Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Focus Groups to Inform User-Centered Development of an eHealth Sleep Intervention for Adolescents: Perspectives of Youth with Insomnia Symptoms, with and without Pain

Introduction: Adolescence is a developmental stage that often coincides with increasing sleep problems. Focus groups were conducted to inform development of an adolescent eHealth sleep intervention by exploring opinions about (1) healthy sleep practices, and (2) using an eHealth intervention. Methods: Adolescents 14–18 years old experiencing symptoms of insomnia based on the Insomnia Sleep Index, with and without recurrent pain, and associated stakeholders (i.e., parents, school personnel, and health care providers) were recruited. Across six online focus groups, 24 adolescents with insomnia participated (14 pain-free, 10 with recurrent pain; 10 male, 14 female). Across seven online focus groups, 22 stakeholders participated, including 8 parents, 9 school professionals, and 5 health care providers (10 male, 8 female). Using a content analysis, subthemes were induced from transcripts. Results: Most healthy sleep practices were perceived as reasonable for adolescents to implement, except avoiding technology before bed and using bedrooms only for sleep. Three primary barriers to sleep practices were identified, including a variable schedule due to lifestyle factors, technology at night, and academics interfering with sleep, and only in the pain group, the barrier related to pain was identified. Content addressing adolescent-specific barriers was considered important to include in a sleep intervention. Desirable eHealth components included interactive features, videos, audio, and pictures to present information. A common barrier to using an eHealth sleep intervention was the program feeling too academic, with accessibility of the sleep information and strategies as a common facilitator. Conclusions: This research represents the first step in a user-centered approach to developing an adolescent eHealth sleep intervention. These results provide insights from a range of perspectives on guiding adolescents to follow healthy sleep practices. Next, these findings will be integrated in the development of an eHealth intervention for adolescents with and without recurrent pain.
Thermal evolution and shale gas potential estimation of the Wealden and Posidonia Shale in NW‐Germany and the Netherlands: a 3D basin modelling study

Sedimentary basins in NW‐Germany and the Netherlands represent potential targets for shale gas exploration in Europe due to the presence of Cretaceous (Wealden) and Jurassic (Posidonia) marlstones/shales as well as various Carboniferous black shales. In order to assess the regional shale gas prospectivity of this area, a 3D high‐resolution petroleum system model has been compiled and used to reconstruct the source‐rock maturation based on calibrated burial and thermal histories. Different basal heat flow scenarios and accordingly, different high‐resolution scenarios of erosional amount distribution were constructed, incorporating all major uplift events that affected the study area. The model delivers an independent 3D reappraisal of the tectonic and thermal history that controlled the differential geodynamic evolution and provides a high‐resolution image of the maturity distribution and evolution throughout the study area and the different basins. Pressure, temperature and TOC‐dependent gas storage capacity and gas contents of the Posidonia Shale and Wealden were calculated based on experimentally derived Langmuir sorption parameters and newly compiled source‐rock thickness maps indicating shale gas potential of the Lower Saxony Basin, southern Gifhorn Trough and West Netherlands Basin.
Experimental Evaluation of a Hybrid Sensory Feedback System for Haptic and Kinaesthetic Perception in Hand Prostheses

This study proposes a new hybrid multi-modal sensory feedback system for prosthetic hands that can provide not only haptic and proprioceptive feedback but also facilitate object recognition without the aid of vision. Modality-matched haptic perception was provided using a mechanotactile feedback system that can proportionally apply the gripping force through the use of a force controller. A vibrotactile feedback system was also employed to distinguish four discrete grip positions of the prosthetic hand. The system performance was evaluated with a total of 32 participants in three different experiments (i) haptic feedback, (ii) proprioceptive feedback and (iii) object recognition with hybrid haptic-proprioceptive feedback. The results from the haptic feedback experiment showed that the participants’ ability to accurately perceive applied force depended on the amount of force applied. As the feedback force was increased, the participants tended to underestimate the force levels, with a decrease in the percentage of force estimation. Of the three arm locations (forearm volar, forearm ventral and bicep), and two muscle states (relaxed and tensed) tested, the highest accuracy was obtained for the bicep location in the relaxed state. The results from the proprioceptive feedback experiment showed that participants could very accurately identify four different grip positions of the hand prosthesis (i.e., open hand, wide grip, narrow grip, and closed hand) without a single case of misidentification. In experiment 3, participants could identify objects with different shapes and stiffness with an overall high success rate of 90.5% across all combinations of location and muscle state. The feedback location and muscle state did not have a significant effect on object recognition accuracy. Overall, our study results indicate that the hybrid feedback system may be a very effective way to enrich a prosthetic hand user’s experience of the stiffness and shape of commonly manipulated objects.
BUSINESS CYCLE SYNCHRONISATION IN THE GREEK REGIONS

