Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Revisiting the linkage between financial inclusion and economic growth: Time series evidence from Vietnam

Financial inclusion has played a key role in encouraging the development of financial sectors in recent decades. Only a few studies, however, have looked at the linkage between financial inclusion and economic growth. This study examines the impact of financial inclusion on economic growth in Vietnam, utilizing data spanning the period from 2001 to 2021. The study uses composite risk, trade openness, and government expenditures as control variables. The study follows the access to finance theory, which suggests that access to financial services such as credit, savings, and insurance can help promote economic growth and development. The nexus between financial inclusion and economic growth has never been examined in the case of Vietnam, which represents a greater share of global trade and income. Moreover, this study uses trade openness, government expenditures, and the composite risk index as control variables in the empirical model. Hence, the study contributes to the existing literature in some meaningful ways. This study employs the FMOLS method to estimate the long-run coefficients of financial inclusion, trade openness, composite risk, and government expenditures. According to the findings, financial inclusion boosts economic performance. On the contrary, composite risk is negatively related to economic growth. The results of this study suggest that Vietnam must implement policies to improve financial inclusion so as to enhance its economic growth.
Simultaneous Joint Inversion For Susceptibility And Velocity

I describe the preliminary results of ongoing research on the implementation of a magnetic inversion exploiting a novel positivity constraint and a nonlinear algorithm for the optimization. Inversion is performed into the magnetization domain and not into the susceptibility domain directly. Furthermore, I propose an effective way to integrate magnetic data with refraction tomography data through simultaneous joint inversion (SJI) with the cross-gradients constraint. Application of this method to synthetic data sets demonstrates the benefits of using SJI with respect to separate, single-domain inversions. As for seismic-gravity SJI, a seismic-magnetic SJI is effective for complex imaging problems, such as regions with intrusions or faults.
Biting Midges (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae) as Vectors of Viruses

Biting midges of the genus Culicoides occur almost globally and can regionally and seasonally reach high abundances. Most species are hematophagous, feeding on all groups of vertebrates, including humans. In addition to being nuisance pests, they are able to transmit disease agents, with some viruses causing high morbidity and/or mortality in ruminants, horses and humans. Despite their impact on animal husbandry, public health and tourism, knowledge on the biology and ecology of culicoid biting midges and their interactions with ingested pathogens or symbiotic microorganisms is limited. Research is challenging due to unknown larval habitats, the insects’ tiny size, the inability to establish and breed most species in the laboratory and the laborious maintenance of colonies of the few species that can be reared in the laboratory. Consequently, the natural transmission of pathogens has experimentally been demonstrated for few species while, for others, only indirect evidence of vector potential exists. Most experimental data are available for Culicoides sonorensis and C. nubeculosus, the only species kept in western-world insectaries. This contribution gives an overview on important biting midge vectors, transmitted viruses, culicoid-borne viral diseases and their epidemiologies and summarizes the little knowledge on interactions between biting midges, their microflora and culicoid-borne arboviruses.
The Conduct and Consequence of Research on Digital Communication

In spite of the capacity for the Internet to connect people and information irrespective of geography, physical location may paradoxically provide influential indicators of the perceived expertise of strangers and the credibility of the information they provide that may in turn guide people’s behaviors. To address this, this study examined the novel concept of geospatial concordance or the degree to which entities implicated in the sharing of aggregated opinions in online information pools are physically close to each other in geographic space. Predictions were tested in the context of user-generated online reviews using stimuli reflecting various types of geospatial concordance: between information consumers and online reviewers, between reviewed venues and their reviewers, and between consumers and reviewed venues. Findings support geographic perspectives emphasizing space as a mental construction imbued with particular meaning and confirm psychological views that people mentally construe places at different levels of abstraction, depending on their psychological, and physical, distance from them.
Reliability and Accuracy of Chirp Based Multiple Auditory Steady State Response (MSSR) and Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) in Children.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to compare the reliability and accuracy of chirp-based Multiple Auditory Steady State Response (MSSR) and Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) in children. METHODS The prospective clinical study was conducted at Selayang Hospital (SH) and Hospital Canselor Tuanku Muhriz (HCTM) within one year. A total of 38 children ranging from 3 to 18 years old underwent hearing evaluation using ABR tests and MSSR under sedation. The duration of both tests were then compared. RESULTS The estimated hearing threshold of frequency specific chirp MSSR showed good correlation with ABR especially in higher frequencies such as 2000 Hz and 4000Hz with the value of cronbach alpha of 0.890, 0.933, 0.970 and 0.969 on 500Hz, 1000Hz, 2000Hz and 4000Hz. The sensitivity of MSSR is 0.786, 0.75, 0.957 and 0.889 and specificity is 0.85, 0.882, 0.979 and 0.966 over 500Hz, 1000Hz, 2000Hz and 4000Hz. The duration of MSSR tests were shorter than ABR tests in normal hearing children with an average of 35.3 minutes for MSSR tests and 46.4 minutes for ABR tests. This can also be seen in children with hearing loss where the average duration for MSSR tests is 40.0 minutes and 52.0 minutes for ABR tests. CONCLUSION MSSR showed good correlation and reliability in comparison with ABR especially on higher frequencies. Hence, MSSR is a good clinical test to diagnose children with hearing loss.
Tephra and ecological studies of Limnopolar Lake, Byers Peninsula, Livingston Island.

