Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecological sustainability in rangelands: the contribution of remote sensing

Rangelands in temperate areas provide food to herds of domesticated animals and, therefore, provide the infrastructure for two major industries: (a) the meat industry that feeds large populations around the globe; and (b) the wool industry that uses fibre from sheep. In the semiarid zone, rangelands have a socio-economic role as they support the economy and culture of pastoral societies. However, despite their importance, rangelands are under constant threat due to encroachment by humans and invasion by noxious plants, due to degradation and erosion processes and due to drought effects. Remote sensing can be used to identify and monitor the threats to ecological processes in rangelands and, thus, to their ecological sustainability. This article provides a review of the scientific literature on the remote sensing of rangelands and discusses recent developments with respect to mapping thematic classes of vegetation and vegetative cover, mapping biophysical properties such as primary production, and monitoring land-use changes, including those driven by anthropogenically enhanced processes such as soil erosion. In the light of the reviewed studies, we expect that future research on monitoring rangeland sustainability with remote sensing will focus on hyperspectral measurements of the spectra of rangeland plant species, on lidar measurements of canopy height, and on synthetic aperture radar for biomass assessment. In the long-term, more predictive (or at least heuristic) modelling of degradation scenarios due to erosion, invasion of noxious species, and land-use transformations can be anticipated.
Characterization of Seismic Sources from Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT): Examples from Baghdad

Abstract On 10 October 2006, a mortar attack on U.S. Forward Operating Base Falcon, south of the Iraqi Capital Baghdad ammunition supply point, resulted in an ammunition “cook‐off” accompanied by numerous explosions. The explosions shook the base and damaged surrounding structures, and they were both felt by Baghdadi residents and seismically recorded at the single broadband seismometer at the Baghdad seismic observatory BHD. The mortar activity, ensuing explosions, and accompanying military activities provided a wealth of information on the nature of seismic and acoustic wave generation and propagation resulting from nearby battlefield sources. Seismic records from the observatory show a variety of waveforms that can be qualified as different types of battlefield‐related sources, including weapon rounds, mortars, rockets, mines, improvised explosive devices, vehicle‐borne improvised explosive devices, and airborne vehicles. These different kinds of military operations in urban terrain are characterized and quantified by correlating their recorded military activity with observed seismic records and various aspects of the signals’ wave propagation.
Risk and Resiliency Factors Associated with School Bullying and Cyberbullying Among Adolescents in Mediterranean Countries

ABSTRACT School bullying and cyberbullying are serious public health problems that negatively affect the lives of school-aged children. We examined the correlation between risk behaviors and lack of resiliency factors with bullying and cyberbullying across seven Mediterranean countries. The sample consisted of 33,399 adolescents (51.1% girls) aged 11, 13, and 15 years who participated in the Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey in 2018 in Greece, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. Bivariate logistic regressions were conducted to test the relationship between risk behaviors, resilience, and bullying. All risk behaviors and lack of resiliency factors examined were related to involvement in bullying as a victim, perpetrator, or bully-victim, both in school and cyberbullying. Moreover, the odds of involvement in school bullying and cyberbullying increased as the number of risk behaviors and the lack of resiliency factors grew. Our results may contribute to the development and implementation of anti-bullying programs.
Depression in Patients With Parkinson’s Disease: A Hospital-Based Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Depression, a common non-motor symptom in Parkinson’s disease (PD), is often underdiagnosed and can significantly impact the quality of life (QOL) and treatment outcomes. Specific disease-related factors and non-specific factors may contribute to depression, and these factors should be identified early to plan the appropriate interventions that promote positive mood. The study aimed to assess the prevalence of depression in PD patients and to find out the factors associated with depression among patients with PD attending the neurology OPD of a tertiary care teaching hospital in Trivandrum. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the neurology OPD of Government Medical College Hospital, Trivandrum, from December 2021 to February 2023. We included patients with PD diagnosed according to the United Kingdom PD Society Brain Bank criteria. We collected data from 220 patients with PD by interview technique. Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) was used to assess depression and anxiety in this study. Staging and the severity of the motor symptoms were assessed using the Hoehn and Yahr scale and the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale Part III (MDS UPDRS Part III), respectively. Results: Among 220 patients with PD, 31.8% (95% CI: 4.36-5.40) had depression. The non-specific variables, such as education, living arrangements, and gender, and disease-specific variables, such as the severity of motor symptoms (MDS UPDRS Part III score) and the Hoehn and Yahr staging of PD, had a statistically significant association with depression. Logistic regression analysis showed that the severity of motor symptoms (OR=2.69, p=0.004)) and female gender (OR=1.830, p= 0.05) were the independent factors associated with depression. Conclusion: Depression is a common non-motor symptom of PD that is often underdiagnosed and undertreated and can significantly impact the QOL of patients and their caregivers. Hence, it should be identified early and managed by pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies.
Perception of Rural and Urban Homemakers Regarding Ban on Polythene Use in the State of Himachal Pradesh

