Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preparation of Calcium Carbonate from Cockle Shells as Fillers in Natural Rubber

The purpose of this research is to study the preparation of calcium carbonate from cockle shells by precipitation method and compare it to calcium carbonate from high temperature heating, commercial calcium carbonate, and cockle shell powder. The properties of the vulcanized natural rubber mixed with different types of calcium carbonate were observed. It appeared that the precipitated calcium carbonate delivered the best properties (hardness, 300% modulus, tensile strength, elongation at break, tear strength, and abrasion resistance), followed by the high temperature heated calcium carbonate, the commercial calcium carbonate, and the cockle shell powder, respectively. This result corresponded to the morphology from the scanning electron microscope (SEM); the precipitated calcium carbonate had crystalline form and the most uniform particle size, followed by the high temperature heated calcium carbonate, the commercial calcium carbonate, and the cockle shell powder. In particular, the cockle shell powder was composed of large and small particles dispersed over a wide range, which brought about the weak point of vulcanized rubber and caused the lowest properties of the vulcanized rubber mixed with cockle shell powder.
Research on critical thinking of pre-service mathematics education teachers in Indonesia (2015-2023): A bibliometric review

Critical thinking involves being mentally organized and participating in a judgmental process to solve problems. The purpose of this study is to look at the focus of research related to critical thinking of pre-service teacher teachers of mathematics education, especially in Indonesia from 2015 to 2023. The method used in this study is a descriptive bibliometric analysis method. The Scopus database is used to obtain the necessary data. The results of the research show that publications related to the critical thinking of pre-service teacher teachers of mathematics education in Indonesia have increased from 2018 to 2020. Most of the publications were published in conference papers and some were in Q2 journals. The research focus is divided into 4 sections, namely, 1) mathematics teacher , mathematical problems , algebra , and qualitative research ; 2) critical thinking skills , mathematics education , and learning systems ; 3) problem based learning and STEM; 4) data analysis techniques, information analysis. The material that is the focus of research is algebra. New themes for this field are experimental research, digital platforms, quantitative methods, and group theory. The keywords of critical thinking skills are not directly connected with these new themes
Red Flags for Early Referral for Infant Mental Health: Content Validation of a Tool

Background: There is growing evidence about the psychological distress and mental health issues experienced by infants with developmental problems. Problems related to developmental issues can be mitigated with early identification and intervention. A simple screening measure is needed to identify infants at risk for mental health issues to make informed decisions about further assessment and interventions. In this background, the present study aimed to develop a checklist to identify infants with psychological distress and at risk for mental health issues without the need to administer full-scale socioemotional tools and intended to be used by primary care professionals for early identification of risk factors followed by intervention to reduce the risk. Early identification of infants at risk in view of the limited resources would help in reducing the impact of early trajectories on the socioemotional health of any infant. Aim: The present study aims to develop a checklist for rapid screening. In view of the limited resources of low-income countries, early identification of infants at risk is important. This would help in reducing the impact of early trajectories on the socioemotional health of infants. Methods: The checklist was based on the “functional and emotional developmental approach” and a literature review of early indicators of psychological distress and mental health issues in infants. The checklist was prepared using objective terms which were further evaluated by mental health experts using standard methods. Accordingly, a content validity index (CVI) was calculated to determine the relevance and clarity of the items. Result: Based on the CVI, 16 items were retained in the final checklist, which was reported to have excellent relevance (CVI = 0.91) and clarity (CVI = 0.84). Conclusion: The checklist is concise with adequate content validity and has the potential to be used in primary care settings to screen infants at risk for psychological distress and mental health issues and make appropriate referrals.
Factors of Food Waste Reduction Underlying the Extended Theory of Planned Behavior: A Study of Consumer Behavior towards the Intention to Reduce Food Waste

Food waste represents an economic, environmental, and social threat, which makes it an important subject of investigation. Food waste behavior has a crucial effect on everyone’s food security, food safety, economic growth, and the environment; hence, it requires further analysis. The article’s objective is to study the food waste reduction behavior of individual consumers and to examine factors which can explain the intention to reduce food waste. The study’s conceptual foundation is the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which aims to explain the relationship between an individual’s attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. The paper extends the TPB by including new factors such as environmental concern, perceived ascription of responsibility, marketing addiction, moral norm, and waste preventing behavior. The data were collected via quota sampling and examined using the structural equation modeling (SEM). The study employed a sample of 369 people in Thailand. The results show that waste preventing behavior, attitude, and perceived behavioral control significantly impact the intention to reduce food waste. The subjective norm and environmental concern positively affects the attitude, which subsequently impacts the intention to reduce food waste. Marketing addiction negatively impacts perceived behavioral control and, hence, increases food waste. This research paper enlarges the understanding of the intention to minimize food waste. Moreover, it points out the implications on how consumers and the government may improve the desire to decrease food waste.
A Real-Time and Efficient Optical Flow Tracking Accelerator on FPGA Platform

