Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lyapunov Redesign-Based Optimal Consensus Control for Multi-Agent Systems With Uncertain Dynamics

This brief investigates an optimal consensus problem for a set of integrator systems with dynamic uncertainties. A hierarchical distributed control framework based on partial global information is given, which can reach the optimal solution of the team objective function. Each agent has an optimal control law based on the neighbors’ information and the gradients of the local cost functions, and a compensator derived with Lyapunov redesign technique to deal with the dynamic uncertainties. Then, to remove the constraint on initial conditions and the need for global knowledge of the state, the state differences between neighbors are involved to strengthen the optimal controller while local information feedback is included in the compensator. The resulted fully distributed algorithms can guarantee asymptotic convergence of the systems in the sense of input-to-state stability (ISS). The effectiveness of the method is illustrated by numerical examples.
Reliable Peak Power Assessment During Concentric and Flexion-Extension-Cycle Based Rowing Strokes using a Non-Modified Rowing Ergometer.

Accurate assessment of peak rowing power is crucial for rowing-specific performance testing. Therefore, within and between day reliability of a non-modified rowing ergometer was examined. 52 trained male rowers (21.0 ± 2.9 years; 1.89 ± 0.05 m; 83.2 ± 8.2 kg; 2,000-m ergometer Time Trial mean power: 369 ± 57 W) performed (two times 4) isolated concentric rowing strokes (DRIVE) and single flexion-extension cycle (FEC-type) rowing strokes (SLIDE-DRIVE) on two separate days (1 week apart). Good to excellent intraclass correlation coefficients (0.94 ≤ ICC ≤ 1.00), low standard error of measurement (≤ 2.7%), low coefficient of variation (≤ 4.9%), and suitable level of agreements (≤ 30W) for DRIVE and SLIDE-DRIVE indicated a high level of (within and between day) reliability. In addition, SLIDE-DRIVE (423 ± 157 W) revealed remarkably higher rowing power (p ≤ 0.001; ηp 2 = 0.601; SMD = 0.34) compared to DRIVE (370 ± 154 W). The non-modified rowing ergometer is considered to be a reliable tool for the peak power assessment during isolated concentric contraction and FEC-type rowing strokes. Notably higher power outputs (compared to an isolated concentric contraction) during FEC rowing may refer to an underlying stretch shortening cycle.
Forecasting Method of Grey Theory and Wavelet Neural Network for Mine Gas Gushing

Forecasting for mine gas gushing that has been affected various factors is always a problems in producing process.In recently years,built model that exists slow speed of convergence and easy to fall into local minima has forecasted for non-linear object based on artificial neural network by many scholars.In this paper a novel predicting model with GM and WNN is established by introducing grey theory into a wavelet neural network.The gray model using the new data generated cumulative highlights tendency influence.A wavelet neural network makes non-linear inspired function easy to approach and reduces the cycle and random components,through forecasting again with the prediction result from grey model.Both of the subsequent training and the examination show that the forecasting model is reliable and improve the precision in the forecasting.
Understanding the Role of Receptive Field of Convolutional Neural Network for Cloud Detection in Landsat 8 OLI Imagery

Deep semantic segmentation networks perform better in cloud detection of satellite imagery than traditional methods, owing to their ability to extract high-level features over a large receptive field. However, a large receptive field often leads to loss of spatial details and blurring of boundaries. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the role of the receptive field on the segmentation results, which has rarely been investigated for cloud detection tasks. This study for the first time explored the relationship between the receptive field size and performance of a cloud detection network. Six typical networks commonly used for cloud detection and nine modified UNet variants with different depths, dilated convolutions, and skip connections were evaluated based on Landsat 8 Biome dataset (L8 Biome). The theoretical receptive field (TRF) and effective receptive field (ERF) were introduced to measure the receptive field sizes of different networks. The results revealed a negative correlation between the ERF size and cloud segmentation accuracies for different cloud distributions and a relatively weak negative correlation between the TRF size and segmentation accuracies. Furthermore, ERFs were considerably smaller than the corresponding TRFs for most networks, implying that large-scale contextual information was not learned after training. This result indicates the importance of using networks with a small receptive field for cloud detection of Landsat 8 OLI imagery. Moreover, as the boundary accuracies are significantly lower than the region accuracies, future efforts should be devoted to addressing inaccurate boundary localization rather than exploring the contextual information over a large receptive field.
Energy literacy of high school students in Vietnam and determinants of their energy-saving behavior

