Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intercultural Competencies in Higher Education:a systematic review from 2016 to 2021

Abstract In the present digital age, students and professionals can interact and collaborate anywhere in the world through multiple means of communication. This article analyzes the scientific evidence of intercultural competencies in higher education from January 2016 to August 2021 out of the publications available in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Inclusion and exclusion criteria resulted in 325 articles being selected for review. The findings denote the relevance of this thematic area in teaching language, international experiences, virtuality, and collaborative learning. The approach with the highest incidence was qualitative research for case study designs, and the research trends proposed by the authors highlight intercultural education and virtual interaction to support global collaboration. The present work describes the studies carried out in this field in the last six years and aims to be valuable for future research related to educational innovation, the development of intercultural competencies, and international cooperation.
Effects of UV-C Irradiation and Vacuum Sealing on the Shelf-Life of Beef, Chicken and Salmon Fillets

One-third of the world’s food supply is lost, with meat being a major contributor to this loss. Globally, around 23% of all meat and 35% of all seafood products are lost or wasted. Meats and seafood products are susceptible to microbial spoilage during processing, storage, and distribution, where microbial contamination causes significant losses throughout the supply chain. This study examined the efficacy of UV-C irradiation and vacuum-sealing in preventing microbiological deterioration in beef, chicken, and salmon fillets. The samples were sterilized using a constant UV-C irradiation dose of 360 J/m2 and stored under a reduced pressure of 40 kPa. A microbiological analysis was conducted daily to examine the microbial contamination, which included counting the colonies of Pseudomonas spp. , aerobic bacteria, lactic acid bacteria (LAB), Salmonella, and Escherichia coli, as well as monitoring the increase in pH levels. The results demonstrated a statistically significant difference (p > 0.05) in the aerobic bacteria counts between the storage conditions and storage days in all samples, which is a primary indicator of microbial spoilage. In contrast, the differences varied in the Pseudomonas spp. and LAB counts between the storage conditions and storage days, and there was no significant difference (p < 0.05) in the pH levels between the storage conditions. The results indicate that the combination of UV-C irradiation and vacuum sealing effectively inhibits microbial growth and extends the shelf-life of beef, chicken, and salmon fillets by 66.6%.
Financing green and climate resilient infrastructure in ASEAN countries

Southeast Asia is one of the world's most energy‐intensive and climate vulnerable regions, with rapid urbanization and industrialization increasing its greenhouse gas emissions and a high exposure to extreme weather events. The COVID‐19 pandemic has had a massive impact on the region's economic growth. Decisions taken by leaders today to revive economies will either entrench the region's dependence on fossil fuels or accelerate decarbonization efforts to achieve the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. This article recalls the imperative of a green, climate resilient recovery from the COVID‐19 pandemic to put ASEAN economies on a sustainable and inclusive development path before discussing the chronic infrastructure investment gap and reviewing options to catalyze climate investment to address this gap and finance recovery efforts.
Exploring College Academic Performance of K to12 IT and Non-IT-related Strands to Reduce Academic Deficiencies

— Improving students' academic performance is a significant concern among academics. Despite various strategies to improve academic performance, there are still a significant number of students who fail academically. This study sought to investigate the possible reasons for the academic deficiencies among Infotech Development Systems Colleges, Inc. Information Technology (IT) students in the IT and Non-IT-related strands, if their strand is significant to their academic performance in college, as well as formulate a solution based on the identified reasons and recommendations to reduce the negative academic remarks. The researchers employed survey questionnaires and interviews to conduct exploratory data analysis. Similarly, the Senior High School academic performance and actual grades of the respondents from AY 2018-2019 to First Semester of AY 2021-2022. On the tested hypothesis showed statistical significance (p < 0.05) on IT-related strand. The study further reveals that the Non-IT-related strand has more students with academic deficiencies compared to IT-related strand and highlights a variety of reasons cited. Respondents cited misalignment of strand to current program, instructor not speaking clearly, unreliable internet connection, and failure to complete and submit an academic task as reasons for academic deficiencies. The researchers designed a model that can potentially eliminate academic inadequacies. The model takes into account both internal and external factors; for internal variable it includes effective time management, a positive attitude and mindset, prompt and punctual completion of requirements, and good study habits. While for the external factors, competent and student-friendly instructors, a stable, strong, and accessible internet connection, a conducive learning environment, relevant available resources and facilities, adaptation of limited face-to-face or hybrid classes, and alignment of SHS strand to college program of choice are
Effectiveness of Leg Raise and Leg Fold Maneuver to Prevent Syncope During Extraction of Teeth: A Pilot Study

