Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Health-Promoting Lifestyle Modification Education on Knowledge, Attitude, and Quality of Life of Postmenopausal Women

Limited knowledge and negative attitudes about menopause among postmenopausal women (PMW) create a multitude of health-related issues leading to impaired quality of life (QOL) among them. This study evaluated the impact of a health-promoting lifestyle education intervention (HPLEI) on knowledge, attitude, and QOL in a group of PMW in Sri Lanka. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 72 PMW, matched for sociodemographic status of the community from two geographically separated areas in Galle, and they were allocated to intervention (n = 37) and control (n = 35) groups. HPLEI is comprised of health education sessions focused on postmenopausal health management with lifestyle modifications provided only for the intervention group for 8 weeks and follow-up for 6 months. The control group was not given any planned education programme and was allowed to proceed with the usual lifestyle during this period. Knowledge, attitude, menopause-specific QOL (MENQOL), and overall QOL were evaluated in both groups with self-administered questionnaires at the baseline, after 8 weeks of education sessions and at the end of 6 months of follow-up. The mean (SD) ages of the intervention and control groups were 54.6 (4.5) and 56.5 (3.4) (p = 0.06) years, respectively. All evaluated variable scores were not different between the intervention and control groups (p > 0.05) at the baseline. In the intervention group, knowledge (mean ± SD; 21.70 ± 1.05) and attitude (mean ± SD; 44.02 ± 5.33) scores increased at the end (p < 0.001). In the control group, a marginal increase in all dimensions of knowledge scores (mean ± SD; 9.71 ± 2.21) and unchanged attitude scores (mean ± SD; 23.91 ± 7.56) were seen. All MENQOL scores decreased during the follow-up in the intervention group (mean ± SD; 138.51 ± 18.47) (p < 0.001) except the sexual domain (p = 0.32). MENQOL scores were increased in the control group (mean ± SD; 92.05 ± 28.87) (p < 0.001) with time. Overall QOL scores increased (mean ± SD; 74.85 ± 9.71) (p < 0.001) in the intervention group during the study period and in the control group overall QOL (mean ± SD; 51.03 ± 13.61) showed a reduction (p < 0.001) at the end. Health education focused on health-promoting lifestyle modifications was effective in improving knowledge, attitude, MENQOL, and overall QOL of PMW.
Esterase Enzyme Function and Genetical Structure of Populations of the Freshwater Fish, Notropis stramineus

Electrophoresis on starch gel of muscle homogenates of the freshwater fish, Notropis stramineus, indicated two regions of esterase heterogeneity. The most anodal group (Es-I) consisted of several closely associated minor bands while the more cathodal group (Es-II) exhibited a clear pattern of variation attributable to three codominant alleles segregating at an autosomal locus. A two-allele polymorphism was also detected at a lactate dehydrogenase locus (Ldh). Temperature-dependent activity of the esterase isozymes separated by column chromatography indicated: (1) there is a correlation of Es-I activity at various temperatures with Es-II genotype, and (2) a difference in temperature-dependent activity between the homozygotes and the heterozygote. The Es-I isozymes from Es-II heterozygotes exhibited a maximum activity at temperatures higher than those from Es-II homozygotes. Population samples during 3 years, ranging over more than 300 miles of the Kansas River mainstream, indicated both temporal and spatial stability of the Es-II polymorphism (i.e., no significant variation in p). A regular pattern of heterozygote deficiency was observed among samples when each was compared with expected Hard-Weinberg frequencies. Although positive assortative mating cannot be excluded as a cause of the observed deficiency, the latter cannot be due to the Wahlund effect, the presence of a null allele, or inbreeding. The last was excluded on the basis of slight heterozygote excesses observed at the Ldh locus in the same population samples. There were no differences in p between two age classes. Although males and females did not differ from one another in p, males exhibited a slight excess of heterozygotes while females exhibited a marked deficiency. Considering the potential relationship between enzyme function and adaptation, the observed pattern of functional diversity allows a prediction of intergeneration selection or intrageneration differential mortality, where heterozygotes are at an advantage at higher environmental temperatures and homozygotes at lower environmental temperatures. Magnitudes of heterozygote deficiency fluctuate with season in all population samples examined through time in a manner predicted by functional characteristics of the esterase isozymes. The rather large changes in zygotic frequencies occurring within a single generation suggest a significant amount of differential genetic mortality occurring within populations.
Long-Term Video Question Answering via Multimodal Hierarchical Memory Attentive Networks