Abstract Depletion of resources and climate change are important factors impacting sustainable development. Energy education, as part of education for sustainable development, is considered an efficient way to raise students’ awareness of environmental protection and energy saving. This study aimed at understanding the energy literacy of high school students in Vietnam, and explored the factors that influence students’ energy-saving behavior as a basis for considering the effectiveness of the energy education program. An online and paper version energy-literacy survey was conducted. Participants were 600 12th-graders from high schools in Northern, Central and Southern Vietnam. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses of the relationships between energy knowledge, energy-related values, attitude toward energy saving, energy saving intention and behavior. Welch’s ANOVA was conducted to examine whether energy-saving behavior differed by group. The results showed that 12th-graders’ energy knowledge tended to be low, while their perceived values, attitude, intention and behavior related to saving energy were relatively high. There was no direct effect of energy knowledge on their energy-saving intention or behavior, while an indirect effect was observed if value and attitude toward energy saving were taken as mediators. Based on the participants’ self-reported data, public-school students performed more behaviors to reduce energy consumption than those from private schools. In addition, the major source from which students gained energy knowledge was the mass media. According to the results, implications related to energy policy and instruction were generated.
The collection, analysis and exploitation of footballer attributes: A systematic review

There is growing on-going research into how footballer attributes, collected prior to, during and post-match, may address the demands of clubs, media pundits and gaming developers. Focusing upon individual player performance analysis and prediction, we examined the body of research which considers different player attributes. This resulted in the selection of 132 relevant papers published between 1999 and 2020. From these we have compiled a comprehensive list of player attributes, categorising them as static, such as age and height, or dynamic, such as pass completions and shots on target. To indicate their accuracy, we classified each attribute as objectively or subjectively derived, and finally by their implied accessibility and their likely personal and club sensitivity. We assigned these attributes to 25 logical groups such as passing, tackling and player demographics. We analysed the relative research focus on each group and noted the analytical methods deployed, identifying which statistical or machine learning techniques were used. We reviewed and considered the use of character trait attributes in the selected papers and discuss more formal approaches to their use. Based upon this we have made recommendations on how this work may be developed to support elite clubs in the consideration of transfer targets.
Patient Representatives’ Perspectives on Healthcare at the Time of COVID-19 and Suggestions for Care Redesign After the Pandemic: A Qualitative Study in Twenty-Four Countries

Objective Several comments and recommendations called to embed better the patients’ and public voice in healthcare policymaking. Still, no studies captured patients’ bottom-up perspectives regarding healthcare at the time of COVID-19 at a micro-level in a range of different countries. We, therefore, explored the perspectives of patient representatives in all six World Health Organisation (WHO) regions and extracted suggestions for care redesign after the pandemic. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with patient representatives until saturation. Thematic analysis followed a modified form of meaning condensation. We established rigour by transcript checking, inter-coder agreement, quote variation and standardised reporting. Results Disadvantaged people experienced an unprecedented inequity in healthcare from limited access to physical violence. The narratives revealed the extent of this inequity, but also opportunities for health workers to act and improve. Stigmatisation from COVID-19 differed between cultures and countries and ranged from none to feeling “ashamed” and “totally bashed”. While experienced as indispensable in the future, patients refused telehealth when they were given “bad news”, such as having an eye removed because of melanoma, and in end-of-life care. Patient representatives redefined their role and became indispensable influencers throughout the pandemic and beyond. Conclusion We reached out to patient representatives with diverse perspectives, including those who represent minorities and marginalised patient populations. Since preferences and personal meanings drive behaviour and could be foundations for targeted interventions, they must be considered in all groups of people to increase society’s resilience as a whole. Future healthcare should tackle inequity, address stigmatisation and consider patients’ narratives to optimize telemedicine.
The Paradigm Shift from School Inspection to School Quality Assurance: Perceptions of the In-service Trained Teachers on the Achievements Made

Improving the quality of education is a Tanzania strategy towards preparation of innovative, creative, competent and competitive workforce required for economic transformation from low agricultural productivity to middle income and semi-industrial country by 2025. Therefore, the paradigm shifts from school inspection to school quality assurance in basic, secondary and teacher education in 2017 was an imperative intervention towards the national development vision. This study therefore, sought to evaluate the perceptions of the in-service trained teachers on the achievement of the paradigm shift from school inspection to school quality assurance in Tanzania education as empirical feedback for the government commitments and investments. Through convergent parallel mixed-methods design, data were collected through semi-structured questionnaires from 76 in-service teachers trained in School Quality Assurance, followed by interviews conducted with in-service teachers trained in Education Leadership, Management and Administration both at Diploma level, between 2019 and 2021 years. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the respondents’ categories basing on their professional training in relation to education practices. The descriptive statistics and content analysis techniques were used to analyze, present, and discuss quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The study found that, the in-service trained teachers perceive the paradigm shift's significant achievement is institutionalizing a collaborative, transparent, holistic and friendly mechanism compared to its predecessor school inspection. However, such achievement has not impacted positively on the quality of education provided as expected due to inadequacy of resources to meet quality standards as recommended by school quality assurance officers, limited quality assurance competencies among teachers, little attention given to teachers’ welfare services and lack of legal power to school quality assurance directorate to enforce their recommendation in schools. Therefore, the study recommended improving resources to meet school quality standards, developing quality assurance competencies among teachers before they graduate, exceptional attention to teachers’ welfare services, and constitutionalizing the school quality assurance directorate into an autonomous entity reporting directly to the parliament. Further study can be conducted on evaluating models for developing quality assurance competencies among pre-service teachers in colleges.
Effective neighbor node discovery using improved Bayesian clock synchronization‐gossip routing protocol in mobile low duty cycle wireless sensor network

