Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Barriers and motivations to conservation behaviors in zoo visitors

Abstract This study used the transtheoretical model of behavior change to categorize participants into stages of change groups regarding eleven conservation behaviors. Three main stages of change were identified: precontemplation, contemplation, and action. Participants from different stage placements were interviewed to explore barriers and motivations towards doing different conservation behaviors. Individuals in different stages identified different motivations and barriers that were important to doing (or not doing) an action. Lack of time was the most common barrier for precontemplators, while the most common barrier for contemplators and actors was being unaware of a behavior. Precontemplators and contemplators were most commonly motivated by a behavior being easy, while actors were most commonly motivated by getting reminders about the behavior. This suggests that educational programs designed to promote conservation behaviors should include multiple motivators and reduce as many types of barriers as possible to reach the greatest number of people.
Economics of Foster Care

Foster care provides substitute living arrangements to protect maltreated children. The practice is remarkably common: it is estimated that 5 percent of children in the United States are placed in foster care at some point during childhood. This paper describes the main tradeoffs in child welfare policy and provides background on policy and practice most in need of rigorous evidence. Trends include efforts to prevent foster care on the demand side and to improve foster home recruitment on the supply side. With increasing data availability and a growing interest in evidence-based practices, there are opportunities for economic research to inform policies that protect vulnerable children.
The Role of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance in Aortic Stenosis and Regurgitation

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is a well-set diagnostic technique for assessment of valvular heart diseases and is gaining ground in current clinical practice. It provides high-quality images without the administration of ionizing radiation and occasionally without the need of contrast agents. It offers the unique possibility of a comprehensive stand-alone assessment of the heart including biventricular function, left ventricle remodeling, myocardial fibrosis, and associated valvulopathies. CMR is the recognized reference for the quantification of ventricular volumes, mass, and function. A particular strength is the ability to quantify flow, especially with new techniques which allow accurate measurement of stenosis and regurgitation. Furthermore, tissue mapping enables the visualization and quantification of structural changes in the myocardium. In this way, CMR has the potential to yield important prognostic information predicting those patients who will progress to surgery and impact outcomes. In this review, the fundamentals of CMR in assessment of aortic valve diseases (AVD) are described, together with its strengths and weaknesses. This state-of-the-art review provides an updated overview of CMR potentials in all AVD issues, including valve anatomy, flow quantification, ventricular volumes and function, and tissue characterization.
Respiratory chain complex I is related to oxidative phosphorylation in gastric cancer stem cells

Background: Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are the main cause of resistance to anti-cancer drug therapy and distant metastasis of tumors, including gastric cancer. The metabolism of CSCs is an important factor in the maintenance of its stemness. This study is intended to explore the role of oxidative phosphorylation in gastric CSCs. Methods: EpCAM+CD44+ gastric CSCs were sorted from the SGC-7901 cell line. The oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis were determined by Seahorse experiment, and the oxygen consumption of cells was determined by Clark’s oxygen electrodes. Gene expression and protein levels of mitochondrial proteins belonging to five respiratory chain complexes were checked. Phenformin and siRNA-NDUFB8 were used to inhibit respiratory chain complex I to explore the biological effect of enhanced oxidation phosphorylation in gastric CSCs. Cell migration capacity, proliferation ability, and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) levels were also evaluated. Results: Compared with control cells, the oxidation phosphorylation in mitochondria increased in EpCAM+CD44+ gastric CSCs, although the respiration level remained the same, and no significant changes were observed in glycolysis. Moreover, mRNA and protein expression levels of NDUFB8 in complex I were significantly increased. However, oxidative phosphorylation decreased in EpCAM+CD44+ cells after the treatment of phenformin and siRNA-NDUFB8 compared to the untreated cells. siRNA for NDFUB8 and phenformin inhibition also decreased the ability of cell migration, cell proliferation, as well as the VEGF secretion of gastric CSCs. Conclusion: These results suggest that the increased oxidative phosphorylation was related to respiratory chain complex I and NDUFB8 in gastric CSCs.
Comparing Learning Methodologies for Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Representation Learning

In recent years, the machine learning community has devoted an increasing attention to self-supervised learning.The performance gap between supervised and self-supervised has become increasingly narrow in many computer vision applications. In this paper, a new self-supervised approach is proposed for learning audio-visual representations from large databases of unlabeled videos. Our approach learns its representations by a combination of two tasks: unimodal and cross-modal. It uses a future prediction task, and learns to align its visual representations with its corresponding audio representations. To implement these tasks, three methodologies are assessed: contrastive learning, prototypical constrasting and redundancy reduction. The proposed approach is evaluated on a new publicly available dataset of videos captured from video game gameplay footage, called Videogame DB. On most downstream tasks, our method significantly outperforms baselines, demonstrating the real benefits of self-supervised learning in a real-world application.
RAIL FREIGHT SERVICES UTILIZATION IN MALAYSIA