Limnopolar Lake, Livingston Island, situated close to the tip of the northern Antarctic Peninsula (62°40'S, 61°00'W), has experienced a long history of primary and secondary tephra inputs from nearby volcanic centres. Background levels of tephra in a sediment core collected from the lake were ~30,000-35,000 gdm-1, and were caused by the continual washing in of tephra deposited in the surrounding watershed. Tephra abundances above these levels were assigned to tephra horizons, of which 5 were identified to have occurred over the last 2000 years. Electron probe microanalysis of the tephra shards revealed that the predominant composition of the tephra was basaltic andesite, with few basalt and andesite pyroclasts. Limited numbers of shards with trachy-basalt and basaltic trachy-andesite compositions were also recorded. Deception Island was attributed as the most likely source of the tephra. Eight distinct biological communities were identified in the sediment core on the basis of abundance and distribution of organism remains. Most community shifts over the last ~2000 years appear to be due to direct or indirect effects of tephra deposition into the lake, with tephra abundance levels being an important factor. However, some community shifts can be attributed to climate variability and grazing pressures. The apparent lack of zooplankton species, with only a recent colonisation of the anostracan Branchinecta gainii and possibly the copepod Boeckella poppei, suggests that zooplankton species may not be adapted to surviving in lakes with continual tephral inputs or alternately have recently colonised the island.
The vertical distribution of fish on two offshore oil platforms

Knowledge of platform ecology is necessary to best inform decommissioning practice. Remotely operated vehicle (ROV) video is often collected during standard industry operations and may provide insight into the marine life associating with offshore platforms, however, the utility of this video for ecological assessments remains unclear. Archival ROV video surveys at the Wandoo oil platforms on Australia’s North West Shelf was evaluated for its utility, with only 4.9% of imagery usable for standardised ecological studies. Based on the subset of usable ROV video, the influence of depth and structural complexity on attributes of the fish assemblage on the Wandoo oil platforms was examined. Vertical ROV transects on three vertical shafts on the Wandoo platforms were stratified into 10 m depth strata from 0 to 50 m, with 111 fish taxa from 25 families identified and counted across all depth strata. At both platforms, taxonomic richness and abundance was significantly highest in shallow regions and declined with depth. Small reef fish were predominantly associated with structurally complex habitat in shallow regions (<22 m), whilst large demersal species dominated below 32 m. Future decommissioning policy in Australia should consider the vertical fish distributions and the importance of shallow sections of platforms. Finally, the dearth of usable video was due to the haphazard method of collection and it is recommended that future surveys should be conducted according to scientific standards to ensure greater utility of the video for both industry use and scientific research.
Upper lithospheric structure of northeastern Venezuela from joint 1 inversion of surface wave dispersion and receiver functions 2

We use 1.5 years of continuous recordings from an amphibious seismic network deployment in the region of 17 northeast South America and southeast Caribbean to study the crustal and uppermost mantle structure through a joint inversion of surface wave dispersion curves determined from ambient seismic noise and receiver functions. The availability of both ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) and land stations makes this experiment ideal to determine the best processing methods to extract reliable empirical Green’s functions (EGFs) and construct a 3D shear velocity model. Results show EGFs with high 21 signal-to-noise ratio for land-land, land-OBS and OBS-OBS paths from a variety of stacking methods. Using the EGF 22 estimates, we measure phase and group velocity dispersion curves for Rayleigh and Love waves. We complement these 23 observations with receiver functions, which allow us to perform an H-k analysis to obtain Moho depth estimates across the study area. The measured dispersion curves and receiver functions are used in a Bayesian joint inversion to retrieve a series of 1D shear-wave velocity models, which are then interpolated to build a 3D model of the region. Our results display clear contrasts in the oceanic region across the border of the strike-slip fault system San Sebastian - El Pilar as well as a high velocity region that corresponds well with the continental craton of southeastern Venezuela. We resolve known geological features in our new model, including the Espino Graben and the Guiana Shield provinces, and provide new information about their crustal structures. Furthermore, we image the difference in the crust beneath the Maturin and Guárico Sub-Basin. RFs a Our results are correlated to shed new insight into the structure of the We begin our discussion by analysis then we examine the shear-wave model of We present a new, 3D shear-wave velocity model of the SE Caribbean area built from a dense set of 1D models (spaced in a 0.5 º x 0.5 º grid). The 1D models were obtained from a nonlinear joint inversion of phase and group velocities of surface waves and receiver functions, using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm (Dreiling et al., 2020). Additionally, we provide a new Moho depth map obtained from a semblance-weighted H-k stacking analysis of receiver functions, which shows remarkable tectonic features. From the interpretation of these results, we outline the following conclusions:
Spectral and temporal implementation of Japanese speakers’ English vowel categories: A corpus-based study