In wireless application, mobile low duty cycle wireless sensor network (MLDC‐WSN) gained more attention among the researchers, because it includes advantages like growing node life, saving node power, and network reliability. However, the sleeping features and mobility of MLDC‐WSN results in topology change that restricts the speed of neighbor node discovery. To highlight this concern, a novel routing protocol named as improved Bayesian clock synchronization‐gossip routing protocol is proposed for an effective neighbor node discovery in MLDC‐WSN. The proposed routing protocol reduces end‐to‐end delay, and clock drifts problems. Also, the proposed routing protocol improves the clock synchronization and captures the neighbor discovery nodes by identifying the next neighbor set in the next moment, due to the prediction of the distance and movement speed of neighbors. Simulation and analytical results showed that the proposed routing protocol superiorly decreases the end‐to‐end delay and energy consumption compared to the existing algorithms.
Co-designing theoretically informed, conceptual prototypes for interventions to increase hand hygiene in hospital settings: a case study

Abstract This case study describes a design thinking workshop to develop conceptual prototypes for interventions that may increase hand hygiene in hospital settings. The workshop was held in London, United Kingdom. The workshop brought together nurses, doctors, and infection prevention/control staff with experience working in hospital settings along with behavioural scientists and designers with experience developing theoretically informed interventions. After the workshop, a core design team synthesized the initial conceptual prototypes into a set of five more distinct conceptual prototypes that can inform future interventions. Stanford d.School’s five-stage model was used to capture the design thinking process. We propose additional workshops be conducted wherein multidisciplinary teams of relevant stakeholders (including patients) co-design novel solutions for enduring problems.
Real-time adaptive leg-stiffness for roll compensation via magnetorheological control in a legged robot

Over the recent few decades, the evolving research-field of legged robotics has seen various mechanical and control-based developments. Inspired by biological species, a significant adaptation in modern mechanical leg designs has been the implementation of adjustable stiffness, shifting from what were previously simple linkages to more-complex variable stiffness actuators. Physiological studies previously demonstrated leg-stiffness modulation was not only a common trait in multiple biological locomotors, but also played a key role in disturbance recovery for humans. Guided by this, recent robotics research has shown that this can also be applied to legged robots to achieve similar locomotion adaptations, albeit often limited by the tuning time of leg stiffness in such circumstances. This study proposes real-time adaptive stiffness robot legs which are governed by fast-response magnetorheological fluid dampers, enabling stiffness adjustment upon a single step. Through experimental characterisation and model validation, these legs are shown to achieve a maximum stiffness shift of 114%. Enabled by real-time control during locomotion, improved performance and roll-angle stability is experimentally demonstrated for a bipedal robot test platform. Such improvement to locomotion is found through typical legged locomotion scenarios, with the platform encountering: obstacles, valleys, and coronal gradients in a comprehensive series of experiments.
Emotional intelligence and motor competence in children, adolescents, and young adults

ABSTRACT This study's purpose was to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and motor competence (MC) in 540 children, adolescents, and young adults. Using the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Scale (SSEIT), participants were divided in three groups of high, average, and low EI. The short form of Bruininks–Oseretsky Test for Motor Proficiency – 2 (BOTMP-2SF) evaluated MC. Within each age and sex group, associations between MC and a) EI as a global construct and b) the four subdomains of EI were overall significant (with p < .01 for 85 out of 90 correlations) and very strong (with 66 correlations > .60). A 3 (EI groups) x 3 (age groups) x 2 (sex) ANOVA on standardized overall MC scores revealed that in all age groups, participants with higher EI outperformed their peers with average and low EI with respect to MC (p < .001). Additionally, boys scored higher on MC tests compared to girls (p < .001). A third-order interaction effect (p < .001) revealed that boys’ superiority in MC generally decreased from childhood to adulthood, especially in the low EI group. The outcomes of this study show a robust relationship between EI and MC from childhood through early adulthood, suggesting a novel MC correlate throughout the lifespan.
Prevalence and factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in Zambia: a web-based cross-sectional study

