Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk perceptions of individuals living in single-parent households during the COVID-19 crisis: examining the mediating and moderating role of income

The COVID-19 crisis had severe social and economic impact on the life of most citizens around the globe. Individuals living in single-parent households were particularly at risk, revealing detrimental labour market outcomes and assessments of future perspectives marked by worries. As it has not been investigated yet, in this paper we study, how their perception about the future and their outlook on how the pandemic will affect them is related to their objective economic resources. Against this background, we examine the subjective risk perception of worsening living standards of individuals living in single-parent households compared to other household types, their objective economic situation based on the logarithmised equivalised disposable household incomes and analyse the relationship between those indicators. Using the German SOEP, including the SOEP-CoV survey from 2020, our findings based on regression modelling reveal that individuals living in single-parent households have been worse off during the pandemic, facing high economic insecurity. Path and interaction models support our assumption that the association between those indicators may not be that straightforward, as there are underlying mechanisms–such as mediation and moderation–of income affecting its direction and strength. With respect to our central hypotheses, our empirical findings point toward (1) a mediation effect, by demonstrating that the subjective risk perception of single-parent households can be partly explained by economic conditions. (2) The moderating effect suggests that the concrete position at the income distribution of households matters as well. While at the lower end of the income distribution, single-parent households reveal particularly worse risk perceptions during the pandemic, at the high end of the income spectrum, risk perceptions are similar for all household types. Thus, individuals living in single-parent households do not perceive higher risks of worsening living standards due to their household situation per se, but rather because they are worse off in terms of their economic situation compared to individuals living in other household types.
Complex Relationship of Left Ventricular Rotational Mechanics and Deformation Represented by Strain Parameters in Healthy Adults—Detailed Analysis from the Three-Dimensional Speckle-Tracking Echocardiographic MAGYAR-Healthy Study

Introduction: Left ventricular (LV) strains are measures of deformation that reflect LV function quantifying the rate of LV contraction, providing information in three directions in space: radial (RS), longitudinal (LS) and circumferential directions (CS). The LV moves around its longitudinal axis in a special movement called LV rotational mechanics. The present study aimed to assess associations between three-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography (3DSTE)-derived LV rotational mechanics and LV strains in healthy adult subjects. Methods: The present study consisted of 174 healthy adults (mean age: 32.8 ± 12.2 years, 79 males). Complete two-dimensional Doppler echocardiography and 3DSTE were performed in all subjects. Results: While LV-gRS and LV-gLS did not show associations with increased basal LV rotation, the lowest LV-gCS was seen in the presence of the highest LV basal rotation. An increase in basal LV rotation and consequential LV twist were not associated with apical LV rotation. While LV-gLS was not associated with the increase in apical LV rotation, LV-gRS and LV-gCS showed a trend towards increasing values. An increase in LV-gRS was associated with an increasing trend towards apical LV rotation, LV twist and LV-gCS and the preservation of basal LV rotation. LV-gLS also increased but only up to a certain value. An increase in LV-gCS was associated with a tendency towards a decrease in basal LV rotation and a tendency towards an increase in LV-gRS and LV-gLS. The highest LV-gCS was associated with the highest apical LV rotation and LV twist. The highest apical LV rotation, LV twist and LV-gCS were seen in the presence of the highest LV-gLS, while basal LV rotation and LV-gRS were not associated with increasing LV-gLS. Conclusions: Basal LV rotation has been shown to have an inverse relationship with LV-gCS, but without being related to LV-gRS and LV-gLS, while apical LV rotation is associated with LV strains in all directions, but to a different extent, suggesting a complex relationship between LV rotational mechanics and LV strains in healthy adults.
A 10-week FIFA 11+ program improves the short-sprint and modified agility T-test performance in elite seven-a-side soccer players

Objective: The primary objective of this study was to assess the effects of 10 weeks of FIFA 11+ training on the physical performance of elite seven-a-side soccer players. Methods: Twenty-five seven-a-side soccer players were recruited from two senior national teams. The players completed the following protocols during 10 weeks of training: a) FIFA 11+: The FIFA group (n = 13) underwent the FIFA 11+ program combined with regular soccer training; b) Dynamic conventional warm-up: The control group (n = 12) underwent regular soccer training. Their ability was validated using a pre-test followed by a post-test to measure the sprint performance (5-, 10-, and 20-m sprints), a modified agility T-test (MAT), and a five-jump test (FJT). Results: A comparison of pre- and post-tests for physical performance in each group demonstrated that the FIFA 11+ warm-up significantly improved the 10-m sprinting performance (p = 0.034; F = 5.04; ηp 2 = 0.17) and reduced the time spent to perform the MAT (p = 0.000; F = 23.16; ηp 2 = 0.52) in the FIFA group compared with the control group; however, no significant changes were observed in the 5- and 20-m sprints and FJT. Conclusion: The main findings of this research showed that the 10-week FIFA 11+ program led to significant improvements in the 10-m sprint and MAT compared to regular training among elite seven-a-side soccer players. Given these positive outcomes, further studies on the practical implementation and optimization of the FIFA 11+ program are warranted to provide valuable guidance for coaches and athletes, seeking to maximize its benefits in real-world settings.
Exploring service design from the grass-roots level of a governments’ public ecosystem: The case of J province

The modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity is one of the major strategies of national development. Service design is contributing its unique role and value to promoting the modernization of the government service system and improving the efficiency of national governance, but the current research is still relatively insufficient. This paper is a preliminary discussion on the application of service design to promote the construction and development of the grass-roots government's sustainable convenience service ecosystem, based on a public service project of administrative examination and approval we did in a town government in J Province in 2021. We hope this paper will serve as a reference for relevant practice and research.
Toxicological Benchmarks for Wildlife

Ecological risks of environmental contaminants are evaluated by using a two-tiered process. In the first tier, a screening assessment is performed where concentrations of contaminants in the environment are compared to no observed adverse effects level (NOAEL)-based toxicological benchmarks. These benchmarks represent concentrations of chemicals (i.e., concentrations presumed to be nonhazardous to the biota) in environmental media (water, sediment, soil, food, etc.). While exceedance of these benchmarks does not indicate any particular level or type of risk, concentrations below the benchmarks should not result in significant effects. In practice, when contaminant concentrations in food or water resources are less than these toxicological benchmarks, the contaminants may be excluded from further consideration. However, if the concentration of a contaminant exceeds a benchmark, that contaminant should be retained as a contaminant of potential concern (COPC) and investigated further. The second tier in ecological risk assessment, the baseline ecological risk assessment, may use toxicological benchmarks as part of a weight-of-evidence approach (Suter 1993). Under this approach, based toxicological benchmarks are one of several lines of evidence used to support or refute the presence of ecological effects. Other sources of evidence include media toxicity tests, surveys of biota (abundance and diversity), measures of contaminant body burdens, and biomarkers. This report presents NOAEL- and lowest observed adverse effects level (LOAEL)-based toxicological benchmarks for assessment of effects of 85 chemicals on 9 representative mammalian wildlife species (short-tailed shrew, little brown bat, meadow vole, white-footed mouse, cottontail rabbit, mink, red fox, and whitetail deer) or 11 avian wildlife species (American robin, rough-winged swallow, American woodcock, wild turkey, belted kingfisher, great blue heron, barred owl, barn owl, Cooper's hawk, and red-tailed hawk, osprey) (scientific names for both the mammalian and avian species are presented in Appendix B). [In this document, NOAEL refers to both dose (mg contaminant per kg animal body weight per day) and concentration (mg contaminant per kg of food or L of drinking water)]. The 20 wildlife species were chosen because they are widely distributed and provide a representative range of body sizes and diets. The chemicals are some of those that occur at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) waste sites. The NOAEL-based benchmarks presented in this report represent values believed to be nonhazardous for the listed wildlife species; LOAEL-based benchmarks represent threshold levels at which adverse effects are likely to become evident. These benchmarks consider contaminant exposure through oral ingestion of contaminated media only. Exposure through inhalation and/or direct dermal exposure are not considered in this report.
Service design as a practice of freedom in collaborative cultural producers

Service design is strongly linked to practices that maintain workers' dependency on management. Social movements in Brazil eschew hierarchical management, instead seeking self-management based on solidarity, equality, and democracy. In recent years, social movements appropriated digital infrastructures to design and deliver collaborative services. This paper hypothesizes that this could be considered designing services as a practice of freedom. The hypothesis is explored through a descriptive study of the self-management practices of a particular collective associated with the Brazilian Digital Culture movement.
The Roles of the PSEUDO-RESPONSE REGULATORs in Circadian Clock and Flowering Time in Medicago truncatula

PSEUDO-RESPONSE REGULATORs (PRRs) play key roles in the circadian rhythms and flowering in plants. Here, we identified the four members of the PRR family in Medicago truncatula, including MtPRR9a, MtPRR9b, MtPRR7 and MtPRR5, and isolated their Tnt1 retrotransposon-tagged mutants. They were expressed in different organs and were nuclear-localized. The four MtPRRs genes played important roles in normal clock rhythmicity maintenance by negatively regulating the expression of MtGI and MtLHY. Surprisingly, the four MtPRRs functioned redundantly in regulating flowering time under long-day conditions, and the quadruple mutant flowered earlier. Moreover, MtPRR can recruit the MtTPL/MtTPR corepressors and the other MtPRRs to form heterodimers to constitute the core mechanism of the circadian oscillator.
Palliative care knowledge and attitudes toward end-of-life care among intensive care unit nurses in Jordan

