Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal Qualitative Study of Career Decision-making of First-Year Medical Students

Objective The growing shortage of neurologists is in part due to suboptimal recruitment. Little is known about students' decision making regarding a career in neurology, particularly early in training. Using a longitudinal qualitative approach, we aimed to understand factors that influence first-year medical students' decisions about neurology. Methods We conducted 1-on-1 semistructured interviews with 15 first-year medical students at 1 institution before and after the preclinical neurology course (2018–2019). In the first interview, we asked about career intentions, factors likely to influence specialty choice, and perceptions of neurology. In the second interview, we asked about changes in students' views over the year. Using thematic analysis, we generated codes and clustered coded data into themes. Results The 2 most prominent factors influencing career choice in general were lifestyle and personal interest. No students expressed concerns about lifestyle in neurology. Most students were neutral about neurology or had a positive personal interest, which typically increased after the neurology course. Students frequently worried about content difficulty and the curative potential of neurology. Conclusions Interventions should include early education about the factors important to students in determining specialty choice, including lifestyle, and address potentially negative perceptions of neurology. Increasing time allotment to the preclinical neurology course may combat perception of the content as difficult.
Environmental Factors in Operations Management: The Impact of Air Quality on Product Demand

The operations management literature has recently begun to analyze how novel data sources help practitioners better understand product demand. We extend this stream of research by analyzing how air quality, a prominent environmental factor that has received little attention in prior studies, can impact product demand. Specifically, we examine how air quality affects the demand for different product color options, and find a greater demand for blue‐color product option on air‐polluted days (vs. clear days). We attribute this pattern to compensatory consumption induced by need deprivation. Specifically, poor air quality deprives people of the visual experience of seeing a blue sky, leading them to seek compensation by acquiring blue‐color options. By analyzing a three‐year purchase‐related dataset from an online retailer (Study 1) and conducting a field experiment (Study 2) and two laboratory experiments (Studies 3 and 4), we establish the external validity, internal validity, and robustness of this finding. We also provide empirical support for deprived visual experience as the mechanism: The proposed effect is driven by air quality indicators that affect visibility (Study 1) and is mediated by experienced visibility (Study 3). We further identify a theoretically relevant individual difference variable as a moderator: prior experience with air pollution, which strengthens the proposed effect in the laboratory setting because prior experience enables people to “relive” the deprived visual experience more vividly (Study 4). Given the prevalence of air pollution across the globe, our research sheds light on how practitioners can improve their operational decisions by factoring in air quality.
Network Analysis to Identify the Risk of Epidemic Spreading

Several epidemics, such as the Black Death and the Spanish flu, have threatened human life throughout history; however, it is unclear if humans will remain safe from the sudden and fast spread of epidemic diseases. Moreover, the transmission characteristics of epidemics remain undiscovered. In this study, we present the results of an epidemic simulation experiment revealing the relationship between epidemic parameters and pandemic risk. To analyze the time-dependent risk and impact of epidemics, we considered two parameters for infectious diseases: the recovery time from infection and the transmission rate of the disease. Based on the epidemic simulation, we identified two important aspects of human safety with regard to the threat of a pandemic. First, humans should be safe if the fatality rate is below 100%. Second, even when the fatality rate is 100%, humans would be safe if the average degree of human social networks is below a threshold value. Nevertheless, certain diseases can potentially infect all nodes in the human social networks, and these diseases cause a pandemic when the average degree is larger than the threshold value. These results indicated that certain infectious diseases lead to human extinction and can be prevented by minimizing human contact.
Analyzing the Concept “Team of Host Country” in German, English, and Russian: a Contrastive Study of Expressive Means in Media Reports on the 2019 Ice Hockey World Championship

This paper aims to describe linguistic units expressing the concept team of host country in German, English, and Russian ice hockey language in relation to syntagmatic types and the associative series these units are based on. The research rests on Saussure’s notion of linguistic units, which should be included in a particular syntagmatic and associative class. The study uses corpus linguistic methodology to extract and analyze respective linguistic units from German, English, and Russian comparable sub-corpora comprising utterances from different media reports devoted to the same sporting event. The authors follow a structuralist approach and discover syntagmatic types, including constant and variable elements, and generalizing regularities in the composition of particular syntagmas. Moreover, the authors build associative series serving as bases for different syntagmatic types and indicating semantic opposition of certain linguistic units. The research also establishes various paradigms reflecting relations between the elements within linguistic units and demonstrating the interaction of syntagmatic and associative elements in the production of the means of expression. From the contrastive perspective, the authors compare linguistic units from different languages and focus on similarities they have in relation to the composition of associative series reflecting the speaker’s range of choices of verbalizations. The data was collected from articles published on web pages of German (sportschau.de, spiegel.de), English (bbc.com, ctvnews.ca), and Russian (tass.ru, rg. ru) mass media.
Disentangling Societal Discontent and Intergroup Threat: Explaining Actions Towards Refugees and Towards the State