Abstract Polythene once considered as a boon by the people is turning out to be a big nuisance and threatening the environment due to its non-biodegradable nature. In the state of Himachal Pradesh, the use of polythene bags was banned in June’2004. In the present study, perception of rural and urban masses regarding the ban on polythene bags was studied in the district Kangra of Himachal Pradesh. Information was collected from rural and urban homemakers to know their views after a period of one year of ban on polythene bags. The tools applied for this purpose included interview schedule, observations and discussion with the users. It was noticed that a large proportion of the respondents preferred to carry polythene bags before ban. The urban people experienced its effect on their day-to-day activities and they took a long time to acclimatize to this ban. On the contrary, rural people were less affected and more conscious about the use of polythene bags. Majority ofthe users were ignorant about ill-effects of polythene bags (especially recycled and coloured ones) on the health.
Natural and Enhanced Attenuation of Soil and Groundwater at the

1 Contamination of groundwater by nitrate continues to be a pervasive issue, and there is 2 great interest in the use of natural and enhanced attenuation to manage subsurface nitrate 3 contamination. Several methods for characterizing the occurrence and rate of nitrate 4 attenuation were tested at a field site near Monument Valley, Arizona. Spatial and 5 temporal nitrate concentration data collected from a transect of monitoring wells located 6 along the plume centerline were analyzed to evaluate the overall rates of natural 7 attenuation. The occurrence and rate of denitrification was evaluated through microcosm 8 experiments, nitrogen isotopic fractionation analysis, and solute transport modeling. 9 First-order rate coefficients calculated with each method were comparable. The 10 composite natural attenuation rate coefficient was slightly larger but similar to the 11 denitrification rate coefficient, which suggests that microbially induced decay primarily 12 controls nitrate attenuation at the site. This research highlights the benefits associated 13 with a multiple-method approach for the characterization of natural attenuation. 14
Investigating the Correlation Between Agility and Jump Performance Indices in Indian Contact Sports Persons: An Observational Study

Introduction: The use of the jump as a plyometric exercise is a way to improve jump performance. Additionally, as it requires abrupt stopping, starting, and changing directions, it might enhance agility. Thus, this study aims to find out the relationship between drop jump variables and agility in contact sports. Materials and Methods: A total of 30 national-level male athletes (age=20.06±1.94 years; height=1.67±0.06 m; body weight: 58.02±8.40 kg) participated in this study. A drop jump test was performed on the Kistler force plate and agility was assessed by using the Illinois agility test along with the agility t-test. The Pearson correlation test was used to find the significant relationship between agility tests completion time and jump height from flight time, reactive strength index, average power, average force, and contact time for drop jumps. Results: The results indicate a significant moderate negative correlation between jump height from flight time and agility test time (r=-0.501 with Illinois agility test, P=0.005, and r=-0.601 with agility t-test, P=0.001). A significant weak negative correlation was observed between average power and Illinois agility test time (r=-0.477, P=0.008). Conclusion: These findings indicate that improved drop jumps will interpret better agility movements or vice versa; therefore, individuals who perform sports that require agile movement benefit from agility assessment and drop jump training.
Modelling air pollution within a street canyon

A street canyon is a typical urban configuration with surrounding buildings along the street, where emissions from vehicles are normally released. Buildings are the artificial obstacles to the urban atmospheric flow and give rise to limited ventilation, especially for deep street canyons. This study implements a large-eddy simulation (LES) coupled with a reduced chemical scheme (the LES-chemistry model) to investigate the processing, dispersion and transport of reactive pollutants in a deep street canyon. Spatial variation of reactive pollutants are significant due to the existence of unsteady multiple vortices and pollutant concentrations exhibit significant contrasts within each vortex. In practical applications of using one-box model, the hypothesis of a well-mixed deep street canyon is shown to be inappropriate. A simplified two-box model (vertically segregated) is developed and evaluated against the LES-chemistry model to represent key photochemical processes with timescales similar to and smaller than the turbulent mixing timescale. The two-box model provides the capability of efficiently running a series of emission scenarios under a set of meteorological conditions. In addition, a box model with grid-averaged emissions of street canyons is compared with a two-box model considering each street canyon independently (horizontally segregated) to evaluate uncertainties when grid-averaged emissions are adopted in a grid-based urban air quality model. This study could potentially support traffic management, urban planning strategies and personal exposure assessment.
Dual Circularly Polarized and Linearly Sweeping Leaky-Wave Antenna

