Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An asymptotic‐numerical method to compute the postbuckling behaviour of elastic plates and shells

In this paper, we apply an asymptotic-numerical method for computing the postbuckling behaviour of plate and shell structures. The bifurcating branch is sought in the form of polynomial expansions, and it is determined by solving numerically (FEM) several linear problems with a single stiffness matrix. A large number of terms of the series can easily be computed by using recurrent formulas. In comparison with a more classical step-by-step procedure, the method is rapid and automatic. However, the polynomial expansions have a radius of convergence which limits the validity of the solution to a neighbourhood of the bifurcation point. In the present form, the method should be viewed as a cheap and automatic way of completing a linear buckling analysis. It is illustrated in two examples: a square plate under in-plane compression and a cylindrical shell under pressure.
FRAMING THE OTHER WORLD: NARRATING SCARS OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN MALAYSIAN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT

The COVID-19 outbreak, which started in March 2020, has affected education in various ways. The closure of schools and universities worldwide has forced both teachers and learners to abandon physical teaching and learning. Instead, they have to adapt themselves to remote online classes. Literature education is no exception. The need to create lively, fun and interactive literature lessons suddenly became impossible. Instead, students were thrown into the world of isolation, fear and helplessness. For the first time in history, literature lessons worldwide have undergone an abrupt change under a new norm. This qualitative study attempts to explore students’ perceptions of COVID-19 pandemic. Data was gathered from written narratives of the midterm assignment of 30 undergraduate TESL students in the Faculty of Psychology and Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah during Semester 2 session 2021/22. Employing the premise mooted by Ahlberg (2021) who considers the pandemic as a crisis and the process of teaching and learning should take into consideration the factors of context, experience and emotion on learners’ sides, the eBook entitled The Other World was used as a frame narrative for reading activity. Next, students were required to choose two short stories from the volumes and produce their own narrations in dealing with the pandemic. A qualitative inductive content analysis of students’ narratives resulted in 5 codes indicating students’ perception of COVID-19 pandemic. Students have mixed reactions in narrating their personal experiences during the pandemic. Most expressed states of despair and depression, and their readiness to adapt themselves to the new social norms. Others have expressed their concerns for security and safety, while a small number related their experience to the new educational norm. The rest of them related their experiences in retrospect of close family ties and gratitude. The results of this study suggest the use of frame narrative technique among hesitant or problematic ESL students in dealing with a crisis.
Tree growth periodicity in the ever‐wet tropical forest of the Americas

The occurrence of annual growth rings in tropical trees—the result of the seasonal activity of vascular cambium—has been explained by seasonal water deficit or flooding periods. However, little is known about the drivers of annual tree‐ring formation under tropical hyper‐humid conditions without clear seasonal dry periods or flooding (ever‐wet conditions). Shelford's law states that the deficit or the excess of environmental resources limits plant growth. Accordingly, we hypothesize that excess soil moisture, a slight seasonal reduction of precipitation and a reduction in light availability determine rhythmic growth in ever‐wet tropical forests. We first assessed the occurrence of rhythmic growth in 14 tree species from the Biogeographic Chocó Region (annual rainfall 7200 mm) using three methods: Radiocarbon (14C) dating (all studied species), tree‐ring synchronization (4 species that have replicates) and automatic dendrometers (two species). Then, we assessed the effect of environmental drivers (rainfall, short‐wave radiation, temperature and soil moisture) on tree growth based on tree ring and dendrometer observations. We present evidence of annual tree‐ring formation in all 14 studied tree species. Depending on the tree species, we observed positive and negative correlations between growth, water availability and light availability. These relationships suggest that both excess or deficit of environmental resources may explain the seasonal pattern of tree growth. Although we cannot differentiate between excess soil water and low light availability by high cloudiness, we suggest that cloudiness frequency could affect tree growth in these forests. Synthesis. We reveal the annual formation of growth rings in the unexplored wetter‐end tropical forests, where seasonal growth depends on either high soil moisture and hypoxia or light limitations by cloudiness and photosynthesis constraints.
The interpretation of asymmetric depolarization in extragalactic radio sources

We discuss various interpretations of the effect found in powerful double radio sources with one-sided jets whereby the depolarization is systematically stronger on the counter-jet side. Depolarization by gas located within the source is unlikely to be the cause of the asymmetry. Line-emitting gas, though often associated with depolarization in radio galaxies, is not systematically stronger on the counter-jet side. We interpret the asymmetry in terms of a halo of hot gas surrounding the radio source. If the visible jet is on the near side of the source, as required for the relativistic beaming hypothesis, it will be seen through less depolarizing gas
Counseling for Health: How Psychological Distance Influences Continuance Intention towards Mobile Medical Consultation