This paper examines the degree of synchronicity in business cycles in Greek regions associated with specific spatial and economic characteristics that explain, to a large extent, synchronisation dynamics. We conducted an analysis of almost 30 years’ (1980-2008) worth of data at the NUTSIII level (prefectures). We conclude that prefectures are more synchronised with the NUTSII regions than the national level, accentuating a regional (NUTSII) border effect. Moreover, the intensification of the integration process and the free operation of markets seem to diachronically affect the structural characteristics of the Greek regions and the geography of cyclical synchronisation. Our study revealed a two-stage integration in which in the first stage they are detected urbanisation economies, while in the second one localisation economies. The metropolitan region, apart from its prominent position in economic growth, shows a confined level of business synchronisation with the other regions, stressing Greece’s pattern of economic and structural dualism.
Laser-Based Four-Core Biosensor With WS2 Thin-Film/CeO2-Nanorods/AuNPs Immobilization for Ascorbic Acid Detection

[] In this study, we present a novel optical sensing system for the real-time detection of ascorbic acid (AA), also known as vitamin C, a vital water-soluble vitamin with significant clinical relevance. AA serves not only as a biomarker for various diseases but also as a treatment for conditions such as scurvy, anemia, and cardiovascular disease. Our approach involves the development of a highly sensitive fiber optic sensor tailored for AA detection, utilizing a multimode fiber-four-core fiber (MMF-FCF) configuration. Fabrication involved advanced techniques, including fusion splicing and hydrofluoric (HF) acid etching, which created a core-mismatch structure generating sufficient evanescent waves (EWs). We immobilized tungsten disulfide (WS2) thin-film and cerium dioxide nanorods (CeO2-NRs) onto the probe’s surface to enhance the sensor’s performance. Thereafter, EWs excited the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) phenomenon of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) immobilized on the probe’s surface, facilitating AA detection. To enhance AA sensor selectivity, the probe’s surface was functionalized with the ascorbate oxidase (AOx) enzyme. The experiments utilized a laser source and an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) to achieve precise excitation and signal amplification, enhancing the sensor’s overall performance. Experimental results demonstrated a sensor sensitivity of 0.796 nm/mM and a limit of detection (LoD) of $167.71 \mu \text{M}$ within the 0– $500 \mu \text{M}$ concentration range. These findings emphasize the sensor’s potential value in clinical applications for AA detection.
Projecting Diversity Conflicts of Future Land System Pathways in China Under Anthropogenic and Climate Forcing

Predicting future land system changes driven by anthropogenic and climactic impacts can help to explore adaptation and mitigation pathways for regional and global sustainable development. Here, we project land cover changes in China from 2030 to 2100 at a resolution of 1 km × 1 km under eight scenarios based on the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenraioMIP), which are extracted from Land Use Harmonization version 2 (LUH2). We use a rule‐based method to classify and map 9 land cover dynamic trajectories at patch scale to present land system changes. At the provincial scale we used hierarchical clustering to identify archetypes of land cover change, which can predict ecological risks for future management in western provinces. Our results reveal that anthropogenic mitigation policies under high mitigation pressure do not result in positive impacts on the land system, but rising temperatures will provide a great opportunity for ecological restoration in some regions.
PLANTATION TECHNOLOGY FOR NINE INDIGENOUS TREE SPECIES OF KERALA

of Project Proposal 1. Code : KFRI 343/2000 2. Title : Plantation technology for nine indigenous tree species of Kerala 3. Principal Investigator : K.K. N. Nair Botany Division 4. Co-investigators : C. Mohanan Plant Pathology Division George Mathew Entomology Division 5. Objectives : To generate data on seed, nursery and plantation aspects of the nine indigenous tree species, including protection from pests and diseases at different stages of plantation establishment. To establish pilot scale plantations of the species with propagules collected from forest trees, to evaluate the field performance of each of them and transfer the technology developed to the Forest Department. To prepare a detailed report on the plantation aspects of the species studied and to publish package of plantation practices for all the nine species in the form of Information Bulletins. 6. Expected outcome : Exhaustive data on the plantation aspects of the nine indigenous tree species Package of plantation practices for all the nine species Demonstration cum data source on native species plantation in the State 6. Date of commencement : April, 2000 7. Date of completion : March, 2002 8. Funding agency : Kerala Forest Department (Kerala Forestry Project supported by the World Bank)
Participation and Outcomes among Disabled and Non-Disabled People in the Diabetes Pay-for-Performance Program

