Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Barriers to help‐seeking among music festival attendees in New South Wales, Australia

Abstract Introduction Prompt help‐seeking behaviour by music festival attendees can reduce risks associated with drug use; however, little is known about perceived barriers to help‐seeking when experiencing or witnessing illness at music festivals. We explored potential barriers and their association with festivalgoer characteristics. Methods We conducted an on‐site cross‐sectional survey of attendees at New South Wales music festivals in 2019/2020. Perceived barriers to help‐seeking in the hypothetical event of the respondent or a friend becoming unwell at the festival were assessed, and regression analyses were conducted to identify characteristics associated with these barriers. Results Across six festivals, 1229 people were surveyed and four‐fifths (83.2%) reported ≥1 barrier: 32.7% fear of getting in trouble with the police, 20.6% not knowing where to find help, 17.2% not knowing how unwell someone might be and 15.3% concern about friends or relatives finding out. In multivariable analyses, people of diverse sexuality and people using drugs that day had greater odds of reporting fear of trouble with the police. People reporting drug use that day had lower odds of reporting not knowing where to find help. Men, gender‐diverse people and people using drugs that day had greater odds of reporting concern about friends or relatives finding out. Discussion and Conclusions Our data substantiate concerns regarding policing strategies and their impact on festivals. Initiatives to support conversations about drugs with friends and families may be best targeted to younger people and those from gender‐diverse backgrounds.
Can caffeine supplementation reverse the impact of time of day on cognitive and short-term high intensity performances in young female handball players?

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to explore whether caffeine (CAF) intake counteracts the morning reduction in cognitive and short-term maximal physical performances related to the daily variation pattern in young female handball players. In a randomized order, 15 active young female handball players [mean (SD) age:16.3 ± 0.8 y, height: 166.1 ± 5.3 cm; body mass: 58.7 ± 9.1 kg; BMI: 21.3 ± 3.1 kg/m2] performed the simple reaction time (SRT), the attention (AT), the squat jump (SJ), the Illinois agility (IAT) and the 5 m run shuttles (to determine total (TD) and peak (PD) distances) tests at 08:00 h and 18:00 h, 60 min after a placebo (cellulose) or CAF (6 mg·kg−1) intake. The results revealed a significant diurnal variation during both the placebo and the CAF conditions, with improvement of cognitive and physical performances from 08:00 h to 18:00 h (P < .05). Moreover, the improvement of SRT and AT after CAF was better in the morning compared to the afternoon (e.g., 5.3% vs. 2.8% for SRT and 4.2% vs. 0.9% for AT). At 08:00 h and 18:00 h, SJ, IAT, TD, and PD were higher after CAF intake than Placebo (p < .05). This improvement was greater at 08:00 h than 18:00 h (e.g., 4.2% vs 1% for SJ, 1.6% vs 0.2% for IAT, 2.4% vs. 0.3% for TD, and 6% vs. 0.9% for PD). In conclusion, the dose of 6 mg·kg−1 CAF intake improves the cognitive and physical performances in young female handball players and reduces the intraday variation of these parameters. Abbreviations CAF: Caffeine PLC: Placebo SRT: Simple Reaction Time AT: Attention Test SJ: Squat Jump IAT: Illinois Agility Test OT: Oral Temperature QUEST: Questionnaire RPE: Rating of Perceived Exertion PD: Peak Distance TD: Total Distance
Efficacy of virtual interventions for reducing symptoms of depression in community-dwelling older adults: a systematic review

ABSTRACT Background: Older adults experience symptoms of depression, leading to suffering and increased morbidity and mortality. Although we have effective depression therapies, physical distancing and other public health measures have severely limited access to in-person interventions. Objective: To describe the efficacy of virtual interventions for reducing symptoms of depression in community-dwelling older adults. Design: Systematic review. Setting: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Libraries, PsycINFO, and gray literature from inception to July 5, 2021. Participants and interventions: We included randomized trials (RCTs) comparing the efficacy of virtual interventions to any other virtual intervention or usual care in community-dwelling adults ≥60 years old experiencing symptoms of depression or depression as an outcome. Measurements: The primary outcome was change in symptoms of depression measured by any depression scale. Results: We screened 12,290 abstracts and 830 full text papers. We included 15 RCTs (3100 participants). Five RCTs examined persons with depression symptoms at baseline and ten examined depression as an outcome only. Included studies demonstrated feasibility of interventions such as internet or telephone cognitive behavioral therapy with some papers showing statistically significant improvement in depressive symptoms. Conclusions: There is a paucity of studies examining virtual interventions in older adults with depression. Given difficulty in accessing in-person therapies in a pandemic and poor access for people living in rural and remote regions, there is an urgent need to explore efficacy, effectiveness, and implementation of virtual therapies.
Difference of Convex Functions Programming With Machine-Learning Prior for the Imaging Problem in Electrical Capacitance Tomography