Objectives The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of leg raise and leg fold maneuvers to prevent syncope during extraction procedures. Methods This study included 30 patients with a previous history of syncope and dental anxiety. Patients were randomly divided into two groups consisting of 15 patients each. Group I (test group) patients were educated about a few physical maneuvers, and instructions were given preoperatively about when to perform them. Group II (control group) underwent extraction conventionally. The blood pressure, saturation, pulse rate, and clinical signs and symptoms of the patients were assessed preoperatively, intraoperatively, and postoperatively. Informed consent was obtained from all the patients. Results There is a significant difference between the control and study groups in terms of the occurrence of syncope and patient comfort. This indicates that the leg raise and leg fold maneuvers reduce the occurrence of syncope during extraction. No participant in the test group experienced syncope post-treatment, while five subjects (33.3%) experienced syncope in the control group. Conclusion Physical counterpressure maneuvers are a risk-free, effective, and low-cost treatment method in patients with vasovagal syncope. Leg raise and leg fold maneuvers improved the hemodynamics of the patients.
Accelerated Simultaneous T2 and T2* Mapping of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions Using Compressed Sensing Reconstruction of Radial RARE-EPI MRI

(1) Background: Radial RARE-EPI MRI facilitates simultaneous T2 and T2* mapping (2in1-RARE-EPI). With modest undersampling (R = 2), the speed gain of 2in1-RARE-EPI relative to Multi-Spin-Echo and Multi-Gradient-Recalled-Echo references is limited. Further reduction in scan time is crucial for clinical studies investigating T2 and T2* as imaging biomarkers. We demonstrate the feasibility of further acceleration, utilizing compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction of highly undersampled 2in1-RARE-EPI. (2) Methods: Two-fold radially-undersampled 2in1-RARE-EPI data from phantoms, healthy volunteers (n = 3), and multiple sclerosis patients (n = 4) were used as references, and undersampled (Rextra = 1–12, effective undersampling Reff = 2–24). For each echo time, images were reconstructed using CS-reconstruction. For T2 (RARE module) and T2* mapping (EPI module), a linear least-square fit was applied to the images. T2 and T2* from CS-reconstruction of undersampled data were benchmarked against values from CS-reconstruction of the reference data. (3) Results: We demonstrate accelerated simultaneous T2 and T2* mapping using undersampled 2in1-RARE-EPI with CS-reconstruction is feasible. For Rextra = 6 (TA = 01:39 min), the overall MAPE was ≤8% (T2*) and ≤4% (T2); for Rextra = 12 (TA = 01:06 min), the overall MAPE was <13% (T2*) and <5% (T2). (4) Conclusion: Substantial reductions in scan time are achievable for simultaneous T2 and T2* mapping of the brain using highly undersampled 2in1-RARE-EPI with CS-reconstruction.
Insights into the Novel Therapeutics and Vaccines against Herpes Simplex Virus