Objectives: This study’s objectives were to compare the participation rates of people with and without disabilities who had type 2 diabetes in a diabetes pay-for-performance (DM P4P) program, as well as their care outcomes after participation. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study. The data came from the disability registry file, cause of death file, and national health insurance research database of Taiwan. The subjects included patients newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes between 2001 and 2013 who were followed up with until 2014 and categorized as disabled and non-disabled patients. The propensity score matching method was used to match the disabled with the non-disabled patients at a 1:1 ratio. Conditional logistic regression analysis was used to determine the odds ratio between the disabled and non-disabled patients who joined the P4P program. The Cox hazard model was used to compare the risk of dialysis and death between the disabled and non-disabled patients participating in the P4P program. Results: There were 110,645 disabled and 110,645 non-disabled individuals after matching. After controlling for confounding factors, it was found that the disabled individuals were significantly less likely (odds ratio = 0.89) to be enrolled in the P4P program than the non-disabled individuals. The risk of dialysis was 1.08 times higher for people with disabilities than those without, regardless of their participation in the P4P program. After enrollment in the P4P program, the risk of death for people with disabilities decreased from 1.32 to 1.16 times that of persons without disabilities. Among the people with disabilities, the risk of death for those enrolled in the P4P program was 0.41 times higher than that of those not enrolled. The risk of death was reduced to a greater extent for people with disabilities than for those without disabilities upon enrollment in the DM P4P program. Conclusion: People with disabilities are less likely to be enrolled in the P4P program in Taiwan and have unequal access to care. However, the P4P program was more effective at reducing mortality among people with disabilities than among those without.
Sustainable Infrastructure in Shrinking Cities Options for the Future

Sustainable Infrastructure in Shrinking Cities: Options for the Future is a research project completed by the Center for Public Administration and Public Policy and the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative at Kent State University. The report includes a synopsis of recent literature regarding the management of water, sewer, transportation, and energy infrastructure in shrinking cities. It presents findings from a series of interviews with infrastructure management professionals, most of whom are from Northeast Ohio. The work is focused on the City of Cleveland, but the findings should be applicable to other cities in similar circumstances.
A Reliability-Critical Path Identifying Method With Local and Global Adjacency Probability Matrix in Combinational Circuits

Accurate and efficient identification of reliability-critical paths (RCPs) not only facilitates fault localization and troubleshooting but also allows circuit designers to improve circuit reliability at a low cost. This article proposes a local and global adjacency probability matrix-based approach (LGAPM) to quickly and efficiently identify RCPs of combinational logic circuits. The approach reflects the criticality of the overall reliability of the circuit as well as the local criticality of gates in the path. In addition, we design a pruning-based method to accelerate RCP identification in large-scale circuits. The experimental results of the LGAPM on all 74 series circuits, ISCAS-85, and partial EPFL benchmark circuits show that the 74181 circuit with a minimum of 17 paths and the EPFL-remainder10 circuit with a maximum of 8.081 × 108 paths take times of about 0.18s and 33931.04s, respectively. The average accuracy on small and medium-scale circuits is 94.24%, and the average stability on all-size circuits is 86.19%. Compared to the SAT-based method, hill-climbing algorithm, and random method, LGAPM’s metrics are superior and more appropriate for large-scale circuits. The overall circuit reliability can be improved from 0.7726 to 0.9238 on average by hardening a tiny number of gates in the identified the most RCPs and the average cost savings is 4.08 times over random hardening methods.
Study of climate change impact on flood frequencies : a combined weather generator and hydrological modeling approach

Climate change is expected to lead to more frequent and intensive flooding problems for watersheds in the south part of China. This study presented a coupled Long Ashton Research Station Weather Generator (LARS-WG) and Semidistributed Land Use‐Based Runoff Processes (SLURP) approach for flood frequency analysis and applied it to the Heshui watershed, China. LARS-WG, as a weather generator, was used to offer 46 sets of climate data from seven general circulation models (GCMs) under various emission scenarios (i.e., A1B, B1, and A2) over near-term and future periods (i.e., T1, 2011‐30; T2, 2046‐65; and T3, 2080‐ 99). SLURPisacontinuous,spatiallydistributedhydrologicalmodelthatusesparametersfromphysiographic data to simulate the hydrological cycle from precipitation to runoff. Flood frequency analysis based on Pearson type III distributions was followed to analyze statistics of annual peaks. The final results (from ensembles of multimodels and multiscenarios) indicated that the magnitudes of a 200-yr return flood for T1, T2, and T3 would increase by 5.23%, 4.08%, and 12.92%, respectively, in comparison to the baseline level; those under the most extreme condition (i.e., worst scenario) would be 25.18%, 31.00%, and 44.46%, respectively. Various GCMs and emission scenarios suggested different results. But the ECHAM5/Max Planck InstituteOcean Modelwas found togive a moreworrying intensification offlood risksandthe Commonwealth Scientific and IndustrialResearch Organisation Mark,version 3.0,andtheCommunity Climate System Model, version 3, were relatively conservative. The study results were useful in helping gain insight into the flood risks and its uncertainty under future climate change conditions for the Heshui watershed, and the proposed methodology is also applicable to many other watersheds in Southeast Asia with similar climatic conditions.
Accelerated convergence to Periodic Steady State of SMPS circuits using PSpice