Background There is a growing need for palliative care globally due to the rapid aging of the population and improvement in cancer survival rates. Adequate knowledge and a positive attitude are vital for palliative care nurses. The study’s purpose was to examine nurses’ knowledge and attitudes toward palliative care. Methods A cross-sectional design with convenience sampling was used. The study included 182 intensive care unit (ICU) nurses from Jordanian hospitals in all sectors. Self-administered questionnaires were used to assess nurses' knowledge and attitudes toward palliative care. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and the Kruskal-Wallis H test were used to analyze the data. Results We measured nurses’ knowledge using the Palliative Care Quiz for Nursing, and we measured nurses' attitudes using the Frommelt Attitude Toward Care of the Dying scale. The mean total knowledge and attitude scores were 8.88 (standard deviation [SD], 2.52) and 103.14 (SD, 12.31), respectively. The lowest level of knowledge was in psychosocial and spiritual care (mean±SD 0.51±0.70). The percentage of nurses with unfavorable attitudes was 53.3%. Significant differences in knowledge and attitude levels were observed according to educational level, experience, and hospital type. Conclusions ICU nurses have insufficient knowledge and inappropriate attitudes toward palliative care. Knowledge of psychological and spiritual aspects of palliative care was particularly lacking as were appropriate attitudes towards communication with dying patients. Improving knowledge and attitudes toward palliative care in nursing schools and hospitals would help overcome this problem.
PERSPECTIVE AND COMMENTARY: Dairy calf feeding and nutrition major variables and subsequent performance

Purpose: My objective was to provide a critical analysis of the major nutrition variables when feeding dairy calves and to provide practical applications. Sources: Peer-reviewed scientific literature, research abstracts, and field experiences in dairy and calf ranch operations were used. Synthesis: A variety of liquids are fed to dairy calves in the United States, and most often, they are fed in combinations. It is critical to know and measure composition and solids levels, and to ensure consistency in what liquid is fed and how it is fed. Avoid greater than 15% solids to minimize digestive upsets due to osmolality. Traditional early weaning programs and 20% CP/20% fat milk replacer (MR) have been replaced with higher CP MR and fed at higher levels resulting in more ADG prior to weaning. Given the inverse relationship between MR fed (and its fat level) and calf starter (CS) intake, the challenge then is to moderate MR feeding early enough prior to weaning to ensure adequate CS intake prior to weaning to optimize functional rumen development and minimize postweaning slump. Conclusions and Applications: Feed a well-textur-ized CS to optimize functional rumen development and av oid needing to feed forage or roughage prior to weaning. Too much forage fed too soon impairs rumen development and confounds true BW gain with gut fill. Water is the most essential nutrient needed in the greatest quantity by dairy calves. It is consumed at about 4:1 relative to DMI. Ensure water and CS containers are physically separated to avoid contamination of each in the other and to have better intake and performance. In colder weather, feed warm water. Calves are most efficient in converting nutrients to growth on a dairy farm when properly fed and managed.
A Note on the Rediscovery of the Sand Wasp Bembecinus proximus (Handlirsch) from an Urban Habitat

The wasp species Bembecinus proximus was described by Handlirsch (1892) but the type locality of the specimen remains inconclusive and was supposed to have been collected from Barrackpore, West Bengal, India. The species is known to be distributed in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India, but the current status of the genus and the species in India remains uninvestigated since the last publication of the species by Krombein 1984. This species has been rediscovered from India after a span of more than three decades from an urban roof-top garden and its ecological role in the urban habitat has been briefly explored and explained. Ziziphus mauritiana has been first reported as its nectaring plant. The significance of these artificial green habitats for urban entomofaunal conservation has been highlighted.
IMIA: Interference Mitigation via Iterative Approaches for Automotive Radar

Interference mitigation for automotive radar is becoming increasingly important due to its increasing popularity in automobiles. In this paper, we tackle this problem and propose two iterative algorithms to suppress mutual interferences among Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars. We first exploit the angular feature of the interferences and use a high-resolution compressed sensing algorithm to single out the interferences in the spatial domain. In order to avoid the influence between the interference segments, we extend the traditional 2-D Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm in an iterative manner to enhance its interference detection performance. In practice, the weak interference is usually difficult to detect, especially when its power is close to that of the strong target, and its existence will mask the weak targets, resulting in missed detection. To tackle this problem, we design a novel iterative interference mitigation algorithm. In each iteration, we estimate the parameters of the targets and subtract out the estimated targets signals from the original time-domain signal. After subtracting out the strong targets, the weak interference segments become more obvious, and thus can be detected more easily. Finally, both the numerical and experimental examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed iterative approaches for interference mitigation.
Predicting the Impact of Data Poisoning Attacks in Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Networks