and migration issues. In this research, we seek to disentangle societal discontent and discontent about refugees in order to better understand how each of these plays a role in the actions that people might take on the streets. Our core concern is to assess to what extent each of these predicts pro- and anti-refugee actions, and more direct anti-government action intentions as well. What we aimed to show is that both pro- and anti-refugee actions are fuelled not just by In debates about migration in Western countries, citizens’ concerns about immigrant groups often go hand in hand with concerns about the decline of society as a whole. Societal discontent, however, is a distinct concept and may have its own relations with immigration attitudes, over and above the role of perceived immigrant threat. In a survey of a representative sample of Dutch people (N = 1239), we disentangled societal discontent from intergroup threat with respect to their relationship with different kinds of action intentions regarding refugees (both pro and anti) and intentions regarding the government. Unsur-prisingly, societal discontent predicted support for anti-government protest (which was strikingly high). More importantly, societal discontent independently predicted both pro-refugee and anti-refugee action intentions, over and above intergroup threat. These associations were moderated by intergroup threat: only when refugees were experienced as a threat did discontent predict anti-refugee action intentions. On the other hand, societal discontent predicted more pro-refugee action intentions, but only when people experienced refugees as an enrichment. Thus, despite populist rhetoric, societal discontent is not always tied to anti-immigrant actions. This suggests that refugee sentiments and societal discontent are not exchangeable: societal discontent plays an important role in reactions to immigration.
Minimality of SRPT Networks With Resource Sharing

A general multi-resource network with users requiring service from a number of shared resources simultaneously is considered. It is demonstrated that the Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT) service protocol minimizes, in a suitable sense, the system resource idleness with respect to customers with residual service times not greater than any threshold value on every network route. Our arguments are pathwise, with no assumptions on the model stochastic primitives and the network topology.
Challenge or chance? Understanding the impact of anti-corruption campaign on China’s hotel industry

Anti-corruption has garnered increasing attention, especially in China, where President Xi launched an influential and far-reaching anti-corruption campaign in late 2012. A better understanding of the effects of anti-corruption efforts on the hotel sector can reveal insights into the development of the Chinese hotel industry. Based on the quarterly data on China’s hotel industry in 49 cities from quarter 2 of 2010 to quarter 4 of 2015, this study investigates how the anti-corruption campaign (measured by anti-corruption inspections and the number of corruption lawsuits) has influenced hotel industry demand in China. Hypotheses are developed from China’s unique cultural environment of guanxi combined with rent-seeking theory and the crowding-out principle. Empirical results confirm a significant and negative effect of the anti-corruption campaign on hotel lodging and food and beverage demand. Several factors, including a city’s administrative position as a provincial capital, hotel class, level of tourism dependence, and local residents’ entertainment expenditure, are found to moderate the effect of the anti-corruption campaign on hotels’ lodging demand significantly. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of these findings.
First insight into the whole genome shotgun sequence of the endangered noble pen shell Pinna nobilis: a giant bivalve undergoing a mass mortality event

The noble pen shell Pinna nobilis is a Mediterranean endemic and emblematic giant bivalve. Already considered by the late 20th century to be an endangered species, it is facing a dramatic and rapidly expanding epizooty that has decimated populations since mid-2016. The ecological importance of P. nobilis has prompted important investigations for conservation purposes. Here, we report a first analysis of the whole genome sequencing of this animal. This was performed on an Illumina HiSeq X platform using a single paired-end library of short fragments (2 × 150 bp). The de novo contig assembly had a total size of 584 Mb (96,738 contigs, N50 = 7.6 kb, with 0.4% of ambiguous nucleotides), representing 77.5% of the predicted genome size of 754 Mb. The P. nobilis genome is highly AT-rich, with a GC content of 35.6%. At 1%, heterozygosity was in the range of other bivalves with sequenced genomes. Over one-third (36.2%) of the genome consisted of repeated elements with a surprising larger number of short interspersed nuclear elements compared to other molluscan genomes. We were also able to reconstruct the full mitochondrial genome (c. 19 kb, with 12 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNA and 22 tRNA genes). In the context of the epizootic outbreak affecting P. nobilis, a first insight into the innate immune and stress-related genes found in the sequence is provided.
Role of Noise in Spontaneous Activity of Networks of Neurons on Patterned Silicon Emulated by Noise–activated CMOS Neural Nanoelectronic Circuits