Long-term Video Question Answering plays an essential role in visual information retrieval, which aims at generating natural language answers to discretionary free-form questions about the referenced long-term video. Rather than remember the video as a sequence of visual content, humans have an innate cognitive ability to identify the critical moments related to the question at first glance, then tie together the specific evidence around these critical moments for further analysis and reasoning. Motivated by this intuition, we propose the multimodal hierarchical memory attentive networks with two heterogeneous memory subnetworks: the top guided memory network and the bottom enhanced multimodal memory attentive network. The top guided memory network serves as a shallow inference engine to pick relevant and informative moments of questions and obtain salient video content at a coarse-grained level. Subsequently, the bottom enhanced multimodal memory attentive network is designed as an in-depth reasoning engine to perform more accurate attention with cues from video bottom evidence in a fine-grained level to enhance question answering quality. We evaluate the proposed method on three publicly available video question answering benchmarks, namely ActivityNet-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and MSVD-QA. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for long-term videos. Extensive ablation studies are carried out to explore the reasons behind the proposed model’s effectiveness.
Discovering protein secondary structures: Classification and description of isolated α‐turns

Irregular protein secondary structures are believed to be important structural domains involved in molecular recognition processes between proteins, in interactions between peptide substrates and receptors, and in protein folding. In these respects tight turns are being studied in detail. They also represent template structures for the design of new molecules such as drugs, pesticides, or antigens. Isolated α-turns, not participating in α-helical structures, have received little attention due to the overwhelming presence of other types of tight turns in peptide and protein structures. The growing number of protein X-ray structures allowed us to undertake a systematic search into the Protein Data Bank of this uncharacterized protein secondary structure. A classification of isolated α-turns into different types, based on conformational similarity, is reported here. A preliminary analysis on the occurrence of some particular amino acids in certain positions of the turned structure is also presented. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Revisiting Stochastic Computing in the Era of Nanoscale Nonvolatile Technologies

In this era of nanoscale technologies, the inherent characteristics of some nonvolatile devices, such as resistive random access memory (ReRAM), phase-change material (PCM), and spintronics, can emulate stochastic functionalities. Traditionally, these devices have been engineered to suppress the stochastic switching behavior as it poses reliability concerns for memory storage and logic applications. However, leveraging stochasticity in such devices led to a renewed interest in hardware–software codesign of stochastic algorithms since the CMOS-based implementations of stochastic algorithms involve cumbersome circuitry to generate “stochastic bits. ” In this article, we consider two classes of problems: deep neural networks (DNNs) and combinatorial optimization. The rapidly growing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked an interest in energy-efficient implementations of large DNNs, with binary representations of synaptic weights and neuronal activities. Stochasticity plays an important role in leveraging the benefits of these binary representations, leading to model compression and optimization during training. In combinatorial optimization, such as graph coloring or traveling salesman problems, stochastic algorithms, such as the Ising computing model, have been shown to be effective. These problems require exhaustive computational procedures, and the Ising model uses a natural annealing agent to achieve near-optimal solutions in a reasonable timescale, without getting stuck in “local minima. ” In this article, we present a broad review of stochastic computing utilizing the stochastic switching characteristics of devices based on nanoscale nonvolatile technologies. We show how to codesign of the devices and algorithms that can enable optimal solutions for both combinatorial problems and binary neural networks for local learning and inference. Directly mapping the nonvolatile device characteristics to the stochastic algorithms without the need for storing the bits in a separate memory leads to efficient use of hardware.
QROUTE: An Efficient Quality of Service (QoS) Routing Scheme for Software-Defined Overlay Networks