The electrical capacitance tomography technology has potential benefits for the process industry by providing visualization of material distributions. One of the main technical gaps and impediments that must be overcome is the low-quality tomogram. To address this problem, this study introduces the data-guided prior and combines it with the electrical measurement mechanism and the sparsity prior to produce a new difference of convex functions programming problem that turns the image reconstruction problem into an optimization problem. The data-guided prior is learned from a provided dataset and captures the details of imaging targets since it is a specific image. A new numerical scheme that allows a complex optimization problem to be split into a few less difficult subproblems is developed to solve the challenging difference of convex functions programming problem. A new dimensionality reduction method is developed and combined with the relevance vector machine to generate a new learning engine for the forecast of the data-guided prior. The new imaging method fuses multisource information and unifies data-guided and measurement physics modeling paradigms. Performance evaluation results have validated that the new method successfully works on a series of test tasks with higher reconstruction quality and lower noise sensitivity than the popular imaging methods.
Effects of Spartina alterniflora Invasion on Nitrogen Fixation and Phosphorus Solubilization in a Subtropical Marine Mangrove Ecosystem

This study revealed the efficient nutrient cycling mechanism of mangroves. Positive coupling effects were observed in sediment quality, NF and PS processes, and NFOPSMs with the invasion of S. alterniflora. ABSTRACT Nitrogen fixation (NF) and phosphorus solubilization (PS) play a key role in maintaining the stability of mangrove ecosystems. In China, the invasion of Spartina alterniflora has brought a serious threat to the mangrove ecosystem. However, systematic research on NF and PS in mangrove sediments has not been conducted, and limited studies have focused on the response of NF and PS to S. alterniflora invasion, particularly at different sediment depths. In the present study, shotgun metagenomics and quantitative PCR were used to study the 0- to 100-cm sediment profile of the mangrove ecosystem in the Beibu Gulf of China. Results showed that the PS potential of mangrove sediments was primarily caused by enzymes encoded by phoA, phoD, ppx, ppa, and gcd genes. S. alterniflora changed environmental factors, such as total nitrogen, total phosphorus, and total organic carbon, and enhanced the potential of NF and PS in sediments. Moreover, most microorganisms involved in NF or PS (NFOPSMs) responded positively to the invasion of S. alterniflora. Cd, available iron, and salinity were the key environmental factors that affected the distribution of NF and PS genes (NFPSGs) and NFOPSMs. A strong coupling effect was observed between NF and PS in the mangrove ecosystem. S. alterniflora invasion enhanced the coupling of NF and PS and the interaction of microorganisms involved in NF and PS (NFAPSM), thereby promoting the turnover of NP and improving sediment quality. Finally, 108 metagenome-assembled genomes involved in NF or PS were reconstructed to further evaluate NFOPSMs. IMPORTANCE This study revealed the efficient nutrient cycling mechanism of mangroves. Positive coupling effects were observed in sediment quality, NF and PS processes, and NFOPSMs with the invasion of S. alterniflora. This research contributed to the understanding of the effects of S. alterniflora invasion on the subtropical mangrove ecosystem and provided theoretical guidance for mangrove protection, restoration, and soil management. Additionally, novel NFOPSMs provided a reference for the development of marine biological fertilizers.
From Antarctica to cancer research: a novel human DNA topoisomerase 1B inhibitor from Antarctic sponge Dendrilla antarctica

Abstract Nature has been always a great source of possible lead compounds to develop new drugs against several diseases. Here we report the identification of a natural compound, membranoid G, derived from the Antarctic sponge Dendrilla antarctica displaying an in vitro inhibitory activity against human DNA topoisomerase 1B. The experiments indicate that membranoid G, when pre-incubated with the enzyme, strongly and irreversibly inhibits the relaxation of supercoiled DNA. This compound completely inhibits the cleavage step of the enzyme catalytic mechanism by preventing protein binding to the DNA. Membranoid G displays also a cytotoxic effect on tumour cell lines, suggesting its use as a possible lead compound to develop new anticancer drugs.
Outsourcing Transcription: Extending Ethical Considerations in Qualitative Research

Research ethics considerations foreground minimising harm to participants. Whilst increasing attention is being paid to researcher vulnerabilities, little has been written about transcriptionists, who can potentially experience emotional distress and vicarious trauma. In this article, we highlight ethical considerations when outsourcing audio for transcription as part of the RE:CURRENT (REcurrent miscarriage: evaluating CURRENT services) Project. Through qualitative interviews, we explored the perspectives of those involved in the management/delivery of services, and women and men who experienced recurrent miscarriage (N = 62). We put distress protocols in place for participants, researchers and the transcriptionist, and adopted a research team approach with the professional transcriber. The transcriptionist highlighted the isolated nature of the role; how researchers often did not brief her when commissioning work, and how the personal impacts of this work were rarely considered. Researchers and ethics committees should consider ethical responsibilities to ‘do no harm’ when it comes to transcriptionist wellbeing.
Wearable textile patch antenna fed by proximity coupling with increased bandwidth