Due to the development of international and domestic trade, the growing important of related freight transport services is increasingly. This paper is intended to discuss the factors affecting the utilization of rail freight services in Malaysia. Three factors were identified which include price, time, location and physical. The data are obtained through a questionnaire which has been structured accordingly and distributed to the respondents. The sample collected were 103 through online questionnaire survey. In this study, the data are analysed using descriptive, normality, reliability, and multiple linear regression. All independent variables such as price, time, location and physical were found to show have significant relationship with the utilization of rail freight services in Malaysia. Although sample collected were from different background, but majority were collected in Western Malaysia, may not represent the entire haulage operator and freight customer in Malaysia. The duration of the study further increases the limitation whereby only 3 to 4 months to complete the entire research. Resources in related fields are limited. The use of rail freight services requires more investment, resources, and costs. Finally, the study's findings should help shifting the preference among haulage companies in the use of rail transportation in an effective, efficiency and environmentally friendly way, to increase the utilization rate of rail freight services in Malaysia. This study increases haulage operator and freight customer knowledge and awareness regarding the adoption of rail freight services. This study also encourages the haulage operator and consumer to use sustainable rail transport services. The paper marks an early contribution to the study on factors that affect the utilization of rail freight services in Malaysia.
How Big Are Effect Sizes in International Education Studies?

A growing literature measures the impact of education interventions in low- and middle-income countries on both access and learning outcomes. But how should one contextualize the size of impacts? This article provides the distribution of standardized effect sizes on learning and access from 234 studies in low- and middle-income countries. We identify a median effect size of 0.10 standard deviations on learning and 0.07 standard deviations on access among randomized controlled trials. Effect sizes are similar for quasi-experimental studies. Effects are larger and demonstrate higher variance for small-scale studies than for large-scale studies. The distribution of existing effects can help researchers and policymakers to situate new findings within current knowledge and design new studies with sufficient statistical power to identify effects.
Low-power low-area techniques for multichannel recording circuits dedicated to biomedical experiments

*e-mail: kmon@agh.edu. pl Abstract. This paper presents techniques introduced to minimize both power and silicon area of the multichannel integrated recording circuits dedicated to biomedical experiments. The proposed methods were employed in multichannel integrated circuit fabricated in CMOS 180nm process and were validated with the use of a wide range of measurements. The results show that both a single recording channel and correction blocks occupy about 0.061 mm2 of the area and consume only 8.5 μW of power. The input referred noise is equal to 4.6 μVRMS. With the use of additional digital circuitry, each of the recording channels may be independently configured. The lower cut-off frequency may be set within the range of 0.1 Hz–700 Hz, while the upper cut-off frequency, depending on the recording mode chosen, can be set either to 3 kHz/13 kHz or may be tuned in the 2 Hz–400 Hz range. The described methods were introduced in the 64-channel integrated circuit. The key aspect of the proposed design is the fact that proposed techniques do not limit functionality of the system and do not deteriorate its overall parameters.
Substrates of the MAPK Slt2: Shaping Yeast Cell Integrity

The cell wall integrity (CWI) MAPK pathway of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is specialized in responding to cell wall damage, but ongoing research shows that it participates in many other stressful conditions, suggesting that it has functional diversity. The output of this pathway is mainly driven by the activity of the MAPK Slt2, which regulates important processes for yeast physiology such as fine-tuning of signaling through the CWI and other pathways, transcriptional activation in response to cell wall damage, cell cycle, or determination of the fate of some organelles. To this end, Slt2 precisely phosphorylates protein substrates, modulating their activity, stability, protein interaction, and subcellular localization. Here, after recapitulating the methods that have been employed in the discovery of proteins phosphorylated by Slt2, we review the bona fide substrates of this MAPK and the growing set of candidates still to be confirmed. In the context of the complexity of MAPK signaling regulation, we discuss how Slt2 determines yeast cell integrity through phosphorylation of these substrates. Increasing data from large-scale analyses and the available methodological approaches pave the road to early identification of new Slt2 substrates and functions.
Herbicides and their potential to disrupt plant–insect chemical communication