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) is a great concern of the global health community due to its linked infection of inconspicuous nature and resultant serious medical consequences. Seropositive patients may develop ocular disease or genital herpes as characteristic infectious outcomes. Moreover, the infectious nature of HSV is so complex that the available therapeutic options have been modified in certain ways to cure it. However, no permanent and highly effective cure has been discovered. This review generates insights into the available prophylactic and therapeutic interventions against HSV. A methodological research approach is used for study design and data complication. Only the latest data from publications are acquired to shed light on updated therapeutic approaches. These studies indicate that the current antiviral therapeutics can suppress the symptoms and control viral transmission up to a certain level, but cannot eradicate the natural HSV infection and latency outcomes. Most trials that have entered the clinical phase are made part of this review to understand what is new within the field. Some vaccination approaches are also discussed. Moreover, some novel therapeutic options that are currently in research annals are given due consideration for future development. The data can enable the scientific community to direct their efforts to fill the gaps that remain unfilled in terms of therapies for HSV. The need is to integrate scientific efforts to produce a proper cure against HSV to control the virus spread, resistance, and mutation in future disease management.
Characterization and critical testing of potential microfossils from the early Earth: the Apex ‘microfossil debate’ and its lessons for Mars sample return

The importance of the search for life within the universe underpins many of the objectives of ESA and NASA. Fundamental to this objective is the recognition and understanding of the early fossil record on planet Earth. The history of study of ‘microfossils’ from the 3465 Ma Apex cherts of the Warrawoona Group in Western Australia is reviewed, as are the criteria put forward to test for for biogenicity of early microfossils. We propose that the null hypothesis of an abiotic or prebiotic origin of ancient microscopical artefacts is sustained until mutually supporting, contextural morphological and geochemical evidence for a biological origin is presented and an abiotic origin is falsified.
Life Cycle Assessment of the Sustainability of Alkali-Activated Binders

Limiting the consumption of nonrenewable resources and minimizing waste production and associated gas emissions are the main priority of the construction sector to achieve a sustainable future. This study investigates the sustainability performance of newly developed binders known as alkali-activated binders (AABs). These AABs work satisfactorily in creating and enhancing the concept of greenhouse construction in accordance with sustainability standards. These novel binders are founded on the notion of utilizing ashes from mining and quarrying wastes as raw materials for hazardous and radioactive waste treatment. The life cycle assessment, which depicts material life from the extraction of raw materials through the destruction stage of the structure, is one of the most essential sustainability factors. A recent use for AAB has been created, such as the use of hybrid cement, which is made by combining AAB with ordinary Portland cement (OPC). These binders are a successful answer to a green building alternative if the techniques used to make them do not have an unacceptable negative impact on the environment, human health, or resource depletion. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) software was employed for choosing the optimal materials’ alternative depending on the available criteria. The results revealed that AAB concrete provided a more ecologically friendly alternative than OPC concrete, higher strength for comparable water/binder ratio, and better performance in terms of embodied energy, resistance to freeze–thaw cycles, high temperature resistance, and mass loss due to acid attack and abrasion.
Simulation of quantum magnetism with trapped ions

Quantum spin models describe quantum magnetism in Solid-State systems. Even when some of these models were proposed at the very beginning of quantum mechanics their study is hindered by the fact that they are very difficult to be studied numerically. Quantum computers could allow us to solve this problem because they can be used for the efficient simulation of many-body quantum systems. In our work we propose an alternative that is easier than quantum computation. By means of lasers a set of trapped ions can simulate the physics of interacting spins in such a way that the range and the sign of the interactions can be tuned by the choice of lasers and trapping conditions. Our proposal can be applied to the simulation of Ising XY and Heisenberg models.
A Novel Deep-learning based Approach for Automatic Diacritization of Arabic Poems using Sequence-to-Sequence Model

