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatic therapy in Baden-Württemberg (Germany), reported clinical diagnoses linked with emotional dysregulation (e.g., self-injury and depression). The second group (n = 12; control group), recruited in the district of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, had no pre-existing clinical diagnoses. (3) Results: The transdiagnostic group showed higher HR (b = 4.62, p < 0.05) and lower HRV (b = 10.20, p < 0.01) in SOLO than in Cyberball. They also reported increased negative affect (interaction b = −0.5, p < 0.01) after SOLO but not after Cyberball. In the control group, no differences in either HR (p = 0.34) or HRV (p = 0.08) between tasks were found. In addition, no difference in negative affect after either task (p = 0.83) was found. (4) Conclusion: SOLO could be an ecologically valid alternative to Cyberball when assessing reactions to ostracism in adolescents with emotional dysregulation.
Effect of In and Mn co-doping on structural, magnetic and dielectric properties of BiFeO3 nanoparticles

Bi1−xInx Fe1−y Mny O3(x = 0, y = 0; x = 0.1 y = 0; x = 0, y = 0.1; x = 0.05, y = 0.05) nanoparticles were prepared by a simple cost effective ethylene glycol based solution combustion route. The XRD analysis reveals the single phase rhombohedral structure for BiFeO3 (BFO) and In and Mn co-doped BFO (BIFMO) samples. Some structural distortion is observed for the In and Mn co-doped samples. The co-doping of In and Mn at A-B-site of BFO improves the particles' surface morphology and reduces the average grain size to around 15 nm which evidently affects the magnetic and electrical properties of these nanoparticles. The saturation magnetization enhances significantly from 0.20 emu g−1 for BFO to 3.50 emu g−1 for the co-doped sample. The enhanced saturation magnetization is attributed to the size effect. The co-doping decreases the coercivity to around 32 Oe due to a decrease in the magneticrystalline anisotropy. The co-doping improves the dielectric constant and dielectric loss and results in the modification of dielectric behaviour with varying temperatures up to 250 °C. All doped samples show high resistivity of the order of 109 Ω cm which further improves with co-substitution of In and Mn and is attributed to the presence of small grain size and reduction of oxygen ion vacancies.
A Transformer Seq2Seq Model with Fast Fourier Transform Layers for Rephrasing and Simplifying Complex Arabic Text

—Text simplification is a fundamental unsolved problem for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models, which is deemed a hard-to-solve task. Recently, this hard task has aimed to simplify texts with complex linguistic structures and improve their readability, not only for human readers but also for boosting the performance of many natural language processing (NLP) applications. Towards tackling this hard task for the low-resource Arabic NLP, this paper presents a text split-and-rephrase strategy for simplifying complex texts, which depends principally on a sequence-to-sequence Transformer-based architecture (which we call TSimAr). For evaluation, we created a new benchmarking corpus for Arabic text simplification (so-called ATSC) containing 500 articles besides their corresponding simplifications. Through our automatic and manual analyses, experimental results report that our TSimAr evidently outperforms all the publicly accessible state-of-the-art text-to-text generation models for the Arabic language as it achieved the best score on SARI, BLEU, and METEOR metrics of about 0.73, 0.65, and 0.68, respectively.
Gender equality related to gender differences in life expectancy across the globe gender equality and life expectancy

Life expectancy (LE) depends on the wider determinants of health, many of which have gendered effects worldwide. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether gender equality was associated with LE for women and men and the gender gap in LE across the globe. Gender equality in 156 countries was estimated using a modified global gender gap index (mGGGI), based on the index developed by the World Economic Forum between 2010 and 2021. Linear regression was used to investigate the association between the mGGGI and its economic, political, and education subindices and the gender gap in LE and women and men’s LE. Overall, the mGGGI increased from 58% in 2010 to 62% in 2021. Globally, changes in the mGGGI and its economic and political subindexes were not associated with changes in the gender gap in LE or with LE for women and men between 2010 and 2020. Improvements in gender equality in education were associated with a longer LE for women and men and widening of the gender gap in LE. In 2021, each 10% increase in the mGGGI was associated with a 4.3-month increase in women’s LE and a 3.5-month increase in men’s LE, and thus with an 8-month wider gender gap. However, the direction and magnitude of these associations varied between regions. Each 10% increase in the mGGGI was associated with a 6-month narrower gender gap in high-income countries, and a 13- and 16-month wider gender gap in South and Southeast Asia and Oceania, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. Globally, greater gender equality is associated with longer LE for both women and men and a widening of the gender gap in LE. The variation in this association across world regions suggests that gender equality may change as countries progress towards socioeconomic development and gender equality.