As mobile healthcare services entered the public sight with high frequency during the COVID-19 pandemic, patients are increasingly recognizing the effectiveness of mobile medical consultation (MMC). Earlier studies have investigated what influences continuance intention (CI) towards MMC, but few studies have scrutinized it from the perspective of patients’ psychological distance. We formulated a framework to examine the psychological factors influencing CI towards MMC by integrating the information systems continuance model and psychological distance theory. The framework was validated using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach and data from 475 MMC users in China. The empirical results revealed that immediacy, telepresence, intimacy, and substitutability were significant predictors of CI, while satisfaction mediated these pathways. Pandemic-induced anxiety positively moderated the effect of immediacy on satisfaction and the effect of satisfaction on CI. Practical implementations for MMC healthcare practitioners, designers, and marketers are drawn.
Results from the second WHO external quality assessment for the molecular detection of respiratory syncytial virus, 2019–2020

External quality assessments (EQAs) for the molecular detection of human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are necessary to ensure the standardisation of reliable results. The Phase II, 2019–2020 World Health Organization (WHO) RSV EQA included 28 laboratories in 26 countries. The EQA panel evaluated performance in the molecular detection and subtyping of RSV‐A and RSV‐B. This manuscript describes the preparation, distribution, and analysis of the 2019–2020 WHO RSV EQA.
A Crowd-Enabled Approach for Privacy-Enhanced and Personalized Safe Route Planning for Fixed or Flexible Destinations

Ensuring travelers’ safety on roads has become a research challenge in recent years. We introduce a novel safe route planning problem and develop an efficient solution to ensure travelers’ safety on roads. Though few research attempts have been made in this regard, all of them assume that people share their sensitive travel experiences with a centralized entity for finding the safest routes, which is not ideal in practice for privacy reasons. Furthermore, existing works formulate safe route planning in ways that do not meet a traveler's need for safe travel on roads. Our approach finds the safest routes within a user-specified distance threshold based on the personalized travel experience of the knowledgeable crowd without involving any centralized computation. We develop a privacy-preserving model to quantify the travel experience of a user into personalized safety scores. Our algorithms, direct and iterative for finding the safest route further enhance user privacy by minimizing the exposure of personalized safety scores with others. Our safe route planner can find the safest routes for individuals and groups by considering both a fixed and a set of flexible destination locations. Extensive experiments using real datasets show that our approach finds the safest route in seconds. Compared to the direct algorithm, our iterative algorithm requires 43% less exposure of personalized safety scores.
Consistency of two versions of hearing handicap inventory for elderly (HHIE and HHIE-S) with degree of hearing loss (HL)

Abstract Objective Using self-assessment methods to assess hearing handicap in the elderly can play an important role in understanding their disease status and taking action to improve it. Thus, the present study was performed to determine the consistency of two versions hearing handicap inventory for elderly, namely HHIE and HHIE-S, with the degree of hearing loss(HL). Methods This is a cross-sectional study conducted on 110 elderly aged 60 years and above who referred to hearing clinics in province Khuzestan, Iran in 2019. In order to collect data, HHIE (including 25 questions) and HHIE-S (including 10 questions) were used. Data analysis was done using SPSS ver. 24. Independent sample t-test was used to compare HHIE and HHIE-S scores in terms of the degree of HL. Results The prevalence of mild, moderate and severe degrees of HL was 21.82%, 48.18% and 30.0%, respectively. The majority of the patients suffered from sensorineural hearing loss (77.28%). Comparison of HHIE/HHIE-S total score among patients with different degrees of HL showed statistically significant differences, and patients with a higher degree of hearing loss reported higher hearing handicaps. HHIE and HHIE-S total scores showed a positive large significant correlation (r = 0.815, p < 0.001). Our findings revealed a significant large positive association of the PTA with the total score of HHIE (r = 0.69, p < 0.001) and HHIE-S (r = 0.76, p < 0.001). Conclusions The large correlation between HHIE and HHIE-S measures observed in the current data supports that these two scales can be used interchangeably. These patient reported outcome inventories are congruent with hearing loss level, so they can be used as proper criteria for referring patients to audiologists in health system.
Probabilistic tree-generating binary grammars

Abstract The article presents a notion of Probabilistic Tree-generating Binary Grammar (PTgBG), a probabilistic extension of Tree-generating Binary Grammars (TgBG). TgBG is a for-malism developed to describe languages with syntactic discontinuities, designed with two practical goals in mind: (1) efficient parsing; (2) representation of results in the form of flat, easily processable phrase-structure trees. Here, we introduce rule probabilities for TgBG, thus creating PTgBG. We compare PTgBG to standard Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) in terms of parse tree probabilities and sentence probabilities. We conclude that PTgBG may be effectively parsed by the methods developed for PCFG, while allowing for convenient expression of some linguistic phenomena, specific for non-configurational languages.
Quality issues in co-authorship data of a national scientific community