Background noise in biological cortical microcircuits constitutes a powerful resource to assess their computational tasks, including, for instance, the synchronization of spiking activity, the enhancement of the speed of information transmission, and the minimization of the corruption of signals. We explore the correlation of spontaneous firing activity of ≈ 100 biological neurons adhering to engineered scaffolds by governing the number of functionalized patterned connection pathways among groups of neurons. We then emulate the biological system by a series of noise-activated silicon neural network simulations. We show that by suitably tuning both the amplitude of noise and the number of synapses between the silicon neurons, the same controlled correlation of the biological population is achieved. Our results extend to a realistic silicon nanoelectronics neuron design using noise injection to be exploited in artificial spiking neural networks such as liquid state machines and recurrent neural networks for stochastic computation.
Atmosphere-ocean dynamics of persistent cold states of the tropical Pacific Ocean

Persistent multiyear cold states of the tropical Pacific Ocean drive hydroclimate anomalies worldwide, including persistent droughts in the extratropical Americas. Here, the atmosphere and ocean dynamics and thermodynamics of multiyear cold states of the tropical Pacific Ocean are investigated using European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reanalyses and simplified models of the ocean and atmosphere. The cold states are maintained by anomalous ocean heat flux divergence and damped by increased surface heat flux from the atmosphere to ocean. The anomalous ocean heat flux divergence is contributed to by both changes in the ocean circulation and thermal structure. The keys are an anomalously shallow thermocline that enhances cooling by upwelling and anomalous westward equatorial currents that enhance cold advection. The thermocline depth anomalies are shown to be a response to equatorial wind stress anomalies. The wind stress anomalies are shown to be a simple dynamical response to equatorial SST anomalies as mediated by precipitation anomalies. The cold states are fundamentally maintained by atmosphere-ocean coupling in the equatorial Pacific. The physical processes that maintain the cold states are well approximated by linear dynamics for ocean and atmosphere and simple thermodynamics.
A Review on MoS2 Properties, Synthesis, Sensing Applications and Challenges

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) is one of the compounds discussed nowadays due to its outstanding properties that allowed its usage in different applications. Its band gap and its distinctive structure make it a promising material to substitute graphene and other semiconductor devices. It has different applications in electronics especially sensors like optical sensors, biosensors, electrochemical biosensors that play an important role in the detection of various diseases’ like cancer and Alzheimer. It has a wide range of energy applications in batteries, solar cells, microwave, and Terahertz applications. It is a promising material on a nanoscale level, with favorable characteristics in spintronics and magnetoresistance. In this review, we will discuss MoS2 properties, structure and synthesis techniques with a focus on its applications and future challenges.
Optimization of Crude Oil Biodegradation of Fungi Isolated from Refinery Effluent Site using Response Surface Methodology

The activities involved in the production and exploration of crude oil has constantly polluted the environment. This study investigated the ability of an indigenous fungus to utilize petroleum hydrocarbon. Response Surface Methodology was used to optimize the effects of pH, microbial concentration (spores/ml), and contact time (days) on the crude oil removal efficiency in refinery effluent. Monocillium sp. was isolated and used for the treatment of refinery effluent due to its predominance in the contaminated soil. Twenty experimental runs were analyzed to determine the effect of pH, microbial concentration and contact time on the oil removal efficiency. From theexperimental results obtained, a maximum oil removal efficiency of 98.42 % was achieved at a pH of 6.5, contact time of 14 days, and a microbial concentration of 3 spores/ml. The results obtained showed the percentage of crude oil removal in the effluent sample increased with an increase in time. Optimization of the experimental result was achieved at a removal efficiency of 98.59 %, a contact time of 13.96 days, a pH of 6.85, and a microbial concentration of 3.01 spores/ml. The findings of this study revealed that Monocillium sp. is a viable hydrocarbon degrader, and can be used in the bioremediation of petroleum contaminated environments. Keywords: Response surface, optimization, bioremediation, hydrocarbon, removal efficiency, Monocillium sp.
Zones of proximal boredom: Vygotsky’s ZPD and modality, abstraction, and explicit themes in Korean from four to seven

Abstract Teachers and parents intuitively judge the ‘level’ of the child and the ‘level’ of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky’s ZPD—the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the maturity of still-dependent functions in children. But this conception of the ZPD conflates two very different kinds of level: that of the child and that of the child’s social milieu. We propose instead an analysis of child speech using Halliday’s work on child development and his systemic-functional linguistics. We measure the emergence of modality, abstraction, and explicit clause Theme in Korean. We analyze four conversations with a single child over three years—from age four to seven. We find that there is a strong shift in the proportion of her clauses devoted to modal probability and towards explicit, textual themes. Counterintuitively, however, the nominal groups in her vocabulary become more concrete rather than more abstract. We conclude that Vygotsky’s ZPD can be accurately gauged and traced through speech development, but for that very reason it cannot be reliably explained by either the child or the environment.
Fabrication and characterization of nanometer-sized gaps in suspended few-layer graphene devices

