Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-consensual sharing of images: Commercial content creators, sexual content creation platforms and the lack of protection

In this article, we explore the experiences of commercial content creators who have their content (videos, photos, and images) misused. This article reports from a mixed-methods study consisting of 16 interviews with content creators; nine interviews with practitioners who support sex workers and interviews with seven adult service website (ASW) operators. These qualitative data are supported by 221 responses to a survey from the content creators’ community. We describe how content creators experience blackmail, threats of exposure and recording without knowledge, stalking, harassment, doxing, ‘deepfakes’ and impersonation. We conclude that the online sex work environment may not be as safe as previous research has demonstrated, and that commercial content creators are often ignored by governance and platforms following sex workers’ complaints regarding their content being misused. We reflect on the forthcoming UK Online Safety Bill as compared to the US Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act/Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA) law which have seen implications across the globe for digital sex workers. We offer solutions for ASWs to act more responsibly.
Research on the privacy concept of higher education groups in China under the COVID-19 epidemic situation

Abstract Since the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 all over the world, many countries, including China, are taking measures for epidemic prevention and control, and some measures require citizens to provide personal privacy information. In the era of big data, it is worth paying attention to how people view the collection of personal privacy data under the special background that China collects personal information to better fight against the COVID-19 epidemic. In particular, it is of great significance and value to explore the privacy concept of Chinese higher education groups, the most important participants in the era of big data in China. This study focuses on the privacy concept of Chinese higher education groups under the background of COVID-19 epidemic, and higher education groups from 19 provinces, 4 municipalities and 4 autonomous regions are selected as research samples. Through questionnaire survey and statistical analysis, individual privacy sensitivity, individual privacy deliver willingness, individual privacy security and other issues of Chinese higher education groups under the COVID-19 epidemic situation are discussed. And this study tries to explore the influencing factors behind it. It is found that Chinese higher education groups generally have high privacy sensitivity and high perception of privacy risk. However, in the special period of fighting against the COVID-19 epidemic, Chinese higher education groups generally have a high willingness to deliver private information and a high privacy security. In addition, education level, discipline background and parents’ education level are important factors affecting the privacy concept of Chinese higher education groups.
Hall effect on the magnetic reconnections during the evolution of a three-dimensional magnetic flux rope

We present a novel Hall magnetohydrodynamics (HMHD) numerical simulation of a three-dimensional (3D) magnetic flux rope (MFR)—generated by magnetic reconnections from an initial 3D bipolar sheared field. Magnetic reconnections during the HMHD evolution are compared with the MHD. In both simulations, the MFRs generate as a consequence of the magnetic reconnection at null points which has not been realized in contemporary simulations. Interestingly, the evolution is faster and more intricate in the HMHD simulation. Repetitive development of the twisted magnetic field lines (MFLs) in the vicinity of 3D nulls (reconnection site) is unique to the HMHD evolution of the MFR. The dynamical evolution of magnetic field lines around the reconnection site being affected by the Hall forcing correspondingly affects the large-scale structures.
The impact of shift work and sleep deficiency on health

Shift work refers to work that takes place at different hours, including at night. It is estimated that 15% to 20% of the working population works in shift work, particularly in the healthcare, energy, communication systems, public safety, and hospitality industries. Research indicates that shift work, particularly night work, can lead to health problems such as fatigue, exposure to harmful work environments, increased risk of workplace accidents, and sleep disorders. Night work is also associated with increased risk of hypertension, nervous system dysfunction, cardiovascular dysfunction. Those working at night are also more prone to hormonal disorders, digestive disorders, lowered immunity, and cancer. Sleep-wake cycle disorders, such as excessive sleepiness during waking hours and insomnia at night, are symptoms of shift work intolerance syndrome, which can occur after several months or years of shift work. It is estimated that over 20% of shift workers suffer from sleep-wake cycle disorders, and various factors such as chronotype, age, gender, family and social obligations, medications, medical and psychiatric conditions, and shift work experience can impact tolerance of shift work. The treatment of sleep and wake disorders related to shift work includes planning for main sleep and supplementary naps, appropriate exposure to light, treatment with melatonin, taking sleeping and psychostimulant medications.
New Methods for Fast Computation of Fractional Fourier Transform

We present a FRFT high-resolution computation (zoom-FRFT) method,which can zoom-in on any interested portion of fractional spectrum by setting spectrum range and output number M.In addition,for solving lower efficiency of zoom-FRFT for small M,a FRFT single-point fast computation (SP-FRFT) method based on Horner rule is presented and its further reduction is made for zero-point computation.It can be used to increase computational efficiency for small M,and compute un-uniform output samples.Finally,two methods are verified by the simulations.
Feasibility of Short-Term Aggressive Lipid-Lowering Therapy with the PCSK9 Antibody in Acute Coronary Syndrome

