Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inferring depth contours from sidescan sonar using convolutional neural nets

Sidescan sonar images are 2D representations of the seabed. The pixel location encodes distance from the sonar and along track coordinate. Thus one dimension is lacking for generating bathymetric maps from sidescan. The intensities of the return signals do, however, contain some information about this missing dimension. Just as shading gives clues to depth in camera images, these intensities can be used to estimate bathymetric profiles. The authors investigate the feasibility of using data driven methods to do this estimation. They include quantitative evaluations of two pixel-to-pixel convolutional neural networks trained as standard regression networks and using conditional generative adversarial network loss functions. Some interesting conclusions are presented as to when to use each training method.
The Levels of C-Reactive Protein, Malondialdehyde and Absolute Lymphocyte Counts in Pre and Post-Acute Exercise

This study was designed to determine the level of oxidative stress using the level of circulating C-reactive protein, malondialdehyde and absolute lymphocyte counts in pre and post-acute exercise as studies have shown that acute exercise enhances the immunological responses of stressed individuals. Twenty five (25) healthy young male undergraduate students with an average age of 24.3 ± 3 years and body mass index of 22.7 ± 1.8 (kg/m2) participated fully in the study. The levels of malondialdehyde and C-reactive protein were significantly higher at one hour, four hours and twenty-four hour post exercise when compared with the pre-exercise stage whereas the absolute lymphocyte count and absolute neutrophils count were significantly higher at one hour and four hours post exercise when compared with the pre-exercise stage. Absolute lymphocyte count, absolute neutrophils count, Creactive protein and malondialdehyde concentrations are increased in acute exercise which is an indication of an acute phase responses during stressful events.
Integrating wildlife conservation into ecosystem service payments and carbon offsets: A case study from Costa Rica

Wildlife conservation is challenged by the expensive and cost prohibitive strategy of directly purchasing land to protect habitat at the landscape scale. An alternative mechanism used to protect habitat includes payments for ecosystem‐services (PES), where farmers and landowners are paid to manage their lands for a particular ecological service. Some of these easements are used to conserve a diversity of resources (i.e., water, soil, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity); however, the largest PES easement programs focus on carbon sequestration and are sold on international carbon markets as offsets. Here, we demonstrate that successfully protecting vulnerable habitat for wildlife can be achieved through partnerships with programs that trade in carbon offsets by focusing landowner recruitment activities in areas with ecologically valuable habitat. This collaborative strategy represents a cost effective and efficient model to protect wildlife at landscape scales. As proof of concept, in 2015 we successfully protected and restored habitats used by golden‐winged warblers, a species being considered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for protection under the Endangered Species Act, by partnering with organizations responsible for managing carbon offsets in Costa Rica. Through these partnerships, we successfully protected 790 ha of valuable habitat, within a single year, by recruiting farmers and landowners into an easement program in the heart of the warbler's winter range. We present our efforts as a model for similar collaborative partnerships in the tropics and beyond.
Social emotions and social cognition in the development of social anxiety disorder

ABSTRACT Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent mental disorders with serious individual impairments and societal costs. Little is known about the mechanisms involved in SAD development. Here, I propose that dysregulated social emotions (social fear and shyness) are crucial for SAD development and that these dysregulated social emotions originate in the disturbances in socio-cognitive abilities. The research from our lab confirmed this. It showed that behavioural and physiological indices of social fear contribute to the development of SAD in toddlerhood and early childhood. Later in childhood, between ages 4.5 and 7.5, we found a new risk factor for SAD―dysregulated shyness. Specifically, we found that negative shy expressions and prolonged physiological blushing (temperature increase) contribute to SAD development. Whereas elevated fear may be rooted in deficits in socio-cognitive skills, dysregulated shyness may be rooted in advanced socio-cognitive abilities. These findings imply that dysregulated social emotions play an important role in SAD and should be explicitly targeted in clinical treatments of SAD.
Corrosion inhibition properties of 4-methyl-2-(methylthio)-3-phenylthiazol-3-ium iodide on the carbon steel in sulfuric acid medium