Many computer network applications impose constraints for multiple quality of service (QoS) metrics, e.g., delay, packet loss, bandwidth, and jitter. These QoS constraints cannot be guaranteed by the Internet due to its best-effort service model. Overlay networks have been an effective technique at the application layer to support multiple QoS constraints of networking applications. In software-defined overlay networks, software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm is introduced in the overlay networks to enable centralized and efficient routing of traffic in the overlay networks, thus, enabling better QoS. One of the main challenges in software-defined overlay networks is the fast-changing overlay link QoS characteristics. However, the existing routing algorithms for satisfying multiple QoS constraints in software-defined overlay networks involve high route computation time and thus these routing algorithms cannot adapt to the fast-changing overlay link QoS characteristics. Moreover, as we scale the size of overlay networks, the size of forwarding tables increases exponentially. This is because the existing routing schemes for ensuring multiple QoS constraints use both the source and the destination address for data-plane forwarding. This leads to pushing a huge amount of forwarding table entries by the controller through the network and thus limiting the size of the overlay network. We propose an efficient routing scheme, QROUTE, for satisfying multiple QoS constraints in software-defined overlay networks. QROUTE consists of a control plane routing algorithm which has significantly low route computation time because of employing a novel directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) based approach. QROUTE also reduces the forwarding entries in the data plane by using a QoS-metric-based forwarding scheme. We extensively evaluate QROUTE using traces from a global overlay service provider. We also examine QROUTE on a testbed of P4-BMv2 switches controlled by the ONOS controller using P4Runtime protocol. We find that QROUTE outperforms other state-of-the-art QoS routing schemes in route computation time, size of the forwarding tables and meeting the QoS requirements of various applications.
RFLP mapping of QTL for fusarium head blight resistance in wheat

Recent epidemics of fusarium head blight (FHB), caused by Fusarium graminearum Schwabe (telomorph: Gibberella zeae), in the USA and Canada have caused severe yield and quality losses in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Development of resistant cultivars has been difficult because of the complex inheritance of resistance and confounding environmental effects. This study was conducted to identify and map DNA markers linked to genes associated with FHB resistance. A population of 112 F 5 -derived recombinant inbred (RI) wheat lines from the cross 'Sumai 3' (resistant)/ 'Stoa' (moderately susceptible) was evaluated in two greenhouse experiments for Type II resistance (spread within the spike). On the basis of restriction fragment length polymorphis (RFLP) marker analyses, five genomic regions were significantly (P < 0.01) associated with FHB resistance, three derived from Sumai 3 and two from Stoa. Regions on Chromosomes 3BS (from Sumai 3) and 2AL (from Stoa) were identified by interval analysis using a LOD threshold of 3.0. These two quantitative trait loci (QTL) have been assigned the gene designations QFhs.ndsu-3B and QFhs. ndsu-2A, respectively. Recombinant inbred lines with these two QTL had a median severity of 20.9%, compared with 36.2% for all RI lines. The best RFLP marker in the 3BS region explained 15.4% of the variation and a multiple regression model consisting of three QTL explained 29.5% of the variation. These results indicate that resistance to FHB is inherited in a quantitative manner and that marker-assisted selection may aid the development of FHB-resistant cultivars.
Contributions of Pore‐Scale Mixing and Mechanical Dispersion to Reaction During Active Spreading by Radial Groundwater Flow