Optical flow is a highly efficient visual tracking algorithm, which is commonly used to estimate pixel movement between two consecutive images in a video sequence. However, its high computational complexity and large number of computations become a bottleneck that hinders the performance of embedded vision systems. When applied to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), it is necessary to consider not only time consumption, but also the overall accuracy of the system, causing even greater difficulties. In this paper, a real-time multi-scale Lucas Kanade (LK) optical flow hardware accelerator with parallel pipeline architecture is proposed. The designed circuit meets the high precision and real-time performance required by SLAM while fully considering the limitations of hardware resources. It is deployed on Xilinx Zynq SoC and achieves a frame rate of 93 fps for feature tracking of continuous frame images at $752\times 480$ resolution. Compared with the implementation on ARM CPU, the average speed is increased by $4.5\times $ . Finally, the feasibility and applicability of the hardware accelerator system designed in this paper are verified on the SLAM system. Experimental results on a public dataset show that the average Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of this work is 0.189 m, indicating that the hardware accelerator has comparable precision with existing state-of-the-art software algorithms, achieving a great balance of performance and precision.
Fermentative characteristics, fungal population, and losses of forage sorghum silage BRS 658 treated with different additives

This study aimed to evaluate the fermentative profile, losses, dry matter recovery, and fungi population in forage sorghum silage treated with different additives. The design was completely randomized, with four replications and seven treatments, which were: 1) Control (C), whole-plant sorghum with no additives; 2) Microbial (M), whole-plant sorghum + microbial additive (0.2% of original matter); 3) Sugar (S), whole-plant sorghum + brown sugar (4.0% of original matter); 4) Microbial plus sugar additives (MS), whole-plant sorghum + microbial additive (0.2% of original matter) + brown sugar (4.0% of original matter); 5) Whey (W), whole-plant sorghum + whey (3% of original matter); 6) Microbial plus whey additives (MW), whole-plant sorghum + microbial additive (0.2% of original matter) + whey (3% of original matter); 7) Microbial plus sugar plus whey (MSW), whole-plant sorghum + microbial additive (0.2% of original matter) + brown sugar (4.0% of original matter) + whey (3% of original matter). Sorghum was cut 111 days after emergence and ensiled in polyvinyl chloride silos. The storage lasted 35 days, after that period, the silos were opened and submitted to analysis. The inclusion of additives in sorghum silage has shown no significant difference in fungal population, lactic acid production, and losses by gases and effluents. The use of microbial inoculant + brown sugar in the sorghum silage BRS 658 decreased the values ​​of ammoniacal nitrogen, pH, propionic, and butyric acid. The inclusion of brown sugar in the sorghum silage promoted an increase in soluble carbohydrates and greater recovery of dry matter.
Revisioning Acrimony: The Development and Validation of Short Scales Measuring Relationship Hostility and Parental Co-Operativity

ABSTRACT In this paper we identify and validate the structure of the acrimony scale and introduce two shorter versions: the AS-18 and the AS-10. Investigations using two large, independent samples of family mediation clients suggest a two-factor solution. We make a theoretical case for distinguishing between acrimony and conflict, and for measuring both acrimony and the capacity for cooperation remaining in a relationship between separated parents. We find that both dimensions can be retained in the shorter versions of the scale, which nevertheless demonstrate good reliability and validity. The subscales for the AS-10 consist of six items measuring “relationship hostility” and four items measuring “parental cooperativity. ” These short subscales may be useful in practice and research settings where it is necessary to measure either parental acrimony, potential for cooperation, or both, whilst minimizing respondent burden.
Leadership by cavea: The social processes of interorganisational collaborative leadership

Research on interorganisational collaboration is longstanding however the role leadership plays in such collaborations is often neglected. Using grounded theory, we present a process model of ‘leadership by cavea’ whereby the relationships across organisations involved in a collaborative project were structured according to hierarchies of privilege, determined by the inherent power of ‘bonding’ social capital. While it emerged that cultural capital was a more valuable resource, this was recognised too late in the leadership process for it to make a necessary contribution. Our findings demonstrate that when seeking to practice collaborative leadership across organisations, individuals and the organisations they represent must be aware of the power they hold and wield, even needing to share or relinquish power to ensure that hierarchies of privilege do not hinder efforts to achieve mutual goals.
1st-Order Error-Feedback Sampling-Rate Reconfigurable Noise-Shaping SAR ADC for Multi-Channel CMOS Front-End ASICs for Space Applications