In this letter, a dual circularly polarized periodic leaky-wave antenna based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) with linearly sweeping beams is proposed. The antenna can simultaneously radiate left-handed circular polarization (LHCP) and right-handed circular polarization (RHCP) beams. Single-arm Archimedean spirals serve as radiators and are designed. Based on linearity analysis and curve fitting, SSPPs structure with potentially linear scanning ability are selected. Finally, the axial ratio (AR) and S-parameter for the proposed SSPPs antenna with spiral radiators are optimized around the broadside frequency using longitudinally asymmetric analysis. A prototype is fabricated and measured results show that the proposed antenna achieves a relative 3 dB AR bandwidth of 31.6% (8–11 GHz) with the same LHCP and RHCP scanning range of 65° and linearly sweeping ability.
Best Practices in Advancing Family Well-Being in Asia: A Multimethod Qualitative Study

Family has been recognized as the basic unit of society. Strengthening family functioning and enhancing family well-being through promoting family-oriented policies that based on evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness and practicalities of interventions are important. However, the planning and evaluation of existing programs is not universally agreed upon due to a lack of guiding evaluation framework and different cultural contexts. This study aims to identify best practices and consolidate social impacts of programs that support family well-being in the Asian Region, data was drawn on the Wofoo Asian Award for Advancing Family Well-Being Project (3A Project), initiated by the Consortium of Institutes on Family in the Asian Region (CIFA). A multimethod qualitative study was conducted, including a review of documents on the 3A Project, documents submitted by a total of forty awarded projects, and four in-depth interviews with team leaders of awarded projects. All data were analyzed in parallel and triangulated in the interpretation of findings. Informed by the logic model of program development and evaluation, this study discovered six overarching best practices ― PIE-ISI ― were identified: (i) Project rationales; (ii) Implementation; (iii) Evaluation; (iv) Innovation; (v) Sustainability and replicability; and (vi) Institutional synergy.
MHRR: MOOCs Recommender Service With Meta Hierarchical Reinforced Ranking

The exponential growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) surges the needs of advanced models for personalized Online Education Services (OES). Existing solutions successfully recommend MOOCs courses via deep learning models, they however generate weak “course embeddings” with original profiles, which contain noisy and few enrolled courses. On the other hand, existing algorithms provide recommendation orders according to the score of each course while ignoring personalized demands of users. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a <italic><underline>M</underline>eta <underline>H</underline>ierarchical <underline>R</underline>einforced <underline>R</underline>anking</italic> approach <italic>MHRR</italic>, which consists of a meta hierarchical reinforcement learning pre-trained mechanism and an over-parameterized ranking regressor to enhance the representation learning of courses and learners while refining the ranking result of recommended courses. Specifically, <italic>MHRR</italic> combines a user profile reviser and a meta embedding generator to provide course embedding representation enhancement for recommender services. Furthermore, <italic>MHRR</italic> transforms learned representations generated from recommender services with Gaussian kernel approximation to over-parameterize the downstream learning to rank (LTR) models with representations in ultra-high dimensionality. We deploy <italic>MHRR</italic> on a real-world MOOCs platform and evaluate it with a large number of baseline models. The results show that <italic>MHRR</italic> outperforms baseline algorithms on two major metrics, including Hit Ratio (HR) and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). Also, we conduct a 7-day online evaluation using the realistic traffic of a large-scale real-world MOOCs platform, where we can still observe significant improvement in real-world applications. <italic>MHRR</italic> performs consistently both in the online and offline evaluation.
Risk and prediction of violent crime in forensic psychiatry