Ecological interactions between plants and insects are of paramount importance for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Herbicides have long been considered a threat to plant and insect populations, but global increases in intensive agriculture and availability of herbicide‐resistant crops have intensified concerns about their full impact on biodiversity. Here, we argue that exposure to sublethal herbicide doses has the potential to alter plant–insect interactions as a result of disruptions in their chemical communication. This is because herbicides interfere with biosynthetic pathways and phytohormones involved in the production of several classes of plant volatiles that mediate plant–insect chemical communication. Sublethal herbicide doses can modify the morphological and life‐history plant traits and affect interactions with insects. However, the potential changes in plant volatiles and their consequences for plant–insect chemical communication have not yet received as much attention. We discuss how target‐site (disruptors of primary metabolism) and non‐target‐site (synthetic auxins) herbicides could alter the production of plant volatiles and disrupt plant–insect chemical communication. We suggest research avenues to fill in the current gap in our knowledge that might derive recommendations and applied solutions to minimize herbicides' impacts on plant–insect interactions and biodiversity.
Unambiguous extraction of threshold voltage based on the ACM model

This paper presents a very simple methodology for determining the threshold voltage. The procedure is based on the expressions of the Advanced Compact MOSFET (ACM) model, valid in all regimes of operation, which assures physical meaning, consistency and reliability for the results. The extraction of the threshold voltage is accomplished over a single measured drain current characteristic in the linear region, in order to avoid short channel effects.
GATE ENGINEERING OF DOUBLE GATE In0.53Ga0.47As TUNNEL FET

Increased power-dissipation in upcoming generation digital systems are limited by supply voltage reductions. For such systems, transistors with lower Subthreshold Slopes are needed. Tunnel Field Effect Transistors (TFET), which works on the principle of band-to-band tunnelling, are supposed to be the possible solution for this problem. TFETs ON-current (I ON ) is usually very low, with the use of semiconductors with indirect and large bandgap, and high effective mass as silicon, where tunnelling probability is depressed. One solution to this problem is the use of III-V semiconductors like InAs, GaSb, GaAsSb, In x Ga 1-x As etc. and structure of gate is another important factor. Double gate instead of a single gate structure will provide improvement in I ON . Work function of the gate material also has a great impact. In this paper, a study of the impact of In 0.53 Ga 0.47 As channel material, gate structure, work function and high-k dielectric for gate for TFET using Cogenda VTCAD is presented.
A historical narrative on pandemic Patterns of behavior and belief

Given the fractured reality of pandemic, the people’s history needs to be written and understood. This paper provides a historical narrative on pandemics based on a literature review and makes inferences from the past and present. This narrative also reflects the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the world and India. The narratives provide a novel perspective to understand public health practices in a global context. It suggests the need for a more synchronized health response in pandemics while highlighting the uncertainties and challenges of using historical diseases as comparisons for the COVID-19 pandemic. The emphasis is on learning from historical evidence and ascertaining how these retrospective diagnoses help make arguments about health and illness in our present moment.
Projected novelty in the climate envelope of the California Current at multiple spatial-temporal scales

A useful measure of general climate stress is where and when novel habitats emerge. Here we evaluate ‘climate envelope novelty’–a spatial indicator of system-level habitat change–in the California Current System (CCS), by quantifying the emergence of novel ocean conditions in multivariate physical-biogeochemical space. We use downscaled climate projections from three earth system models out to 2100 under emission scenario RCP8.5, and detect novelty at multiple spatial-temporal scales using two methods (n-dimensional hypervolumes and extrapolation detection). Under high emissions, persistent novelty doesn’t appear until around 2040 and then only in small patches of Southern California and the Pacific North West. However, novelty increases rapidly after this (especially in warmer seasons), so that by 2060 up to 50% of the CCS in an average year has shifted to a novel local climate, which increases to 100% by 2090. These results are for the average year, and the first years to experience these levels of novelty typically occur 20 years sooner. The ecosystem will increasingly experience novel combinations of warmer temperatures, lower dissolved oxygen (especially inshore), and a shallower mixed layer (especially offshore). The emergence of extensive local novelty year-round has implications for the required ubiquitous redistribution or adaptation of CCS ecology, and the emergence of extensive regional novelty in warmer months has implications for bioregional change and regionally emerging fisheries. One of our climate projections showed considerably less novelty, indicating that realistic uncertainties in climate change (especially the rate of warming) can mean the difference between a mostly novel or mostly analog future.
Emerging Trends and Research Foci in Artificial Intelligence for Retinal Diseases: Bibliometric and Visualization Study