Weight loss measurement and electrochemical techniques were used as the methods for studying the inhibition effects of 4-methyl-2-(methylthio)-3-phenylthiazol-3-ium iodide (ST1) on carbon steel corrosion in 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 . The results reveal that corrosion rate of carbon steel decreases with addition of ST1 in 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 . The corrosion rate and inhibition efficiency were found to depend on the concentration of the inhibitor. Inhibition efficiencies up to 99% can be obtained. The polarization data indicated that the inhibitor was of mixed type, with predominant effect on the cathodic partial reaction. Changes in impedance parameters (charge transfer resistance, R t , and double layer capacitance, C dl ) confirm that corrosion inhibition was due to adsorption on the metal surface following the Langmuir adsorption isotherm. The results obtained from the three different techniques were in good agreement. The influence of the immersion time shows that the inhibiting molecules form a stable and efficient film. XPS analyses clearly show that the adsorption mechanism of ST1 on the carbon steel surface in 0.5 M H 2 SO 4 solution is mainly physical adsorption.
Negotiating Collaborations: BookTubers, The Publishing Industry, and YouTube’s Ecosystem

BookTubers (from the acronym book + YouTuber) have become key players for the publishing industry, given their influence on children and teens to promote reading and book consumption. Based on an 18-month digital ethnography that combines direct observation, digital interactions on YouTube channels, and other social media and semistructured interviews with 17 Spanish-speaking BookTubers, this study uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital to analyze how BookTubers negotiate their practices with other agents of the publishing world. This article characterizes the challenges the Spanish-language publishing industry is facing in the context of digitalization to attract readers; describes the position that BookTubers have within the YouTube ecosystem, and how they relate with the platform’s actors, politics, and affordances; and analyzes the exchanges that BookTubers establish with publishers—often referred as collaborations—and their implications for their autonomy. This case study helps to understand how platformization allows new agents to transfer capital gained in social media to other cultural industries.
The impact of corporate ownership structure on corporate risk disclosure: Evidence from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Understanding the role of corporate ownership structure on corporate disclosure allows an assessment of its current effectiveness and opportunities for potential improvements. Prior research on the determinants of corporate risk disclosure (CRD) has basically focused on firm-specific characteristics and corporate governance characteristics and has largely ignored the potential role of ownership structure on CRD. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study has yet extensively investigated the effect of ownership structure on the level of CRD in Saudi Arabia. This study examines the influence of different types of ownership on CRD in a developing country with high ownership concentration and unique institutional setting, namely the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The study uses panel data analysis of the annual reports of Saudi listed companies over a period of four years. The findings show a strong impact of ownership structure on CRD. However, the extent and direction of this influence depend on the type of ownership. Companies with higher royal ownership and government ownership disclose more risk-related information. By contrast, companies with higher family ownership and institutional ownership tend to disclose less risk-related information. However, executive directors’ ownership and non-executive directors’ ownership have no impact on CRD. The results suggest that not all controlling families have the same characteristics and motivations towards CRD practice. Overall, the results confirm the essential role of ownership structure to influence the agency conflicts through increase (decrease) CRD. The results of this study support the use of different theories to better explain the phenomenon of CRD. The study has important implications for policymakers, regulatory authorities, and practitioners in Saudi Arabia and developing countries to improve CRD practices and optimize ownership structure.
The modern news consumer: news attitudes and practices in the digital era

Wave after wave of digital innovation has introduced a new set of influences on the public’s news habits. Social media, messaging apps, texts and email provide a constant stream of news from people we’re close to as well as total strangers. News stories can now come piecemeal, as links or shares, putting less emphasis on the publisher. And, hyper levels of immediacy and mobility can create an expectation that the news will come to us whether we look for it or not. How have these influences shaped Americans’ appetite for and attitudes toward the news? What, in other words, are the defining traits of the modern news consumer? A new, two-part survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in early 2016 in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, reveals a public that is cautious as it moves into this more complex news environment and discerning in its evaluation of available news sources. To be sure, news remains an important part of public life. More than seven-in-ten U.S. adults follow national and local news somewhat or very closely – 65% follow international news with the same regularity. Fully 81% of Americans get at least some of this news through websites, apps or social networking sites. And, this digital news intake is increasingly mobile. Among those who get news both on desktop computers and mobile devices, more than half prefer mobile. In this digital news environment, the role of friends and family is amplified, but Americans still reveal strong ties to news organizations. The data also reinforce how, despite the dramatic changes witnessed over the last decade, the digital news era is still very much in its adolescence. These findings come from a two-part study which asked U.S. adults a wide range of questions about their news habits and attitudes, and then over the course of a subsequent week asked them in real time about news they had gotten in the last two hours. The first survey was conducted Jan. 12-Feb. 8, 2016, among 4,654 U.S. adults ages 18 and older who are members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel. The second survey consisted of 14 short, online surveys that were administered two per day from Feb. 24-March 1, 2016. Survey invitations were sent at different times each day, and responses were accepted for two hours after the invitations were sent. Panelists who completed the January wave on the web and reported that they get news online were asked to participate in the experiential study; 2,078 panelists participated and completed at least 10 of the 14 surveys.
Phylogeny of Vibrio cholerae Isolates from Patients with Cholera Disease in Babylon Province