Abstract A stream of research on co-authorship, used as a proxy of scholars’ collaborative behavior, focuses on members of a given scientific community defined at discipline and/or national basis for which co-authorship data have to be retrieved. Recent literature pointed out that international digital libraries provide partial coverage of the entire scholar scientific production as well as under-coverage of the scholars in the community. Bias in retrieving co-authorship data of the community of interest can affect network construction and network measures in several ways, providing a partial picture of the real collaboration in writing papers among scholars. In this contribution, we collected bibliographic records of Italian academic statisticians from an online platform (IRIS) available at most universities. Even if it guarantees a high coverage rate of our population and its scientific production, it is necessary to deal with some data quality issues. Thus, a web scraping procedure based on a semi-automatic tool to retrieve publication metadata, as well as data management tools to detect duplicate records and to reconcile authors, is proposed. As a result of our procedure, it emerged that collaboration is an active and increasing practice for Italian academic statisticians with some differences according to the gender, the academic ranking, and the university location of scholars. The heuristic procedure to accomplish data quality issues in the IRIS platform can represent a working case report to adapt to other bibliographic archives with similar characteristics.
Midwinter Dry Spells Amplify Post‐Fire Snowpack Decline

Increasing wildfire and declining snowpacks in mountain regions threaten water availability. We combine satellite‐based fire detections with snow seasonality classifications to examine fire activity in California's seasonal and ephemeral snow zones. We find a nearly tenfold increase in fire activity during 2020–2021 versus 2001–2019. Accumulation season broadband snow albedo declined 25%–71% at two burned sites (2021 and 2022) according to in‐situ data relative to un‐burned conditions, with greater declines associated with increased burn severity. By enhancing snowpack susceptibility to melt, both decreased snow albedo and canopy drove midwinter melt during a multi‐week dry spell in 2022. Despite similar meteorological conditions in December–February 2013 and 2022–linked to persistent high pressure weather regimes–minimal melt occurred in 2013. Post‐fire snowpack differences are confirmed with satellite measurements. With growing geographical overlap between wildfire and snow, our findings suggest California's snowpack is increasingly vulnerable to the compounding effects of dry spells and wildfire.
Individual Oral Exams in Mathematics Courses: 10 Years of Experience at the Air Force Academy

Abstract Over the last 10 years faculty members in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Air Force Academy have incorporated individual oral exams into mathematics courses. We have experimented with various approaches, shared results and ideas with other department members, and refined our techniques. We have found that this alternative assessment gives the instructor considerable insight into students’ understanding, and, in general, students value the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities via this kind of assessment. In this paper, we provide suggestions on successfully administering oral exams and offer evidence supporting their use in mathematics courses.
Defining a Correlative Transcriptional Signature Associated with Bulk Histone H3 Acetylation Levels in Adult Glioblastomas

Glioblastoma (GB) is the most prevalent primary brain cancer and the most aggressive form of glioma because of its poor prognosis and high recurrence. To confirm the importance of epigenetics in glioma, we explored The Cancer Gene Atlas (TCGA) database and we found that several histone/DNA modifications and chromatin remodeling factors were affected at transcriptional and genetic levels in GB compared to lower-grade gliomas. We associated these alterations in our own cohort of study with a significant reduction in the bulk levels of acetylated lysines 9 and 14 of histone H3 in high-grade compared to low-grade tumors. Within GB, we performed an RNA-seq analysis between samples exhibiting the lowest and highest levels of acetylated H3 in the cohort; these results are in general concordance with the transcriptional changes obtained after histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibition of GB-derived cultures that affected relevant genes in glioma biology and treatment (e.g., A2ML1, CD83, SLC17A7, TNFSF18). Overall, we identified a transcriptional signature linked to histone acetylation that was potentially associated with good prognosis, i.e., high overall survival and low rate of somatic mutations in epigenetically related genes in GB. Our study identifies lysine acetylation as a key defective histone modification in adult high-grade glioma, and offers novel insights regarding the use of HDAC inhibitors in therapy.
Intra- and inter-speaker variability of vowel space using three different formant extraction methods

Individual speakers’ voices display various unique patterns, one of the most prominent of which is vowel articulation. This study focuses on vowel space properties of 15 Czech speakers in read and spontaneous speech, comparing outputs of three formant extraction methods, measuring formants: (1) in the vowels’ temporal midpoints, (2) as their mean from the vowels’ middle thirds, and (3) in the vowels’ articulatory targets. The results show extensive variability across speakers, but also great within-speaker variability between the two speech styles, with spontaneous speech manifesting more centralised vowel pronunciation than read utterances. The first two measurement methods did not yield systematically different results, while formant values extracted from acoustically defined articulatory targets lead to noticeably larger vowel spaces. The results suggest that care should be taken when interpreting formant values obtained by different methods.
Fbxl4 Regulates the Photic Entrainment of Circadian Locomotor Rhythms in the Cricket Gryllus bimaculatus