Background Patients with retinal diseases may exhibit serious complications that cause severe visual impairment owing to a lack of awareness of retinal diseases and limited medical resources. Understanding how artificial intelligence (AI) is used to make predictions and perform relevant analyses is a very active area of research on retinal diseases. In this study, the relevant Science Citation Index (SCI) literature on the AI of retinal diseases published from 2012 to 2021 was integrated and analyzed. Objective The aim of this study was to gain insights into the overall application of AI technology to the research of retinal diseases from set time and space dimensions. Methods Citation data downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection database for AI in retinal disease publications from January 1, 2012, to December 31, 2021, were considered for this analysis. Information retrieval was analyzed using the online analysis platforms of literature metrology: Bibliometrc, CiteSpace V, and VOSviewer. Results A total of 197 institutions from 86 countries contributed to relevant publications; China had the largest number and researchers from University College London had the highest H-index. The reference clusters of SCI papers were clustered into 12 categories. “Deep learning” was the cluster with the widest range of cocited references. The burst keywords represented the research frontiers in 2018-2021, which were “eye disease” and “enhancement. ” Conclusions This study provides a systematic analysis method on the literature regarding AI in retinal diseases. Bibliometric analysis enabled obtaining results that were objective and comprehensive. In the future, high-quality retinal image–forming AI technology with strong stability and clinical applicability will continue to be encouraged.
Observation of Temporal Variations in Seismic Anisotropy Within an Active Fault‐Zone Revealed From the Taiwan Chelungpu‐Fault Drilling Project Borehole Seismic Array

Temporal fault‐zone observations are important to better understand the evolution of fault structure and stress configuration. However, long‐term monitoring in the fault zone is rare after a large earthquake. Here, we use seismic data in the fault zone at 1‐km depth from the Taiwan Chelungpu‐fault Drilling Project to study long‐term anisotropy after the 1999 Mw7.6 Chi‐Chi earthquake. The direct S‐wave splitting measurements resolve the overall weak anisotropy in the shallow crust. In order to resolve fault damage zone anisotropy, we perform coda cross‐correlation technique for 794 microearthquakes between 2007 and 2013. We estimate the temporal change in background shear‐wave velocity, fast shear‐wave polarization direction (FSP), and strength of anisotropy (Aani) in the fault damage zone. We show the average FSP direction is N93°E with a significant Aani of about 12%, likely due to the pervasive vertical microcracks created after the earthquake. Temporal variations of anisotropy exhibit seasonal variation with periodicity every 9–12 months that correlates with rainfall events. Furthermore, long‐term anisotropy shows a gradual rotation of FSP direction of about 15° during the first 4 years of observation. At the same time, the strength of anisotropy reduced from 17% to 10% and shear‐wave velocity increased, suggesting the fault healed after the earthquake. This study reports in‐situ evidence for two key observations: (a) long‐term, fault‐zone healing after a major earthquake and (b) modulation of 1‐km deep fault‐zone properties by surficial hydrologic processes. These observations may provide constraints on the response of the fault damage zone in the interseismic period.
Satellite tags describe movement and diving behaviour of the blue shark Prionace glauca in the southwest Pacific

: The blue shark Prionace glauca is the most abundant, widely distributed and ex ploited pelagic shark species. Its population is declining in almost all major oceanic basins. Population management and conservation efforts have traditionally depended on fishery bycatch and observer data. Recent studies correlating animal distribution derived from satellite tags, with commercial fishery impacts, across multi-jurisdictional regions, have provided an improved data plat-form for population management. Here we present the first fishery-independent data of blue shark distribution in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Fifteen blue sharks were satellite tagged, adding to the global dataset of approximately 179 individuals successfully tracked using bolt-on satellite tags. Smart Position and Temperature (SPOT) tags transmitted between 66 and 505 d, and SPLASH tags between 200 and 343 d. Individual track lengths ranged from 3000 to 14 559 km, spanning 10 exclusive economic zones, from latitudes 0.1° to 43.1° S, and longitudes 160.1° E to 150.8° W. Horizontal movements revealed age/sex segregation and large-scale horizontal migration patterns. Dive data collected with SPLASH tags showed fine-scale vertical habitat use at depths between 0 and 1364 m and temperatures of 5 to >30°C. Behavioural events, such as foraging, searching and travelling, were inferred from commonly repeated patterns in the retrieved dive profiles. This study provides a characterisation of critical habitat use in a region never before sampled, adding to the global understanding of blue sharks, and the fishery-independent data-base necessary to inform blue shark population management.