This letter presents the design methodology of a textile rectangular patch antenna with increased bandwidth. The broadening of the antenna operating band is obtained by using a proximity coupling feed line cascaded to a quarter‐wave impedance transformer. The design parameters used to enhance the antenna bandwidth are the widths of the feed line and impedance transformer. The proposed design procedure has been applied to the design of four antennas centered at 2.45 GHz using denim substrate and conductive fabric. All antennas have the same patch dimensions, but they were designed using different values for the widths of the feed line and impedance transformer. The measured 10‐dB return loss bandwidth of the antenna prototypes are 11.2%, 13.4%, 17.0%, and 24.0%, in good agreement with simulated results. The effect of human body proximity and antenna curvature on the performance of the designed antennas has also been analyzed. The antenna configuration investigated has demonstrated to be able to increase the antenna operating band. The proposed design procedure is flexible, allowing the design of antennas with a variety of bandwidth values. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1906–1912, 2016
User-centric information modeling

Agriculture and farmers faces a great challenge in effectively manage information both internally and externally in order to improve the economic and operational efficiency of operations, reduce environmental impact and comply with various documentation requirements. In order to meet this challenge, the flow of information between decision processes must be analysed and modelled as a prerequisite for the subsequent design, construction and implementation of situated information systems. This paper presents an attempt to use system engineering principles for the identification of decision processes and information flows within specific agricultural domains as a framework and guidance for the design of the physical information system. The information flow configuration is centred around the farmer as the principal decision maker. The new information management concepts and designs mean that farmers have to be ready to adopt new working habits and perhaps also undergo further training. Farmers can utilise different services more efficiently and they are able to outsource some of the tasks they had previously performed themselves. Farmers have better knowledge of their production processes and are able to evaluate the performance of the chosen technology. This should lead to better process control in farms. Farmers can also utilise the collected farm data to show the quality of farming e.g. traceability, to markets and administration. The system concept also allows the farmers to access and utilise better scientific research and technological developments by providing fresh real process data and the ability to update the systems according to the latest knowledge.
Efficient IoT Framework for Industrial Applications

The use of low-power wireless sensors and actuators with networking support in in-dustry has increased over the past decade. New generations of microcontrollers, new hardware for communication, and the use of standardized protocols such as the Internet Protocol have resulted in more possibilities for interoperability than ever before. This in-creasing interoperability allows sensors and actuator nodes to exchange information with large numbers of peers, which is beneﬁcial for creating advanced, ﬂexible and reusable systems.The increase in interoperability has resulted in an increase in the number of possible attacks from malicious devices or users. For this reason, the use of encryption techniques to protect client and server communications has become mandatory. However, even with state-of-the-art encryption mechanisms, there is no protection that can control access to each particular service with ﬁne-grained precision. The nodes within an industrial network of wireless sensors and actuators are resource-constrained embedded devices, and increasing interoperability therefore requires a higher level of computation capabil-ities. The nodes’ intrinsic limitations of memory and processing exert an adverse eﬀect on power consumption and communication delays, resulting in a shorter battery life-time. Therefore, the standard computing solutions for Internet communications are not directly applicable, and new mechanisms to achieve security, scalability, dependability, interoperability and energy eﬃciency are needed.Sensor and actuator networks can transmit sensed data, but they also oﬀer access to the actuators. Such accesses, presumably provided via services, require an access protection scheme. For this reason, the use of access control mechanisms is mandatory. Access control assists in the creation of customized services and access policies. These access policies can isolate access permissions to devices with diﬀerent roles, such as production and maintenance.The main contribution of this thesis is a novel, eﬃcient IoT framework for industrial applications, including design, implementation, and experimental validation. The frame-work includes features for communication protection, authentication, ﬁne-grained access control, zero-conﬁguration networking, and run-time reconﬁguration. These technologies and their corresponding energy consumption data clearly demonstrate the feasibility of integrating a battery-operated IoT concept into a functional System of Systems. The provided data also pinpoint the most critical areas for improvement.
Detektion und Vermessung von Schäden in Abwasserrohren mit einem axialen 3D-Lichtschnittsensor (Detection and Measurement of Damages in Sewer Pipes with a 3D-structured Light Projection Sensor)

Abstract Ein axialsymmetrischer 3D-Lichtschnittsensor wurde entwickelt, der an die Geometrie eines Kanalrohres angepasst ist. Mit ihm können die 3D-Koordinaten des sichtbaren Bereichs absolut vermessen werden. Eine sehr schnelle Detektion und Grobklassifikation der Innenschäden ist schon mit einer qualitativen Auswertung der erfassten Muster möglich. Dieser Sensor wurde in eine marktübliche Inspektionskamera integriert und unter realen Bedingungen erprobt.
The Withering of OEM Model and the Way Ahead for Hong Kong Enterprises