Photic entrainment is an essential property of the circadian clock that sets the appropriate timing of daily behavioral and physiological events. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the entrainment remain largely unknown. In the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus, the immediate early gene c-fosB plays an important role in photic entrainment, followed by a mechanism involving cryptochromes (crys). However, the association between c-fosB expression and crys remains unclear. In the present study, using RNA-sequencing analysis, we found that five Fbxl family genes (Fbxl4, Fbxl5, Fbxl16, Fbxl-like1, and Fbxl-like2) encoding F-box and leucine-rich repeat proteins are likely involved in the mechanism following light-dependent c-fosB induction. RNA interference (RNAi) of c-fosA/B significantly downregulated Fbxls expression, whereas RNAi of the Fbxl genes exerted no effect on c-fosB expression. The Fbxl genes showed rhythmic expression under light-dark cycles (LDs) with higher expression levels in early day (Fbxl16), whole day (Fbxl-like1), or day-to-early night (Fbxl4, Fbxl5, and Fbxl-like2), whereas their expression was reduced in the dark. We then examined the effect of their RNAi on the photic entrainment of the locomotor rhythm and found that RNAi of Fbxl4 either disrupted or significantly delayed the re-entrainment of the locomotor rhythm to shifted LDs. These results suggest that light-induced c-fosB expression stimulates Fbxl4 expression to reset the circadian clock.
The Hierarchical Newton’s Method for Numerically Stable Prioritized Dynamic Control

This work links optimization approaches from hierarchical least-squares programming to instantaneous prioritized whole-body robot control. Concretely, we formulate the hierarchical Newton’s method which solves prioritized nonlinear least-squares problems in a numerically stable fashion even in the presence of kinematic and algorithmic singularities of the approximated kinematic constraints. These results are then transferred to control problems which exhibit the additional variability of time. This is necessary to formulate acceleration-based controllers and to incorporate the second-order dynamics. However, we show that the Newton’s method without complicated adaptations is not appropriate in the acceleration domain. We therefore formulate a velocity-based controller which exhibits second-order proportional derivative (PD) convergence characteristics. Our developments are verified in toy robot control scenarios as well as in complex robot experiments which stress the importance of prioritized control and its singularity resolution.
Automatic tuning of multivariable controllers with adaptive relay feedback

A new method for automatic tuning of multivariable PI controllers using adaptive hysteresis relay feedback is proposed for multivariable processes with significant interactions. It is shown that for a stable m x m process it is possible to estimate an m x m transfer function matrix at two points in the frequency domain. Therefore, a minimum of m/sup 2/ adaptive relay feedback tests are performed in the process. For each test, if a limit cycle exits, it will correspond to a single critical point of the process. By varying the relay parameters, different critical points can be determined. The resulting oscillations frequencies are allowed to be close to each other by means of an adaptive relay, so that the process frequency response matrix can be estimated at that point. The method developed here also identifies steady state matrix of the multivariable process during the same adaptive relay feedback tests. The results of the identification procedure are used to tune a multivariable PI controller by the Maciejowski rule. Comparative results are shown to demonstrate that the new auto-tuning method has the best set-point response performance.
Rain Discrimination with Machine Learning Classifiers for Opportunistic Rain Detection System Using Satellite Micro-Wave Links

In the climate change scenario the world is facing, extreme weather events can lead to increasingly serious disasters. To improve managing the consequent risks, there is a pressing need to have real-time systems that provide accurate monitoring and possibly forecasting which could help to warn people in the affected areas ahead of time and save them from hazards. The oblique earth-space links (OELs) have been used recently as a method for real-time rainfall detection. This technique poses two main issues related to its indirect nature. The first one is the classification of rainy and non-rainy periods. The second one is the determination of the attenuation baseline, which is an essential reference for estimating rainfall intensity along the link. This work focuses mainly on the first issue. Data referring to eighteen rain events were used and have been collected by analyzing a satellite-to-earth link quality and employing a tipping bucket rain gauge (TBRG) properly positioned, used as reference. It reports a comparison among the results obtained by applying four different machine learning (ML) classifiers, namely the support vector machine (SVM), neural network (NN), random forest (RF), and decision tree (DT). Various data arrangements were explored, using a preprocessed version of the TBRG data, and extracting two different sets of characteristics from the microwave link data, containing 6 or 12 different features, respectively. The achieved results demonstrate that the NN classifier has outperformed the other classifiers.