—Over the last 10 years, Arabic language have attracted researchers in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research papers suddenly emerged in which the main work was the processing of Arabic language and its dialects too. Arabic language processing has been given a special name ANLP (Arabic Natural Language Processing). A lot of ANLP work can be found in literature including almost all NLP applications. Many researchers have been attracted also to Arabic linguistic knowledge. The work expands from Basic Language Analysis to Semantic Level Analysis. But Arabic text semantic analysis cannot be held without considering diacritization, which can greatly affect the meaning. Many Arabic texts are written without diacritization, and Diacritizing them manually is a very tiresome process that may need an expert. Automatic diacritization systems became a demand as an initial step for processing Arabic text for any Arabic Language Processing application as Arabic diacritization is very important to get a readable and understandable Arabic text. For this reason, many researchers recently worked on building systems and tools that automatically diacritize un-diacritized Arabic texts. This work presents a novel deep learning-based sequence-to-sequence model to diacritize un-diacritized Arabic poems. The proposed model was tested and achieved high diacritization accuracy rate.
Experimental study of a drop bouncing on a wall in a liquid

The behavior of millimetric drops rising in water and bouncing under a horizontal plate is studied using a high-speed video camera. The position and velocity of the center of mass of the drops, as well as their deformation are analyzed. The bouncing is found to be very dissipative, almost 80% of the energy being lost during the interaction with the wall. The deformation of the drop is governed by the balance between its inertia and capillary effects and evolve like a dissipative mass-spring system. The coefficient of restitution is compared to previous experiments done for drops in air, bubbles in water as well as solid spheres in various fluids.
Opuntia robusta mucilage combined with alginate as encapsulation matrix for Lactiplantibacillus plantarum

ABSTRACT There is a constant search for novel and inexpensive materials for the encapsulation of cells. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficiency of mucilage from young cladodes of Opuntia robusta in the encapsulation of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum 1449. The mucilage was mixed with alginate at ratios of 2:1, 1:1, and 1:2 (alginate:mucilage, AM). The mixtures were used to encapsulate L. plantarum 1449. The microcapsules were characterized by size, weight, shape, color, and stability. The results showed that increased amounts of mucilage in the mixtures influenced the stability of the microcapsules, leading to an increased amount of irregular shapes and greater variability in size and weight. The AM 1:1 showed good encapsulation efficiency (96.1 ± 0.5%) and the viability of L. plantarum 1449 after three months of storage at 4°C was 77.2 ± 2.4%. In conclusion, mucilage combined with alginate has great potential as an encapsulating agent.
Characteristics of aperture coupled microstrip antennas with various radiating patches and coupling apertures

A full wave moment method is applied to the analysis of aperture coupled microstrip antennas, in which all components of the electric and equivalent magnetic surface currents are considered. The electric current distributions on the rectangular patch for different coupling aperture positions are presented with their radiation patterns. The effects of the coupling aperture shape and size on the input impedance and radiation performance are also discussed. As an example of new radiators, slotted patches are studied, and it is shown that they can be used to achieve dual-frequency operation. >
Semi-Probabilistic Repetition Schemes for Sporadic URLLC Traffic in Multiuser Massive MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) assisted grant-free access is a compelling approach to support uplink ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLCs). It is a natural idea to combine massive MIMO and repetition transmission to further improve the reliability. However, excessive repetitions may increase the collision probability in multiuser scenarios and thus limit the reliability improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-probabilistic repetition (SPRe) scheme for the massive multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems with grant-free access. By introducing a transmission probability for the replicas, the SPRe is more flexible than the popular repetition scheme, i.e., <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-repetition, and covers the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-repetition as a special case. Considering practical MU-MIMO systems with finite block-length coding, channel estimation errors, pilot collisions and the sporadic arrivals of URLLC traffic, the reliability of the proposed SPRe is thoroughly analyzed and derived in closed form. Through further asymptotic analysis, the optimal transmission probability to maximize the reliability of MU-MIMO is derived for the high-SNR regime and low-load scenarios. Moreover, the diversity gain of the proposed SPRe is also analyzed and it is proved that the optimal SPRe is superior to the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-repetition in terms of reliability. The analysis and superiority of the SPRe are finally verified through computer simulations.
Vocal‐tract length normalization for acoustic‐to‐articulatory mapping using neural networks