Background: The guideline-recommended low-density lipoprotein cholesterol target level of <70 mg/dL may not be achieved with statin administration in some patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Therefore, the proprotein convertase subtilisin-kexin type 9 (PCSK9) antibody can be added to high-risk patients with ACS. Nevertheless, the optimal duration of PCSK9 antibody administration remains unclear. Methods and Results: Patients were randomized to receive either 3 months of lipid lowering therapy (LLT) with the PCSK9 antibody followed by conventional LLT (with-PCSK9-antibody group) or 12 months of conventional LLT alone (without-PCSK9-antibody group). The primary endpoint was the composite of all-cause death, myocardial infarction, stroke, unstable angina, and ischemia-driven revascularization. A total of 124 patients treated with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) were randomly assigned to the two groups (n = 62 in each). The primary composite outcome occurred in 9.7% and 14.5% of the patients in the with- and without-PCSK9-antibody groups, respectively (hazard ratio: 0.70; 95% confidence interval: 0.25 to 1.97; p = 0.498). The two groups showed no significant differences in hospitalization for worsening heart failure and adverse events. Conclusions: In ACS patients who underwent PCI, short-term PCSK9 antibody therapy with conventional LLT was feasible in this pilot clinical trial. Long-term follow-up in a larger scale clinical trial is warranted.
Synthesis and characterization of nanocellulose from watermelon rinds and water hyacinth

Nanocellulose derived from cellulose, the abundant natural polymer, is used in various applications due to its superior chemical, mechanical and thermal properties along with good biocompatibility and biodegradability. This paper reports an investigation of the extraction of nanocellulose from two freely available natural precursors-watermelon rinds and water hyacinth leaves. Cellulose isolation was carried out through chemical methods, including acid and alkali treatments followed by bleaching. The chemical composition, percentage crystallinity and particle size were studied using various characterization techniques. FTIR spectra indicate the removal of hemicelluloses, pectin, and lignin resulting in the effective isolation of cellulose from both precursors. Results of XRD indicate a high concentration of Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs) in the treated sample. The FESEM and SEM-EDAX images also confirm the formation of CNCs. TGA and DSC results show excellent thermal stability for both CNCs. Investigations on the properties of a CNC-reinforced epoxy composite are also reported. Results indicate considerable improvement in the mechanical properties, thermal stability and thermal conductivity of the composites compared to the pristine polymer.
Mosquito-borne Diseases and Climate Change Implementing Strategies

Mosquito-related diseases are a serious public health problem not only in the Philippines but also for the entire planet. The increase of mosquito-borne diseases has been attributed to climate change, though, contradicting reports show inconclusive relationships between dengue and mosquito-borne diseases. This paper presents the mitigation and adaptation action towards climate change and the correlation of climatic factors such as temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, and rainfall to the cases of mosquito-borne diseases. The data gathered from the survey were evaluated using the mean percentages. Pearson correlation was utilized to determine the extent of correlation between the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases and climatic factors. Results showed a significant correlation between temperature (p=0.020) only. The adaptation and mitigation actions are shown to have challenged the existing plan and implementation strategies since commendable action towards climate change is not evident to all groups studied that could also be a contributory factor for the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases.
Polymer-based candle-shaped microneedle electrodes for electroencephalography on hairy skin

In this paper, we report on the optimization of the shape of dry microneedle electrodes for electroencephalography (EEG) on hairy locations and compare the electrodes we developed with conventional wet electrodes. We propose the use of SU-8-based candle-shaped microneedle electrodes (CMEs), which have pillars of 1.0 mm height and 0.4 mm diameter with a gap of 0.43 mm between pillars. Microneedles are formed on the top of the pillars. The shape was determined by how well the pillars can avoid hairs and support the microneedles to penetrate through the stratum corneum. The skin–electrode contact impedances of the fabricated CMEs were found to be higher and less stable than those of conventional wet electrodes. However, the CMEs successfully acquired signals with qualities as good as those of conventional wet electrodes. Given the usability of the CMEs, which do not require skin preparation or gel, they are promising alternatives to conventional wet electrodes.
SalDA: DeepConvNet Greets Attention for Visual Saliency Prediction