Graphene nanodevices, such as ultra-narrow constrictions and nanometer-spaced gaps, are emerging as appealing candidates for various applications, ranging from advanced quantum devices to single-molecule junctions and even DNA sequencing. Here, we present the realization and characterization of nanometer-sized gaps in suspended few-layer graphene devices via feedback-controlled electroburning at room temperature. By analyzing the electrical behavior after the electroburning process, we identify two distinct regimes for the resulting devices, deriving a simple yet effective quantitative criterion to determine the complete opening of the nanogaps.
The Effect of Different Levels of Sodium Nitrate on the Physicochemical Parameters and Nutritional Value of Traditionally Produced Fermented Loins

This study evaluated the effect of sodium nitrate reduction on the following parameters: thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, the color parameters (CIE L* a* b*), total heme pigments, heme iron content and nutritional value related to N-nitrosamines content as well as nitrate and nitrite residues of traditionally produced fermented loins. Raw loins (m. longissimus thoracis et lumborum) and fermented products with different levels of nitrate added (0, 50, 100, 150 mg kg−1) were tested during six months of vacuum storage. The reduction of nitrate did not lead to statistically significant changes in total pigment content as well as heme iron content in fermented loins at the end of processing and during storage. Water activity did not differ statistically significantly between the formulations. Fermented loins at the end of processing revealed residual sodium nitrite levels of <10 mg kg−1, while the amount of nitrate residue depended on the level added during production, obtaining the highest value of 19.0 mg kg−1 for the sample with the highest nitrate addition. The level of nitrosamines was <5 µg kg−1 in all samples, which proves their chemical safety. In conclusion, the use of nitrate reduced to 50 mg kg−1 in fermented loins allows to obtain a product with properties similar to the product with 150 mg kg−1 of nitrate, especially in terms of its physicochemical properties and lipid oxidation.
Data-driven optimization of peer-to-peer lending portfolios based on the expected value framework

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending has been gaining popularity amongst bor-rowers and individual investors. This can mainly be attributed to the easy and quick access to loans and the higher possible returns. However, the risk involved in these investments is considerable, and for most investors, being nonprofessionals, this increases the complexity and the importance of investment decisions. In this study, we focus on generating optimal investment decisions to lenders for selecting loans. We treat the loan selection process in P2P lending as a portfolio optimization problem, with the aim being to select a set of loans that provide a required return while minimizing risk. In the process, we use internal rate of return as the measure of return. As the starting point of the model, we use machine-learning algorithms to predict the default probabilities and calculate expected values for the loans based on historical data. Afterwards, we calculate the distance between loans using (i) default probabilities and, as a novel step, (ii) expected value. In the calculations, we utilize kernel functions to obtain similarity weights of loans as the input of the optimization models. Two optimization models are tested and compared on data from the popular P2P platform Lending Club. The results show that using the expected-value framework yields higher return.
Protective effects of nebivolol on acetic acid-induced ulcerative colitis in rats

Background Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory disease of large intestine. Overproduction of free radicals, lowered antioxidant capacity and abnormal apoptosis are involved in pathogenesis. Nebivolol, a β blocker with vasodilatory, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory effects, can play future role in therapies for UC. Aim of the study The purpose of this study was to evaluate the protective effect of nebivolol against acetic acid (AA)-induced UC in rats. Methods Male wistar rats were pre-treated orally with nebivolol 5 mg/kg/d, 10 mg/kg/day, for seven days, before and 3 days after induction of colitis (by intra-rectal administration of 2 ml of 4% AA). Colonic macroscopic scoring and histopathological examination were done. Colonic content of thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), reduced glutathione (GSH), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and myeloperoxidase (MPO) activities were assessed. Apoptosis was monitored by determining caspase-3 gene expression. Serum levels of interleukin (IL)1-β, SOD, TBARS and tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α were measured. Results In AA- group, serum levels of TBARS, TNF-α and IL-1β were significantly increased. SOD activity was significantly reduced. Caspase 3 protein expression was upregulated. Colonic content of TBARS and the activity of MPO were elevated. GSH concentration and activity of SOD were significantly reduced, compared to control group. In nebivolol pretreated groups (5 and 10 mg/kg/d) and sulfasalazine group, all parameters were near normal. Nebivolol significantly decreased colonic macroscopic scoring and wet colon weight compared to AA group. The coloprotective effect of nebivolol was confirmed by histopathological examination. Conclusion Nebivolol has a protective effect against AA- induced colitis, through its anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant and anti-apoptotic effects.