As computer networks become increasingly important in various domains, the need for secure and reliable networks becomes more pressing, particularly in the context of blockchain-enabled supply chain networks. One way to ensure network security is by using intrusion detection systems (IDSs), which are specialised devices that detect anomalies and attacks in the network. However, these systems are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, such as label and distance-based flipping, which can undermine their effectiveness within blockchain-enabled supply chain networks. In this research paper, we investigate the effect of these attacks on a network intrusion detection system using several machine learning models, including logistic regression, random forest, SVC, and XGB Classifier, and evaluate each model via their F1 Score, confusion matrix, and accuracy. We run each model three times: once without any attack, once with random label flipping with a randomness of 20%, and once with distance-based label flipping attacks with a distance threshold of 0.5. Additionally, this research tests an eight-layer neural network using accuracy metrics and a classification report library. The primary goal of this research is to provide insights into the effect of data poisoning attacks on machine learning models within the context of blockchain-enabled supply chain networks. By doing so, we aim to contribute to developing more robust intrusion detection systems tailored to the specific challenges of securing blockchain-based supply chain networks.
Distributed Computation of DNN via DRL With Spatiotemporal State Embedding

Offloading techniques are considered one of the key enablers of deep neural network (DNN)-based artificial intelligence (AI) services on end devices with limited computing resources. However, offloading DNN layers involves hard combinatorial problems. To this end, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based offloading algorithm for computing DNN layers with minimum end-to-end inference latency. We combine long short-term memory (LSTM) and graph neural network for state embedding that can exploit spatial correlation over the network to accelerate training, and temporal correlation over time to reduce the overhead of state monitoring. With this embedding, our DRL algorithm can draw multiple actions from a single state observation and adapt, without retraining, to new environments unseen in the training phase. We show through extensive simulations that our algorithm outperforms the existing ones in terms of both latency and robustness to feedback delay which is inevitable in practice, in particular, achieving a performance enhancement of up to 29.6% in some scenarios.
Using environmental and spatial filters to explain stonefly occurrences in southeastern Brazilian streams: implications for biomonitoring Utilizando filtros ambientais e espaciais para explicar a ocorrência de plecópteros em córregos do sudeste Brasileiro: implicações para o biomonitoramento

Many biomonitoring programs of aquatic systems are based on knowledge of species' geographic distributions and on how different groups respond facing different sources of impact. In this study, we asked if plecopteran occurrences at genus level can be explained using environmental conditions of low-order Southeastern Brazilian streams. Additionally, we asked if plecopteran nymphs discriminate reference streams from streams under diffuse anthropic impacts. We sampled plecopteran nymphs in 44 first- and second-order reference streams and in 14 test streams representing three of the most common land uses in the State of Sao Paulo (Eucalyptus, sugar-cane plantation and pasture). Our data set included incidence of Plecoptera genera, and genus richness as response variables, and environmental and spatial variables as predictors. We adopted a variation partitioning technique and estimated the unique and common effects of the two sets of explanatory variables on the response variables using multiple regression and RDA analyses. We found no relation between our response variables and environmental factors. Our results also revealed that only spatial variables significantly explained the variation on distributional patterns of Plecoptera in reference streams. This result seems to characterize differences between mountain areas and the sedimentary basin. Defining regions and reference streams for biomonitoring is an essential step to establish effective biomonitoring in the State of Sao Paulo, because it may contribute to separate natural variability from anthropogenic influences.
Switched Battery DC–DC Converters for Low-Power Applications

DC–DC conversion at an ultralow operating frequency is one potential solution to maintain high efficiency in cases of ultralow power delivery. Switched-capacitor converters (SCCs) have an inherent limitation to operate at low frequencies due to their charge-sharing losses. To overcome this issue, this article explores a new dc–dc conversion family based on switched batteries. The so-called switched-battery converter (SBC) is derived from the SCC by replacing the flying capacitors with batteries. The particular nature of the battery introduces constraints but offers degrees of freedom that redraw the trade-offs between switching frequency, charge-sharing losses, power density, and power efficiency. We demonstrate 97% power efficiency at 27 mW with only 100 Hz switching frequency using a button cell (69 mm3) to achieve a 2:1 voltage conversion ratio. We also propose a 3:1 topology and various battery experiments to generalize the concept.