In the past three decades, the majority of Hong Kong manufacturers thrived on the OEM business model — typically the firms focused on building a low-cost advantage by capitalizing on low factors of production costs in the Pearl River Delta Region. Unfortunately, as China’s economic reform policy successfully implemented in a greater depth and wider scope, the production and operations costs have been steadily increasing. Hong Kong manufacturers who owned their factories in the PRD Region or subcontracted their orders to the local factories find their low-cost advantages are quickly disappearing. What is more disturbing to the Hong Kong enterprises is the fact that their mainland contractors are becoming their direct competitors in getting OEM orders. There have been wide spread concerns about the sustainability of the OEM model and there were calls for firms to engage in technological upgrading and/or building of own brands by various governments. Using concepts from strategic management and family business, this paper defines OEM, ODM and related business models, and explores the alternative development paths that OEM and ODM firms can take. Given the challenging global market forces and inherent weaknesses of the local firms, this paper argues that it is unwise for local enterprises to either head on compete against or mimic the NIE key rival’s competitive advantage. Being inspired by the philosophy of Tai Chi, the authors posit a natural path beyond OEM and ODM business models which is leveraging the best-in-class operators along the value chain activities, and synergistically integrate them as an entity to compete against the global competitors. Managerial and public policy implications are discussed at the end of the paper.
Performance of the Reveal Rapid Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing System on Gram-Negative Blood Cultures at a Large Urban Hospital

Timely and effective antibiotic treatment is vital for sepsis, with increasing incidence of antimicrobial-resistant bacteremia driving interest in rapid phenotypic susceptibility testing. To enable the widespread adoption needed to make an impact, antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) systems need to be accurate, enable rapid intervention, have a broad antimicrobial menu and be easy to use and affordable. ABSTRACT Timely and effective antibiotic treatment is vital for sepsis, with increasing incidence of antimicrobial-resistant bacteremia driving interest in rapid phenotypic susceptibility testing. To enable the widespread adoption needed to make an impact, antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) systems need to be accurate, enable rapid intervention, have a broad antimicrobial menu and be easy to use and affordable. We evaluated the Specific Reveal (Specific Diagnostics, San Jose, CA) rapid AST system on positive blood cultures with Gram-negative organisms in a relatively resistant population in a large urban hospital to assess its potential for routine clinical use. One hundred four randomly selected positive blood cultures (Virtuo; bioMérieux) were Gram stained, diluted 1:1,000 in Pluronic water, inoculated into 96-well antibiotic plates, sealed with the Reveal sensor panel, and placed in the Reveal instrument for incubation and reading. The MIC and susceptible/intermediate/resistant category was determined and compared to results from Vitek 2 (bioMérieux) for the 17 antimicrobials available and to Sensititre (Thermo Fisher) for 24 antimicrobials. Performance was also assessed with contrived blood cultures with 33 highly resistant strains. Reveal was in 98.0% essential agreement (EA) and 96.3% categorical agreement (CA) with Sensititre, with just 1.3% very major error (VME) and 97.0%/96.2%/1.3% EA/CA/VME versus Vitek 2. Reveal results for contrived highly resistant strains were equivalent, with EA/CA/VME of 97.7%/95.2%/1.0% with CDC/FDA Antibiotic Resistance Isolate Bank references. Average time to result (TTR) for Reveal was 4.6 h. Sample preparation was relatively low skill and averaged 3 min. We conclude that the Reveal system enables accurate and rapid susceptibility testing of Gram-negative blood cultures.
Loading and scheduling outbound trucks at a dispatch warehouse

Abstract We address the operational planning problem of loading and scheduling outbound trucks at a dispatch warehouse shipping goods to several customers. This entails, first, assigning shipments to outbound trucks given the trailers’ capacities and, second, scheduling the trucks’ processing at the dock doors such that the amount of required resources at the terminal (e.g., dock doors and logistics workers) does not exceed the available levels. The trucks should be scheduled as late as possible within their time windows, but no later than the deadlines of the loaded shipments. Such planning problems arise, e.g., at dispatch warehouses of automotive parts manufacturers supplying parts to original equipment manufacturers in a just-in-time or even just-in-sequence manner. We formalize this operational problem and provide a time-indexed mixed-integer linear programming model. Moreover, we develop an exact branch-and-price algorithm, which is shown to perform very well, solving most realistically sized problem instances to optimality within a few minutes. In a numerical study, we also look into the interplay between the time window policy for trucks and just-in-time deliveries. Finally, we find evidence that too small a workforce or too few outbound dock doors in the dispatch warehouse can substantially compromise the punctuality of the deliveries.