7 Svensk sammanfattning . 8 Acknowledgements . 9 List of papers. 11 Abbreviations . 12 Introduction . 13 Historical background . 13 Historical development of forensic psychiatric risk assessments . 14 “First generation”: dangerousness . 14 “Second generation”: risk . 15 “Third generation”: management . 15 Forensic psychiatric risk factors . 15 Historical risk factors . 16 Clinical risk factors . 17 Combined Instruments . 18 PCL-R . 18 HCR-20 . 18 Biological risk factors . 19 Problematic aspects of forensic psychiatric risk assessments. 20 Aims of the study . 22 General aims . 22 Specific aims . 22 Paper I . 22 Paper II . 22 Paper III . 22 Paper IV . 22 Subjects and Methods . 23 Baseline study . 23 Forensic psychiatric investigations . 25 Data collection . 25 i. Psychiatric assessments . 25 ii. Forensic personality assessments . 26 iii. Self-rated personality assessments . 26 Neurochemical analyses. 26 Follow-up study: study population and data collection . 27 Independent variables . 27 Dependent variables . 27 Data administration and statistical methods . 28 Ethical considerations . 28 Detailed methods used for the follow-up study . 28 Paper I . 28 Paper II . 30 Paper III . 30 Results . 31 Paper I . 31 Paper II . 31 Paper III . 32 Paper IV . 33 Discussion . 34 “Risk” in clinical assessments . 35 Strengths and limitations. 36 Clinical implications . 37 References . 38
Multimodal and Multitask Learning with Additive Angular Penalty Focus Loss for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition has lots of applications such as human-computer interaction and health management. The current methods are challenged with the problems of fuzzy decision boundary and imbalance between difficult and easy samples in the training data. This paper first proposes an additive angle penalty focus loss function (APFL), which strictly refines the fuzzy decision boundary by introducing angle penalty factors to improve the compactness within the class and enlarge the distance between classes. It also assigns the larger loss to difficult samples to make the model pay more attention to them, as they are easily misclassified. Simultaneously, due to the lack of training samples, the framework of multimodal and multitask learning with APFL is further proposed, which extracts spectrogram features by deep neural network, text features by the pretrained language model, and audio features by the pretrained sound model. It uses the gender recognition as an auxiliary task. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed loss function and framework.
Overcoming challenges in laser beam focusing through a moderately scattering medium: stacked-actuator vs. bimorph deformable mirror

The paper presents an analysis of the efficiency of using bimorph deformable mirrors and mirrors on piezoactuators for the problem of focusing scattered laser radiation. In this paper, we study the efficiency of a piezoactuator deformable mirror with 61 piezopackets and an aperture of 60 mm, as well as a bimorph mirror with 48 electrodes and an aperture of 50 mm. It is shown that such mirrors can be used to optimize the focal spot formed by scattered radiation in the far-field.
The potential of integrating structured experiential learning into the curriculum as a means of improving the agricultural extenstion curriculum : a comparative study of two programs in KwaZulu-Natal.

The training of agricultural extension graduates is an important contributor to agricultural development in both developed and developing countries. Extension workers help small holder farmers uplift their food production. In most African countries, the curriculum of agricultural extension institutions has been adopted from other countries. This causes higher education institutions to produce graduates with inadequate skills to meet the needs of African countries. With the transformation in South Africa, and the resultant unification of the extension system, the curriculum needs to be reviewed to meet the current needs of the employers. This research explores the potential of including structured experiential learning into the curriculum with the aim of bridging the gap that exists within the extension training systems in South Africa. The alumni from two institutions, one with an unstructured experiential learning programme and the other with a structured experiential learning programme were interviewed to find out the skills that they feel are needed and whether those skills can be effectively taught during the academic training of students. A convenience sampling method was used. The employer’s perceptions regarding the skills for effective extension work were also solicited. Both the alumni and the employers indicated that well planned and supervised experiential learning would help students acquire practical agriculture skills, and also orientate them to the new work environment. The educators indicated that the curriculum structure at times impedes the effective implementation of an experiential learning programme due to semester system and demands from other courses The research revealed that for effective experiential learning, it is important that universities work with communities in development programmes and to forge links with the industry. Although service providers may be willing to offer experiential learning to students, they are also limited in terms of resources. They cannot always accommodate students from tertiary institutions as there are number of them requiring experiential learning opportunities.
Climate element of migration decision in Ghana: Micro Evidence

The debate about how environmental or climate factors affect migration decisions has generated a lot of interest in recent times, however empirical studies about the subject are limited and fragmented. This paper investigates the effect of climate factors on migration decisions by comparing the 2005/06 and 2012/13 rounds of Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS5 and GLSS6), using Heckman two-stage method to account for selectivity bias. The climate condition in various ecological zones of Ghana is used as a proxy to investigate the effect of climate elements on migration decision. Results show that socio-economic factors such as anticipated welfare gains, household size, education, the sector of employment and others, together with climatic element do significantly affect an individual’s migration decision. Findings further suggest a positive effect of climate element on migration decisions. The coastal savannah and forest ecological zones have a greater probability of accommodating more in-migrants relative to the northern savannah ecological zone. In addition, marginal effects reveal that the probability to migrate to coastal savannah zone relative to northern zones is higher than the probability to migrate to forest zones relative to northern zone. Moreover, anticipated welfare gains reinforce the effect of climate elements and also entrenches the divergence between the probability of migrating to coastal and forest zones relative to the northern zones. With the current climate change of high temperature and low rainfall, migration may be considered as one of the several adaptation strategies in response to changes in the environment.