Predicting salient regions in images requires the capture of contextual information in the scene. Conventional saliency models typically use the encoder–decoder architecture and multiscale feature fusion for modeling contextual features, which, however, possess huge computational cost and model parameters. In this article, we address the saliency prediction task by capturing long-range dependencies based on the self-attention mechanism. Self-attention has been widely used in image recognition or other classification tasks, but is still rarely being considered in regression-based saliency prediction task. Inspired by the nonlocal block, we propose a new saliency prediction network in which deep convolutional network is integrated with the attention mechanism, namely, SalDA. Considering each feature map may capture different salient regions, our spatial attention module first adaptively aggregates the feature at each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions within each independent channel. Meanwhile, in order to capture interdependence between channels, we also introduce a channel attention module to integrate different features among different channels. We combine these two attention modules into a multiattention module to further improve the saliency map prediction for the network. We show the effectiveness of SalDA on the largest saliency prediction data set SALICON. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods in this area, we can yield comparable saliency prediction performance, but with substantially less model parameters and shorter inference time.
Why Does It Hurt So Much? Emotion Regulation Mediates the Association between Fibromyalgia Symptoms and Psychological Distress

While it is known that fibromyalgia patients often suffer from depression and stress symptoms, there is inconclusive evidence as to why these symptoms occur. The aim of this study is to examine the role of emotion regulation in mental health symptoms among treatment-seeking individuals with fibromyalgia. Ninety-three (93) participants (mean age = 47.25, SD = 12.4) were recruited from one of Israel’s largest community healthcare providers. They were administered self-report questionnaires assessing fibromyalgia (FIQR), perceived stress (PSS), major depression (PHQ-9), and difficulties in emotion regulation (DERS). Associations were found between measures of fibromyalgia symptoms, psychological distress, and emotion regulation. Several sub-indices of emotion regulation showed significant correlations with psychological distress, with non-acceptance of emotional responses showing the strongest associations. Moreover, non-acceptance of emotion responses mediated the association between fibromyalgia symptoms and psychological distress. Our findings show that the connection between fibromyalgia symptoms and psychological distress is partially explained by difficulties in emotion regulation. Moreover, we show that specific emotion regulation strategies play a differential role in fibromyalgia patients’ distress, thereby highlighting the importance of identifying unique psychotherapeutic targets. Specifically, regulating emotions through acceptance of emotional responses seems to be particularly important for fibromyalgia patients, as they cope with stigma and a lack of validation.
A Decade of Spaceborne Observations of the Arctic Atmosphere: Novel Insights from NASA’s AIRS Instrument

AbstractArctic sea ice is declining rapidly and its annual ice extent minima reached record lows twice during the last decade. Large environmental and socioeconomic implications related to sea ice reduction in a warming world necessitate realistic simulations of the Arctic climate system, not least to formulate relevant environmental policies on an international scale. However, despite considerable progress in the last few decades, future climate projections from numerical models still exhibit the largest uncertainties over the polar regions. The lack of sufficient observations of essential climate variables is partly to blame for the poor representation of key atmospheric processes, and their coupling to the surface, in climate models.Observations from the hyperspectral Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on board the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Aqua satellite are contributing toward improved understanding of the vertical structure of the atmosphere over the poles si.
Enhancement of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of Co layer in exchange-biased Au/Co/NiO/Au polycrystalline system

The perpendicular exchange bias in NiO(antiferromagnet)/Co(ferromagnet) polycrystalline layer films is studied. It is found that the NiO layer forces the Co layer magnetization to be oriented perpendicular to the film plane in a greater thickness range than is found in the Au/Co/Au system. Simultaneously, a large coercivity and a significant perpendicular exchange bias field were observed that are owing to the interlayer exchange bias coupling between NiO and Co, which supports the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of the Co layer. These findings are confirmed by magnetometry and magnetoresistance measurements.
Resolving the biophysics of axon transmembrane polarization in a single closed-form description

When a depolarizing event occurs across a cell membrane there is a remarkable change in its electrical properties. A complete depolarization event produces a considerably rapid increase in voltage that propagates longitudinally along the axon and is accompanied by changes in axial conductance. A dynamically changing magnetic field is associated with the passage of the action potential down the axon. Over 75 years of research has gone into the quantification of this phenomenon. To date, no unified model exist that resolves transmembrane polarization in a closed-form description. Here, a simple but formative description of propagated signaling phenomena in the membrane of an axon is presented in closed-form. The focus is on using both biophysics and mathematical methods for elucidating the fundamental mechanisms governing transmembrane polarization. The results presented demonstrate how to resolve electromagnetic and thermodynamic factors that govern transmembrane potential. Computational results are supported by well-established quantitative descriptions of propagated signaling phenomena in the membrane of an axon. The findings demonstrate how intracellular conductance, the thermodynamics of magnetization, and current modulation function together in generating an action potential in a unified closed-form description. The work presented in this paper provides compelling evidence that three basic factors contribute to the propagated signaling in the membrane of an axon. It is anticipated this work will compel those in biophysics, physical biology, and in the computational neurosciences to probe deeper into the classical and quantum features of membrane magnetization and signaling. It is hoped that subsequent investigations of this sort will be advanced by the computational features of this model without having to resort to numerical methods of analysis.
Conceptualizing, Defining, and Measuring Before-School Physical Activity: A Review With Exploratory Analysis of Adolescent Data