This paper proposes a $1^{\text{st}}$-order, error feedback (EF), sampling-rate $(fs)$ reconfigurable Noise-Shaping Successive-Approximation-Register (NS-SAR) Analog-to-Digital-Converter (ADC) for multi-channel CMOS front-end ASICs for X-rays detectors in space applications. The core of the design is an 8-bits Asynchronous-SAR (ASAR) ADC, equipped with a unique variable rising-edge only delay-cell, which generates all required clock signals internally using a single external low duty-cycle sampling signal. The EF NS function has been achieved by introducing a $1^{\text{st}}$-order Finite-Impulse-Response (FIR) loop filter with a duty-cycled OP-AMP. Designed in a $0.35\mu\mathrm{m}$ CMOS process at $3.3\mathrm{~V}$ supply voltage, the proposed NS-SAR ADC achieves an ENOB of ${\bf 1 1. 8}$ bits and a peak SNDR of $72\mathrm{~dB}$ at a typical $fs$ of 40 kHz with an Oversampling-Ratio (OSR) of 8 in schematic-level simulations, consuming an average power of $37\mu\mathrm{W}$. The sampling frequency of the NS-SAR ADC is reconfigurable together with the power consumption while maintaining the same performance. For a fair comparison of the proposed high input signal swing ($2\mathrm{~V}$) ADC at 3.3 V supply with low input signal swing ADCs at lower supply, normalized versions (FoMWN, FoMSN) of FoMW and $FoM_{S}$ have been proposed. The $ADC$ achieves its best $FoM_{WN}$ of $115.34\mathrm{fJ}/\mathrm{C}$-step and $FoM_{SN}$ of $186.31\mathrm{~dB}$ at its $\operatorname{maximum}f_{S}(178\mathrm{kHz})$ at an OSR of 8.
Smart Health Care Management System for Diagnosis of Lungs Cancer

Lung cancer has a mortality rate that is significantly greater than other forms of cancer, making it the second biggest cause of death worldwide after cardiovascular disease. Detecting lung cancer in its earliest stages has been the focus of a significant amount of research and development over the past few years, leading to the development of several unique computer-aided diagnostic tools that use deep learning. On the other hand, deep learning models are readily susceptible to overfitting, and this issue invariably results in decreased performance. In this study, we proposed a CNN-based approach for the classification of lung cancer and attained 95.62% accuracy. When applied to classifying lung cancer, the solution achieves the most outstanding performance possible throughout the entire dataset. The overfitting issue that arises during lung cancer classification tasks may be solved with the help of the proposed framework, which also outperforms existing methods that are considered to be state-of-the-art.
Financial literacy and quality of life amongst cancer patients in Sri Lanka

Purpose: The quality of life has been widely examined by social science researchers with reference to different lifestyle-related issues of people across the world. It has made an eye-opening contribution by many authors educating the importance of quality of life for patients suffering from different diseases including cancers as one of the critical scopes. Alongside this, this study aimed to examine how financial literacy and social support could impact the quality of life of cancer patients in Sri Lanka with a rationale for its social and community impacts. Design/methodology/approach: The variable of financial distress was considered the main independent variable within the scope of financial literacy to examine its influence on the quality of life of cancer patients. Additionally, this study investigated how social support influences the quality of life of cancer patients supported by empirical evidence. It followed a quantitative research method in line with the required inclusions for an acceptable methodology. Respondents were selected for the survey with a questionnaire followed by a convenient sampling method. The final analysis was limited to 187 respondents due to the incompletion of the questionnaires filled in by the sample units. The hypotheses were tested by using the CB-SEM model supported by Amos-23 software and the descriptive analysis was executed by using the SPSS-21 package. Findings: The main findings of the study were discussed in the article in line with the two hypotheses tested. In brief, results proved that financial distress (FD) has a significant impact on the quality of life (QoL) of cancer patients. Additionally, it has tested the hypotheses related to how social support (SS) impacts on quality of life (QoL) of cancer patients. The results verified that social support experienced by cancer patients significantly influences the quality of life of cancer patients. Originality: The cancer patients in Sri Lanka should be supported by a holistic approach besides the treatments. Alongside this, this paper contributes new knowledge of examining how the quality of life of cancer patients has been influenced by financial distress and social support in line with the empirical and practice gaps noticed. In addition, this study contributes to the main scopes mentioned by sustainable development goals (SDG) with reference to the local context as it provides new knowledge for social and community-related issues. Implications: The findings of the study could be used by the health sector authorities and social welfare service organizations to come up with policies and programs to make life better for cancer patients in terms of financial and social aspects. Keywords: Quality of Life, Financial Literacy, Financial Distress, Social Support, Sri Lanka
Century-scale changes in Asian summer monsoon precipitation during the Holocene