A new method of estimating the overall vocal‐tract (VT) length and the normalization of acoustic parameters of different speakers is reported in this paper for acoustic‐to‐articulatory mapping. The main goal of this work was a high accuracy of VT length estimation from a short speech utterance. An articulatory model, originally developed by Maeda, was used as a reference female VT. Linear scaling was used to synthesize training data for VT lengths between 100% and 125% of the reference VT length (14.96 cm). These data had 250 utterances, resulted from different VT lengths, each containing six vowels. A neural network with two hidden layers was trained using vectors of 10 mel‐frequency cepstrum coefficients and the corresponding VT lengths of these utterances. For the same VT length range, similar test data were synthesized using the training vowels but in different contexts. With the trained network, evaluation of this method on test data has shown an average error of less than 1% and a maximum error of 3.
Lifecycle climate impact and primary energy use of electric and biofuel cargo trucks

Heavy trucks contribute significantly to climate change, and in 2020 were responsible for 7% of total Swedish GHG emissions and 5% of total global CO2 emissions. Here we study the full lifecycle of cargo trucks powered by different energy pathways, comparing their biomass feedstock use, primary energy use, net biogenic and fossil CO2 emission and cumulative radiative forcing. We analyse battery electric trucks with bioelectricity from stand‐alone or combined heat and power (CHP) plants, and pathways where bioelectricity is integrated with wind and solar electricity. We analyse trucks operated on fossil diesel fuel and on dimethyl ether (DME). All energy pathways are analysed with and without carbon capture and storage (CCS). Bioelectricity and DME are produced from forest harvest residues. Forest biomass is a limited resource, so in a scenario analysis we allocate a fixed amount of biomass to power Swedish truck transport. Battery lifespan and chemistry, the technology level of energy supply, and the biomass source and transport distance are all varied to understand how sensitive the results are to these parameters. We find that pathways using electricity to power battery electric trucks have much lower climate impacts and primary energy use, compared to diesel‐ and DME‐based pathways. The pathways using bioelectricity with CCS result in negative emissions leading to global cooling of the earth. The pathways using diesel and DME have significant and very similar climate impact, even with CCS. The robust results show that truck electrification and increased renewable electricity production is a much better strategy to reduce the climate impact of cargo transport than the adoption of DME trucks, and much more primary energy efficient. This climate impact analysis includes all fossil and net biogenic CO2 emissions as well as the timing of these emissions. Considering only fossil emissions is incomplete and could be misleading.
Relation between VT1, VT2, and VO2max with the Special Wrestling Fitness Test in Youth Wrestlers: A Short Report

This study investigated the relationship between peak oxygen uptake and ventilatory threshold 1 (VT1) and 2 (VT2) with the Special Wrestling Fitness Test variables. Thirteen wrestlers (male: six; female: seven) of Olympic freestyle wrestling were assessed. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient (p < 0.05) was used to establish the relationship between variables. A positive correlation was found between VT1 with throws in set B (r = 0.77; p = 0.002; 95%CI = 0.37–0.93), total throws (r = 0.73; p = 0.004; 95%CI = 0.30–0.91), heart rate recovery (r = 0.58; p = 0.036; 95%CI = 0.05–0.86), and test index (r = −0.60; p = 0.031; 95%CI = −0.86–0.07); between VT2 and throws in set B (r = 0.57; p = 0.043; 95%CI = 0.01–0.86); and between peak oxygen uptake with throws in set B (r = 0.77; p = 0.002; 95%CI = 0.39–0.93), throws in set C (r = 0.64; p = 0.02; 95%CI = 0.12–0.89), and total throws (r = 0.72; p = 0.006; 95%CI = 0.28–0.91). In conclusion, the peak oxygen uptake and ventilatory thresholds correlated with specific Special Wrestling Fitness Test variables.