Introduction vaccinations against COVID-19 have been instituted to contain the pandemic. However, information about the acceptability of COVID-19 vaccines in Zambia is lacking. Therefore, the study assessed the prevalence and factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among the general population in Zambia. Methods this was an online questionnaire-based cross-sectional study conducted from 13th April to 21st May 2021. We included adult Zambians who had access to Facebook and WhatsApp. A multivariable logistic regression model was fitted to determine factors influencing vaccine acceptability. Data were analysed using Stata version 16.1. Results of the 677 participants, only 33.4% (n = 226) would accept the vaccine if made available to them. In multivariable regression analysis, respondents who were older than 41 years compared to the 18 to 23 years age group (aOR: 2.77, 95% CI: 1.03-7.48), those who agreed (aOR; 22.85, 95% CI: 11.49-45.49) or did not know (aOR; 3.73, 95% CI: 2.29-6.07) compared to those who disagreed that the COVID-19 vaccine passed through all the necessary stages to ensure its safety and effectiveness, and those who were aware (aOR; 11.13, 95% CI: 5.31-23.35) compared to those who were not aware that the COVID-19 vaccine reduces virus transmission, were more likely to accept the vaccine. Conversely, entrepreneurs compared to government employees (aOR; 0.24, 95% CI: 0.07-0.79) were less likely to accept vaccination. Conclusion awareness of the COVID-19 vaccine was high despite low acceptability levels. These findings are significant as they highlight the need to develop strategies for improving vaccine acceptability in Zambia.
Effect of Dobutamine on Patients with Septic Shock: A Retrospective Nationwide Study

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND Dobutamine is administered to patients with hypoperfusion associated with septic shock; however, its effect on mortality of septic shock remains unknown. We used a national inpatient database to investigate the effect of dobutamine on patients with septic shock. METHODS Adults with septic shock who received ≥30 mL/kg fluid and ≥10 μg/min noradrenaline and either vasopressin or adrenaline within 1 day after admission from 1 July 2010 to 31 March 2016 were identified by searching the Japanese Diagnosis Procedure Combination database. Stabilized inverse probability weighting analysis using propensity scores was performed to compare all-cause 28-day mortality and length of stay between patients who had and had not received dobutamine. RESULTS Of 4,747 eligible patients, 1,259 had received dobutamine and 3,488 had not. All-cause 28-day mortality did not differ significantly between the groups (risk difference, 0.1%; 95% confidence interval [CI], −3.3 to 3.4; P = 0.975). Receipt of dobutamine was significantly associated with longer hospital stay (difference, 3.8; 95% CI, 0.5–7.2; P = 0.024). Subgroup analysis showed that receipt of dobutamine was not significantly associated with length of stay in patients with cardiovascular disease (difference, −5.1 days; 95% CI, −11.7 to 1.5; P = 0.133), or those who received ≥20 μg/min noradrenaline (difference, 0.5 days; 95% CI, −6.8 to 7.7; P = 0.900). CONCLUSIONS Overall all-cause 28-day mortality in patients with septic shock did not significantly differ between patients who had and had not received dobutamine; however, receipt of dobutamine was significantly associated with longer hospital stay.
Auditory Pattern Representations Under Conditions of Uncertainty—An ERP Study

The auditory system is able to recognize auditory objects and is thought to form predictive models of them even though the acoustic information arriving at our ears is often imperfect, intermixed, or distorted. We investigated implicit regularity extraction for acoustically intact versus disrupted six-tone sound patterns via event-related potentials (ERPs). In an exact-repetition condition, identical patterns were repeated; in two distorted-repetition conditions, one randomly chosen segment in each sound pattern was replaced either by white noise or by a wrong pitch. In a roving-standard paradigm, sound patterns were repeated 1–12 times (standards) in a row before a new pattern (deviant) occurred. The participants were not informed about the roving rule and had to detect rarely occurring loudness changes. Behavioral detectability of pattern changes was assessed in a subsequent behavioral task. Pattern changes (standard vs. deviant) elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a, and were behaviorally detected above the chance level in all conditions, suggesting that the auditory system extracts regularities despite distortions in the acoustic input. However, MMN and P3a amplitude were decreased by distortions. At the level of MMN, both types of distortions caused similar impairments, suggesting that auditory regularity extraction is largely determined by the stimulus statistics of matching information. At the level of P3a, wrong-pitch distortions caused larger decreases than white-noise distortions. Wrong-pitch distortions likely prevented the engagement of restoration mechanisms and the segregation of disrupted from true pattern segments, causing stronger informational interference with the relevant pattern information.