The Asian summer monsoon is one of the largest and most influential of the Earth's climate systems, both in terms of human and climate system interactions. Previous research has focused on interannual and millennial variability of the monsoon. Little is known about century-scale fluctuations. Significant threats to human health and economies could result from unanticipated e.xtremes in monsoon behavior on this timescale, however. Using geochemical pro.xies, I developed a record of century-scale water-balance fluctuations during the Holocene for Ahung Co (Lake) in Tibet. Conditions became drier at 7200 and 3700 calendar years BP. The event at ~3700 calendar years BP coincides with the fall of the Indus civilization, which some researchers believe was caused by a decrease in precipitation. This is the first water-balance record from Tibet to have an age model free from reservoir effects. The age model revealed a gap in sedimentation at the top of the core. Other lake records should be ree.xamined for similar gaps. To determine the cause of water-balance fluctuations in Ahung Co, I used meteorological observations and evaporation models to reconstruct water fluxes to and from the lake over the past eight years. Water-balance fluctuations reflect changes in summer monsoon strength. Water fluxes during the simimer are an order of magnitude greater than during other seasons. In addition to controlling precipitation, the summer monsoon controls evaporation through changes in cloudiness, humidity and temperature.
Qualitative spatial reasoning with uncertain evidence using Markov logic networks

Abstract Probabilistic logics combine the ability to reason about complex scenes, with a rigorous approach to uncertainty. This paper explores the construction of probabilistic spatial logics through the combination of established qualitative spatial calculi together with Markov logic networks (MLNs). Qualitative spatial calculi provide the basis for automated representation and reasoning with complex spatial scenes; MLNs provide a rigorous basis for handling uncertainty and driving probabilistic inference. Our approach focuses specifically on the combination of an uncertain knowledge base with a certain spatial reasoning rule-base. The experiments explore how uncertain knowledge propagates through certain qualitative spatial inferences, using the specific example of reasoning with cardinal directions. The results provide a template for probabilistic qualitative spatial reasoning more generally, with applications to a wide range of common scenarios for situational awareness and automated reasoning under uncertainty.
Non-Disclosure and Suicidal Ideation in Adolescent Victims of Bullying: An Analysis from the Family and School Context

ABSTRACT In recent years, suicide rates among bullying victims have raised much concern among educators and health professionals. Suicide is the fourth leading cause of preventable death among adolescents, data that warn about the need to monitor the signs before victims’ suicidal behavior to prevent this fatal outcome. In the present study, the role of victims’ silence about their victimization situation was analysed, as well as the particular impact of family and school environments. More specifically, we examined the mediating role of the victim’s non-disclosure between the parental styles (observing the father’s and mother’s roles separately) and the school climate, concerning suicidal ideation in victims. The sample consisted of 2,977 adolescents (48.5% boys), aged 11-17 years (M = 14.1, SD = 1.42), of whom 635 (21.3%) reported having been victims of bullying in the past year. The results showed that parental styles of rejection and indifference were positively related to victims’ non-disclosure of bullying and suicidal ideation. Conversely, a positive school climate showed a negative relationship with victims’ disclosure of the bullying situation and suicidal ideation. The findings also indicated that non-disclosure mediates the relationship between the mother’s parental style and suicidal ideation. These findings expand knowledge about the role of bullying victims’ social context and the variable disclosure with regards to suicidal ideation in adolescents victimized by peers at school.
Unmodified Gold Nanoparticles as Potential Diagnostic Agents for Colorimetric Detection of Pathogenic Infections

Global outbreaks of infections have called for the development of rapid and sensitive in vitro diagnostic methods. Highly virulent and transmissible diseases are responsible for the increased rate of morbidities and fatalities worldwide. An infectious spread is best contained by early diagnosis, disease-load monitoring, and contact tracing. Ordinary diagnostic methods are expensive, laborious, time-consuming
Measuring geomorphology in river assessment procedures 1: A global overview of current practices

Despite geomorphic processes being increasingly recognized as a vital component of river management projects, evidence suggests that they may not be adequately captured in common river assessment procedures. We reviewed 91 river assessment procedures from around the world to evaluate their effectiveness in capturing geomorphic processes relevant for river management goals. Our objectives were to summarize which common geomorphic indicators are measured and how in different types of river assessments categorized based on their main focus: geomorphic, physical habitat, mixed geomorphic and habitat, and hydromorphology. Our analysis identified differences in the types of geomorphic indicators included and measurement methodologies between the types of assessment procedures. Some geomorphic processes, such as sediment transport, are nearly completely absent from all assessments, despite their importance for geomorphic processes. The variability among assessment procedures suggests that a single procedure is unlikely to capture all geomorphic components required to support every river management programs. Here, we discuss how the strengths and limitations of different assessment types can be used to guide decisions around how to select assessments and geomorphic indicators to support management project goals. A companion paper expands the discussion of how to plan effective river assessment procedures to support unique management goals.