In the present study, a total of 35 stool samples were collected in the Central Health Laboratory of Babylon Province from patients presenting invasive cholera disease. The period of collection was from November 2017 to December 2018. Identification of Vibrio cholerae species was carried out by conventional methods, biochemical tests, diagnostic kits and then confirmed by PCR-based assay targeting the ompW gene. The results of this study reported that O1 serogroups were the predominant serogroup among all clinical samples with a high rate of 94.3% (N = 33), while only two isolates of non-O1/non-O139 (NAG) (5.7%) were documented as a causative agent to cholera or cholera-like disease. The phylogenetic relationship among all 35 studied strains elucidated by using PCR-based fingerprinting assay (ISSR-PCR). The results of this assay showed grouping of Inaba strains into different clusters indicating that these strains were genetically diverse. Furthermore, V. cholerae El Tor O1 Ogawa strain (OG1) was closely related to strains of Inaba serotype. In contrast, NAG strains (NAG1 and NAG2) were not genetically similar to any of Inaba or Ogawa strains indicating different clone origin.
A Rigid-Flex Wearable Health Monitoring Sensor Patch for IoT-Connected Healthcare Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new communication paradigm that can connect elements from various fields through the Internet. One of the most attractive IoT applications is in the modern healthcare area, as the traditional healthcare system has an increasing demand for social resources, including doctors, nurses, hospital beds, and health monitoring devices. In this article, the design of a compact wearable sensor patch is presented for measurements of different physiological signals, such as the electrocardiogram (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG), and body temperature. As ECG and PPG sensors are integrated with the same device, the proposed sensor patch can be used to estimate blood pressure (BP) continuously based on the pulse arrival time (PAT) without extra wires and devices. The sensor patch consists of a center board for signal acquisition and processing, a power board for energy supply and charging batteries, and three sensors for vital signs monitoring. All the components are designed in a rigid-flex structure, which can be easily attached to the human body for remote health monitoring applications. The sensors can be detached from the center board for customized measurements of a certain physiological signal (e.g., ECG) to reduce power consumption. Experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed sensor patch by comparison with a commercial reference device. With the integration of a miniaturized Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) module, the proposed sensor system can transmit physiological measurements wirelessly to a gateway. Data encryption is applied on both the sensor patch and gateways to protect data for privacy and security purposes during transmission. Both a mobile gateway (based on smartphones) and a fixed gateway (based on portable computers) are designed as the bridge between the wearable sensor system and the Internet cloud, where health data can be stored and further analyzed. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the overall platform for IoT-connected healthcare applications.
Innovation of Police Model Under the Background of Big Data

As big data constantly penetrates into all fields of society, China's police model is also facing new opportunities and challenges. We need to set our eyes on the future, make solid and incremental progress in innovative practice and implementation from various aspects such as work concept, working mechanism, management mode and organizational structure. The new concept and new model of police development of “highly shared and in-depth application” of police information must be achieved, as it provides efficient police management tools and service modes for public security work.
Secure Two-Party Protocol for Privacy-Preserving Classification via Differential Privacy

Privacy-preserving distributed data mining is the study of mining on distributed data—owned by multiple data owners—in a non-secure environment, where the mining protocol does not reveal any sensitive information to the data owners, the individual privacy is preserved, and the output mining model is practically useful. In this thesis, we propose a secure two-party protocol for building a privacy-preserving decision tree classifier over distributed data using differential privacy. We utilize secure multiparty computation to ensure that the protocol is privacy-preserving. Our algorithm also utilizes parallel and sequential compositions, and applies distributed exponential mechanism to ensure that the output is differentially-private. We implemented our protocol in a distributed environment on real-life data, and the experimental results show that the protocol produces decision tree classifiers with high utility while being reasonably efficient and scalable.
Kinetic Helicity and Lifetime of Activity Complexes During Solar Cycle 24