Spreading and mixing are complementary processes that promote reaction of two reactive aqueous solutes present in contiguous plumes in groundwater. Spreading reconfigures the plume geometry, elongating the interface between the plumes, while mixing increases the volume of aquifer occupied by each plume, bringing the solute molecules together to react. Since reaction only occurs where the two solute plumes are in contact with each other, local mechanisms that drive flow and transport near the interface between the plumes control the amount of reaction. This work uses local characteristics of the plumes and the flow field near the plume interface to analyze the relative contributions of pore‐scale mixing and mechanical dispersion to instantaneous, irreversible, bimolecular reaction in a homogeneous aquifer with active spreading caused by radial flow from a well. Two solutes are introduced in sequence at the well, creating concentric circular plumes. We allow for incomplete mixing of the solutes in the pore space, by modeling the pore space as a segregated compartment and a mixed compartment with first‐order mass transfer between the two compartments. We develop semi‐analytical expressions for concentrations of the solutes in both compartments. We found that the relative contribution of mechanical dispersion to reaction increases over time and also increases due to increases in the Peclet number, in the relative source concentration of the chasing solute, and in the mass transfer rate from the segregated compartment to the mixed compartment of the pore space.
Excitation module for orthogonal fundamental mode fluxgate sensor

A fluxgate is a device that has important applications in weak magnetic field measurements. Compared with the second harmonic mode, the orthogonal fundamental mode fluxgate exhibits a better performance in terms of lower noise and wider bandwidth, making it popular among researchers in this field. An amorphous wire is a vital part of any orthogonal fundamental mode fluxgate, and its excitation parameters determine the performance of the sensor (especially the noise level). For different structures and sizes of amorphous wires as probes, the optimal excitation parameters of orthogonal fundamental mode fluxgate are different. The conventional excitation module development scheme suffers from problems such as a complicated structure and low flexibility. To overcome these problems, a simple, compact, and effective excitation module is proposed, which is composed of a waveform generator, signal conditioning circuit, and voltage-controlled current source. Owing to the high flexibility, the frequency of the direct digital frequency synthesis is fully programmable. We tested the design performance indexes of key parameters, such as excitation signal waveform, amplitude, noise level, and bandwidth. The excitation current noise level is as low as 12.42 nA/sqrt (Hz) @ 20 kHz without Iac and 17.35 nA/sqrt (Hz) @ 20 kHz with Iac. The effective bandwidth of the alternating current output is 10–200 kHz. Moreover, a system test platform was developed, and this module was used to analyze the variation trend of the noise level of the fluxgate sensor under different excitation parameters (such as Iac, Idc, and excitation current frequency). It has been proved that the excitation module helps in effectively and quickly selecting the best excitation parameters to improve the performance of orthogonal fundamental mode fluxgates and shorten their development cycle.
The Effects of Temperature on the Pathogenicity of Heat-Sensitive Mutants of the Entomopathogenic Fungus,Beauveria bassiana,toward the Migratory Grasshopper,Melanoplus sanguinipes

Abstract Heat-sensitive (HS) mutants ofBeauveria bassianawere shown to kill grasshoppers at the growth-permissive temperature (PT) of 20°C but not at 30°C or more, the nonpermissive temperatures (NPT). The migratory grasshopper,Melanoplus sanguinipes,exhibited near complete poikilothermy in the bioassay system employed forB. bassianastrains. Temperature shift, from 20 to 30°C, during the bioassays was used to halt the mutant cell development postinfection. The resultant mortality data were analyzed using median effect plots. Timing of the infection was correlated with the required time at PT for grasshopper death. An incubation period of 4.6 to 6.4 days, postinfection, at PT was needed in order for the values for onset of infection, mortality rates, and the LT50for the three HS mutants to reach those insects infected with control strain, GK2016, at the PT. The time of PT exposure required to ultimately kill half of the test insect population, termed LE50, ranged from 3.9 to 5.1 days. A minimum time for the insect infection at PT, defined by the LE50value, is required for infection to lead to mortality. This time, the initial 4.4 days of infection, may reflect certain critical event(s) after which, whether or not additional fungal growth at NPT occurs, grasshopper death is unavoidable. These observations should help the development of models for predicting the outcome of infection processes and elucidation of critical events.
Developing a procurement framework for the Malaysian hospitality industry: a preliminary study / Siti Zalipah Ibrahim... [et al.]