This study investigates the predictions of second language (L2) speech acquisition models — SLM(-r), PAM(-L2), and L2LP — on how native (L1) Japanese speakers implement the spectral and temporal aspects of L2 American English vowel categories. Data were obtained from 102 L1 Japanese speakers in the J-AESOP corpus, which also includes nativelikeness judgments by trained phoneticians. Spectrally, speakers judged to be non-nativelike showed a strong influence from L1 categories, except L2 /ʌ/ which could be deflected away from L1 /a/ according to SLM(-r) and L2 /ɑː/ which seemed orthographically assimilated to L1 /o/ according to PAM(-L2). More nativelike speakers showed vowel spectra similar to those of native English speakers across all vowels, in accordance with L2LP. Temporally, although speakers tended to equate the phonetic length of English vowels with Japanese phonemic length distinctions, segment-level L1-L2 category similarity was not a significant predictor of the speakers’ nativelikeness. Instead, the implementation of prosodic-level factors such as stress and phrase-final
Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Laval Photometric Indoor HDR Dataset, the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range 360° panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks, where: per-pixel luminance, per-pixel color and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller photometric dataset with a commercial 360° camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community. Dataset and code are available at https://lvsn.github. io/beyondthepixel/.
Multidisciplinary recognizable proof of clupeiform fishes from the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean

Abstract In the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean, several described species of Clupeiformes overlap their geographical distribution in the coastal areas from Rio Grande do Sul (Southern Brazil) to Bahía Blanca (Argentina) and the Río de la Plata estuary. Larvae and juveniles of the SW Atlantic menhaden Brevoortia aurea are very difficult to discriminate from those of other clupeids belonging to the genera Platanichthys and Ramnogaster inhabiting the same environments. Here we implemented phylogenetic analyses based on mitochondrial cytochrome b sequences and morphometric and osteological studies to achieve unambiguous species recognition in different ontogenetic stages of six endemic species of Clupeiformes from the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean. All phylogenetic analyses based on the cytochrome b gene yielded a robust support to the existence of highly structured and monophyletic groups conforming clupeiforms taxa. These monophyletic entities were consistent with major groups accessed through the first two principal components (PCs) from morphometric variation among taxa. Both approaches resulted in accurated and complementary tools for the individual assignment in clades and groups within Clupeiformes during different ontogenetic stages in their life cycle. The detection of species-specific spawning and nursery areas through accurated methodological approaches of identification constitute a prerequisite for a sustainable management in pelagic fisheries
Day-to-day Variability Indices improve utility of Oscillometry in Paediatric Asthma

Background Oscillometry may provide paediatric asthma with a feasible sensitive tools for objective remote monitoring. Methods School-aged cohorts of healthy, well controlled and poorly controlled asthma (defined as [≥]2 exacerbations within preceding 12m) performed daily home-based oscillometry for 3-4 months (C-100 tremoflo, Thorasys Ltd), alongside objective measures of asthma control (ACQ weekly, ACT monthly), medication use (Hailie) and exacerbations. Day-to-day variability was calculated as Coefficient of variation (CV) for resistance at 5Hz (R5), reactance (X5) and Area under reactance curve (AX). Analyses included cohort comparison, ability to differentiate asthma from health and correlations with asthma control and exacerbation burden. Exacerbation clusters were explored by analysing oscillometry data, symptoms, breathing parameters and symptoms using principal component analysis and k-means clustering. Results Feasibility was 74.9+/-16.0% in health (n=13, over 93.7+/-16.2 days) and 80.6+/-12.9% in asthma (n=42, over 101.6+/-24.9 days; 17 well controlled 27 poor asthma control). Significantly higher day-to-day variability in all oscillometry indices occurred in asthma, vs. health, and with worsening asthma control. CV R5 stable differentiated asthma from health best (AUC 0.87, p=0.00001). CV R5 correlated with all measured of concurrent asthma control and asthma exacerbation burden, r 0.41-0.52 (all p<0.01). Analysing pre-exacerbation and post-exacerbation onset periods separately, day-to-day variability indices identified two distinct exacerbation clusters: a smaller cluster (n=12 and n=8, respectively) with higher R5, X5, AX and higher CV R5 and X5 vs. a larger cluster (n=53 and 65, respectively). Symptoms did not differ across clusters. Conclusions Home-based oscillometry monitoring was highly feasible over extended periods in school-aged asthmatics. Utility was evidenced by improved ability to differentiate asthma from health, reflect asthma control and exacerbation burden and phenotype exacerbations.
The effect of balanced energy-protein supplementation provided to lactating women on maternal and infant outcomes: study protocol for a prospectively planned individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis

Background: The high prevalence of infant stunting and maternal undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries poses a significant public health threat. The World Health Organization recommends balanced energy-protein (BEP) supplementation to pregnant women from populations with a high prevalence of underweight (prepregnancy BMI <18.5 kg/m2), leaving a notable gap in guidance for lactating women. To address this problem, we established the Maternal BEP Studies Harmonization Initiative (BEP Initiative) to investigate the impact of BEP supplementation given to pregnant and/or lactating women on maternal and infant outcomes by synthesizing data from multiple clinical trials. This is a study protocol for our prospective individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis on BEP lactation trials. Methods: Data from four randomized controlled trials that include mother-infant dyads in India (n=816), Pakistan (n=957), Burkina Faso (n=800), and Nepal (n=726) will be pooled and analyzed. Women were randomized to BEP (one trial had a third arm with maternal BEP plus infants receiving azithromycin) or control groups at baseline (during the first week) and received the intervention through six months postpartum. A one-stage IPD meta-analysis will be done using mixed-effects linear and log-binomial regression models to account for between-trial heterogeneity. The primary outcome of infant length-for-age z scores (LAZ) at six months of age and secondary outcomes of maternal and infant indicators of nutritional status at six months of age will be examined. Also, we will examine baseline characteristics as covariates and effect modifiers for the BEP to outcome relationship. Risk of bias assessments will be carried out for each of the individual trials using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Discussion: This prospective IPD meta-analysis uses a one-stage IPD meta-analysis, which allows for higher statistical power to examine outcomes, more flexibility in defining variables, and has the ability to examine many individual- and study-level variables as effect modifiers, allowing conclusions on which individuals or populations may benefit more from BEP given during lactation.
Intrahost SARS-CoV-2 k-mer identification method (iSKIM) for rapid detection of mutations of concern reveals emergence of global mutation patterns

Despite unprecedented global sequencing and surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, timely identification of the emergence and spread of novel variants of concern (VoCs) remains a challenge. Several million raw genome sequencing runs are now publicly available. We sought to survey these datasets for intrahost variation to study emerging mutations of concern. We developed iSKIM (“intrahost SARS-CoV-2 k-mer identification method”) to relatively quickly and efficiently screen the many SARS-CoV-2 datasets to identify intrahost mutations belonging to lineages of concern. Certain mutations surged in frequency as intrahost minor variants just prior to, or while lineages of concern arose. The Spike N501Y change common to several VoCs was found as a minor variant in 834 samples as early as October 2020. This coincides with the timing of the first detected samples with this mutation in the Alpha/B.1. 1.7 and Beta/B.1. 351 lineages. Using iSKIM, we also found that Spike L452R was detected as an intrahost minor variant as early as September 2020, prior to the observed rise of the Epsilon/B.1. 429/B.1. 427 lineages in late 2020. iSKIM rapidly screens for mutations of interest in raw data, prior to genome assembly, and can be used to detect increases in intrahost variants, potentially providing an early indication of novel variant spread.
JEasyTFM: an open-source software package for the analysis of large 2D TFM data within ImageJ

Abstract Motivation Cells adhering to the extracellular matrix can sense and respond to a wide variety of chemical and physical features of the adhesive surface. Traction force microscopy (TFM) allows determining the tensile forces exerted by the cells on their substrate with high resolution. Results To allow broad access of this techniques to cell biology laboratories we developed JeasyTFM, an open-source ImageJ package able to process multi-color and multi-position time-lapse pictures thus suitable for the automatic analysis of large TFM data. Availability and implementation JEasyTFM is implemented as an ImageJ plugin and available at: http://questpharma.u-strasbg.fr/JEasyTFM.html.