We study magnetic features on the solar surface that exist for several rotations during solar cycle 24. To identify them, we average synoptic maps over a range in latitude and stack the resulting longitudinal strips in time. We use synoptic maps of magnetograms obtained with the NSO/Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun instrument and create synoptic maps of the kinetic helicity of subsurface flows integrated over 2.0–7.1 Mm based on Solar Dynamics Observatory/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager Dopplergrams. To distinguish between active and quiet regions, we sort the grid points of the synoptic maps by their activity level and divide the data into four subsets with 25% of activity each and into two subsets with the highest or lowest 12.5% of activity values. The kinetic helicity of these six subsets follows the hemispheric helicity rule with, on average, positive values in the southern and negative values in the northern hemisphere. However, the helicity of the subset with the highest activity is about four times higher than that of the other subsets, and the mid-quartile subsets show the weakest hemispheric helicity rule. We define the lifetime of complexes in each subset and find that for the high-activity subset, the amplitude of magnetic activity and kinetic helicity increases almost linearly with the lifetime of complexes. The distribution of flares closely resembles that of the high-activity subset. The flare-productive locations in long-lived complexes produce, on average, the same number of flares as those of short-lived complexes. However, long-lived complexes have a higher fractional number of these locations than the short-lived complexes and thus produce more flares not just because they live longer.
Self-reported conflicts of interest (sfCOI) of authors and the interpretation of randomized phase III trials (RCT) and related editorials (REd) in cancer research.

6055 Background: Growing participation from industry in cancer research has resulted in increased reporting of COI. We aimed to test any association between author’s conclusion and sfCOI in cancer studies. Methods: All RCT and REd published in 6 major cancer journals in a 3.5 year period were selected. Two investigators blinded to COI disclosure independently analyzed each RCT and REd, classifying authors’ conclusions as highly positive, positive, neutral, negative, and highly negative with respect to author’s opinion on the experimental therapy. The agreement rate between investigators for conclusion classification was 90% (consensus was achieved for the remaining 10%). We also collected data on study results, COI and sponsorship. COI was defined as any self-reported financial tie between author and industry except for research funds. Predictors of positive/highly positive conclusions of RCT and of REd were tested separately in logistic regression multivariable models. Results: From Jan 2008 to Oct 2011,.
In vitro evaluation of doxorubicin-eluting porous titania microspheres for transcatheter arterial chemoembolization

ABSTRACT Preparing drug-eluting beads (DEBs) from radiopaque materials such as titania (TiO2) can meet clinical need for directly visualizing DEBs during drug-eluting bead transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (DEB-TACE). Porous anatase-type TiO2 microspheres with mean volume diameters of approximately 30 µm were obtained when silica nanoparticles (SiNPs) were introduced into the TiO2 matrix by a sol–gel process involving a water-in-oil emulsion, and the SiNPs were then dissolved by subsequent treatment with NaOH solution. Of special note, microspheres prepared using SiNPs of approximately 20 – 25 nm in diameter had a high speciﬁc surface area of ~120 m2·g−1 and a high doxorubicin (DOX)-adsorption capacity of ~150 mg·mL−1, and they gradually released ~10% of the adsorbed DOX within 5 days. The DOX-loaded microspheres were non-cytotoxic, moreover, and exerted anticancer effects on HeLa cells. We propose that the present TiO2 microspheres are potentially useful as novel radiopaque embolic materials for DEB-TACE.
Evaluation of Cardiac Dysfunction in Children and Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

Background This study was conducted to identify cardiac dysfunction and the relationship of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels and serum lipids to echocardiographic indices in children and adolescents with T1DM. Materials and Methods: This case-control study was conducted on 100 cases including 50 children and adolescents aged 3-19 years old suffering T1DM for at least two years and 50 age- and sex-matched healthy subjects with the patients. This study was conducted in Shahrekord, Iran. All participants underwent TDI echocardiography and the levels of HbA1C and serum lipid were measured in diabetic patients. Then echocardio function of two groups were compared and the relation between these findings and HbA1C and lipids was evaluated. Data was analyzed using SPSS software (version 23.0). Results: MPI, E/A, E'/A', E wave, A wave, IVRT, ET, EDV, LVIDd and LVIDs were significantly different between diabetes and control groups (p 0.05). A significant, positive correlation was observed between E/E' and TG (p=0.007, r= 0.37). E/A showed positive correlation with HDL (p=0.046, r=0.284) and negative correlation with TG (p = 0.048, r=-0.281), and LDL (P=0.012, r=-0.352). E'/A' showed positive correlation with HDL (p=0.033, r=0.302), and negative correlation with TG (p=0.014, r=-0.347) in diabetic patients. Conclusion In diabetic patients, first, cardiac diastolic function decreases, resulting in a decrease in E¢/A and E/A ratios as well as a decrease in myocardial performance index, which indicates systolic and diastolic function, and is recommended to be taken into account in the initial examination of the heart of diabetics and not to wait for late-onset systolic function change.