Businesses are made up of many sub-structure of activities. One particular activity that demands high attention is procurement. In the hospitality industry, the procurement department plays a major role in ensuring supply of raw material and goods are planned, purchased, distributed, and consumed efficiently. An influx of activities such as requisition, acquisition, and quality check is done in this department. In estimating the total cost of acquiring goods and services, it is important for organizations to identify unit costs and other costs associated with operations and maintenance that occurs during purchasing and conserving of goods. Recent studies have reported the usage of an Electronic Procurement System (EPS) that replaces the conventional procurement system typically used in Hotels. This paper aims to explore the current practice, effectiveness and efficiency of the procurement systems used in Malaysian hotels through in-depth interviews. Findings of this study will assist hospitality businesses to analyze their procurement activities and develop proper strategies that enables them to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and most importantly, improve their bottom line.
Social media-enhanced learning in a small island developing states (SIDS) setting

The rapid and ongoing advances in technology are leading to significant transformations in the world, making it even more connected. The educational sector is also responding by developing new models to face and adopt these changes. Learners are exposed to new media technologies which have set the scene for more collaboration, participation and engagement in the learning environment. As research points towards an eagerness for the acceptance of social media in developing countries, there is a need to further explore its implication for education. In an era of globalization which creates more association among universities from developed nations and small island developing states (SIDS), the significance of investigating learners’ social media engagement level is even greater. This article documents the development of a Learner Social Media Engagement Level model for higher education institutions in SIDS based on a research in Mauritius. The analysis results in the identification of five main levels of participation, namely Curator, Consumer, Communicator, Collaborator and Producer. The article concludes with the social profile of each category of learner and highlights how the small state experience could be significant for a wider international community.
Impact of nutrients and physical factors on the shift from cyanobacterial to chlorophyte dominance in shallow Danish lakes

Phytoplankton dominance (as biomass) by heterocystous cyanobacteria, nonheterocystous cyanobacteria, and chlorophytes was studied along a trophic gradient (0.011–2.2 mg P∙L−1) by analyzing regularly collected semiquantitative data from 178 shallow Danish lakes (mean depth 1 mg P∙L−1). In contrast with many earlier findings, heterocystous cyanobacteria were not dominant at low total N (TN):TP or low inorganic N concentrations; chlorophytes were dominant at extremely high pH, and the shift from cyanobacterial to chlorophyte dominance could not be explained by a change in the photic zone to mixing zone ratio. We suggest that chlorophyte dominance in hypertrophic shallow lakes is attributable to continuous input of nutrients and carbon from the sediment and exte.
La ecología alimentaria del pez endémico Girardinichthys multiradiatus (Cyprinidontiformes: Goodeidae), en el Parque Nacional Lagunas de Zempoala, México

Girardinichthys multiradiatus, conocido comunmente como "mexcalpique" un pequeno pez endemico de la cuenca del rio Lerma, cuya presencia en el parque Nacional Lagunas de Zempoala, sugiere una antigua conexion entre estos lagos y la cuenca. El area de distribucion actual en la porcion del valle de Mexico y Toluca se ha visto reducida, por lo que este parque representa un refugio para la especie. Sin embargo, se conoce poco de la biologia del mexcalpique. Presentamos datos sobre su dieta y habitos alimentarios. El estudio se realizo en el Lago Acoyotongo del Parque Nacional Lagunas de Zempoala mediante muestreos estacionales. La identificacion del contenido estomacal (97 ejemplares) se llevo hasta el taxon mas especifico posible. Para la cuantificacion se utilizaron los metodos numerico y frecuencia de aparicion. La dieta general de esta especie se encuentra constituida por doce componentes alimenticios, de los cuales once son de origen animal. Himenopteros, colembolos y quironomidos fueron los que presentaron los mayores porcentajes de ingestion y preferencia. Esta es una especie carnivora con tendencias insectivoras.