Physical activity (PA) among children and adolescents is often reported by time segments centered around the school day, including before school. However, there is no consistent approach to defining the before-school segment, to accurately capture PA levels and facilitate synthesis of results across studies. Therefore, this study aimed to (a) examine how studies with children and adolescents have defined the before-school segment, and (b) compare adolescents’ before-school PA using various segment definitions. We conducted a systematic search and review of literature from six databases, and subsequently analyzed accelerometer data from Australia (n = 472, mean age 14.9 years, 40% male), to compare PA across five before-school definitions. Our review found 69 studies reporting before-school PA, 59 of which used device-based measures. Definitions ranged widely, but justifications were rarely reported. Our empirical comparison of definitions resulted in a range of participants meeting wear time criteria (≥3 days at >50% of segment length) from the latest-starting definition (30 min prior to school; n = 443) to the earliest-starting definition (6:00 a.m.–school start; n = 155), implying that for many participants, accelerometer wear was low in the early hours due to sleep or noncompliance. Statistically significant differences in light and moderate-to-vigorous PA (mean minutes/school day, proportion of segment length, and proportion of wear time) were found between definitions, indicating that before-school PA could potentially be underestimated depending on definition choice. We recommend that future studies clearly report and justify segment definition, apply segment-specific wear time criteria, and collect wake time data to enable individualized segment start times and minimize risk of data misclassification.
Avian Influenza: Could the H5N1 Virus Be a Potential Next Threat?

Avian influenza virus (AIV) poses a significant challenge to poultry production, with negative repercussions for both the economy and public health worldwide. Since January 2003, a total of 868 human cases of AIV H5N1 have been reported from four countries in the Western Pacific Region, as of 9 March 2023. When AIVs are circulating in poultry, there is a risk of sporadic infections and small clusters of human cases due to exposure to infected poultry or contaminated environments. The increase in reported A(H5N1) infections may reflect continued virus circulation in birds, as well as enhanced surveillance and diagnostic capacity resulting from the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Numerous countermeasures, including vaccines and antiviral treatments, are available for influenza infection. However, their effectiveness is often debated due to the ongoing resistance to antivirals and the relatively low and unpredictable efficiency of influenza vaccines compared to other vaccines. Vaccination remains the primary method for preventing influenza acquisition or avoiding serious complications related to the disease. In this review, we summarize the global landscape of the Influenza A virus and provide insights into human clinical symptomatology. We call for urgent investment in genomic surveillance strategies to timely detect and shape the emergence of any potential viral pathogen, which is essential for epidemic/pandemic preparedness.
The Role of Fidelity in Goal-Oriented Semantic Communication: A Rate Distortion Approach

We study a variant of a robust description source coding framework, which is a relevant model for goal-oriented semantic information transmission, via its corresponding characterization. Considering two individual single-letter separable distortion constraints and input and output data acting as the intrinsic and extrinsic message, respectively, we first derive a lower bound on the optimal rates of the problem, as well as necessary and sufficient conditions for this bound to be tight. Subsequently, we prove a general result that provides in parametric form the optimal solution of the characterization of this problem. Capitalizing on these results, we examine the structure of the solution for one case study of general binary alphabets under Hamming distortions and solve in closed form a special case. We also solve another general binary alphabet case where a Hamming and an erasure distortion coexist, as a means to highlight the importance of selecting the type of the distortion constraint in goal-oriented semantic communication. Furthermore, we develop a goal-oriented Blahut-Arimoto (BA) algorithm, which can be used for the computation of any finite alphabet intrinsic or extrinsic message under individual distortion criteria. Finally, we revisit the problem for multidimensional independent and identically distributed ( $\mathop {\mathrm {i.i.d.}}$ ) jointly Gaussian processes with individual mean-square error (MSE) distortion constraints, providing new insights that have previously been overlooked. This work reveals the cardinal role of context-dependent fidelity criteria in goal-oriented semantic communication.