The periodic steady state (PSS) of switched mode power supplies (SMPS) is of great interest to the analog designers since it serves as a starting point for further frequency response, noise and distortion analysis. Traditionally, to reach such a periodic steady state through PSpice, the designer must run the transient simulation and wait for the system to settle to its steady state. This takes a long time because SMPS circuits are stiff circuits with a wide range of time constants. In this work, we present how accelerated convergence to PSS has been achieved in PSpice. We have enabled three prominent algorithms to achieve PSS - Minimum Polynomial Extrapolation (MPE), shooting-Newton method using Numerical Jacobian, and shooting-Newton method using Analytical Jacobian. In this paper, we present these state-of-the art algorithms and their customizations in the PSpice simulator, along with the successful results obtained on a range of circuits.
Products Excellence From Customer Perception: Comparative Analysis Between Islamic and Conventional Bank

The primary purpose of this study was to articulate the literature of Islamic banking in Muzaffarabad, AJK by investigating the influence of the level of perception, understanding, and usage of Islamic banking products and services on the satisfaction level of its account holders. The present study targets to highlight the relationship between products excellence and customer perception. Products excellence and customer perception of prominent Islamic and conventional banks in Muzaffarabad are analyzed through comparative analysis. The quantitative data were collected from different Islamic and conventional bank customers through random sampling using self-administrated questionnaire. A sample of 267 respondents from different regions of Muzaffarabad was selected. For the analysis, the descriptive statistics was adopted to check the relationship between demographic variables and perception. The findings of the study exposed that Islamic bank customers had better products excellence perception and were more satisfied towards the provided services compared to conventional bank customers. Islamic bank customers supposed tangibles and assurance as the most significant components of an exceptional products excellence whereas conventional bank customers perceived assurance and modernization as the most significant components of products. There are certain limitations accompanying with this study such as small sample size and data collection in specific geographical locations. This study has various concrete suggestions for professional bankers, financers, regulators, and policy makers. The regulators and policy makers of Islamic and conventional banks may contrivance the findings of this study to improve customer perception through better excellence declaration. The study has significantly contributed towards the knowledge on service quality and customer perception particularly in context of Muzaffarabad.
Evaluating the application of the multi-view spatial data infrastructure assessment framework

As a response to the growing interest in assessing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) the Multi-view SDI assessment framework has been proposed. The Multi-view SDI assessment framework collects multiple assessment approaches and methods with the aim to assess many different aspects of SDI in a comprehensive and unbiased way. Despite the potential strengths of the framework, its complex design raises concerns about its usability and applicability for SDI assessment. In this article we evaluate the application of the Multi-view SDI assessment framework. In addition, we ask the potential users of the framework to evaluate its applicability to assess SDIs. The results show that the framework could be applied to 21 National SDIs. Evaluation of the application process reveals that the completeness of assessment data and time needed to measure indicators depends strongly on the assessment methods used. It is recommended to use those methods that need less time to measure assessment indicators. The results also show that a significant part of the measurements could not be done due to survey questions not being filled in by the respondents. The results also show that the users tend to agree with the applicability of the Multi-view SDI assessment framework to assess SDIs.
Multi-Instance Learning Using Transformer for Obscured Weak Label Problem in PPG-Based Blood Pressure Estimation

Photoplethysmograph (PPG)-based blood pressure (BP) estimation has gained great momentum in recent years. However, the commonly used sample pair construction method for training the BP estimation model can result in weak label problems, which are often obscured by the routine supervised learning (SL) method. We proposed an end-to-end BP estimation model based on multi-instance learning and transformer (BP-MIL-Trans). The proposed method cropped the input PPG segment into several subsegments, with each subsegment defined as an instance. Then, the proposed transformer-based pooling layer could identify the critical instance correlated to the weak label and fuse the mutual information between different instances. Besides, it only handled instances smaller than the input segment length, reducing computational overhead. We conducted various experiments for different weak-label scenarios and achieved better estimation performance, noise robustness, and model complexity compared to the common SL model. Our study reveals an overlooked issue in BP estimation and provides a more effective solution. Additionally, it offers fresh perspectives for lightweight model design, which merits attention.