Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Examining How Dog ‘Acquisition’ Affects Physical Activity and Psychosocial Well-Being: Findings from the BuddyStudy Pilot Trial

Simple Summary Dog owners are more physically active than non-dog owners, but the direction of the relationship between dog ownership and increased physical activity is unknown. In other words, it is unclear whether acquiring a dog causes a person to become more active, or whether more physically active people choose to acquire dogs. Given that regular physical activity is critical for the prevention and management of numerous chronic diseases, research supporting the hypothesis that dogs make people more active could inform programs and policies that encourage responsible dog ownership. In the BuddyStudy, we used dog fostering to mimic dog acquisition, and examined how taking a dog into one’s home affected physical activity and psychosocial well-being. Nearly half of study participants saw large increases in physical activity and nearly three-quarters saw improvements in mood after fostering for six weeks. More than half met someone new in their neighborhood because of their foster dog. Most participants adopted their foster dog after the six-week foster period, and some maintained improvements in physical activity and well-being at 12 weeks. The results of this pilot study are promising and warrant a larger investigation. Abstract Dog owners are more physically active than non-dog owners, but evidence of a causal relationship between dog acquisition and increased physical activity is lacking. Such evidence could inform programs and policies that encourage responsible dog ownership. Randomized controlled trials are the ‘gold standard’ for determining causation, but they are prohibited in this area due to ethical concerns. In the BuddyStudy, we tested the feasibility of using dog fostering as a proxy for dog acquisition, which would allow ethical random assignment. In this single-arm trial, 11 participants fostered a rescue dog for six weeks. Physical activity and psychosocial data were collected at baseline, 6, and 12 weeks. At 6 weeks, mean change in steps/day was 1192.1 ± 2457.8. Mean changes on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale were −4.9 ± 8.7 and −0.8 ± 5.5, respectively. More than half of participants (55%) reported meeting someone new in their neighborhood because of their foster dog. Eight participants (73%) adopted their foster dog after the 6-week foster period; some maintained improvements in physical activity and well-being at 12 weeks. Given the demonstrated feasibility and preliminary findings of the BuddyStudy, a randomized trial of immediate versus delayed dog fostering is warranted.
New developments in the nuclear binary cluster-core in the heavy nuclear region

New Developments in the Nuclear Binary Cluster-Core in the Heavy Nuclear Region B. D. C. KIMENE KAYA Department of Physics, University of Stellenbosch, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602, South Africa. Dissertation: PhD November 2017 The atomic nucleus is a complex many-body interacting system, which exhibits a underlying correlated set of nucleon states. The cluster model is one of the most reliable models that predicts the strongly correlated subsystem of nucleons close to the decay threshold of nuclei. The binary-cluster model describes the structure and decay properties of super-heavy nuclei. The phenomenological Cubic Woods-Saxon potential, developed by Buck, Merchant and Perez, has successfully predicted a number of experimental observables associated with clustering phenomenon. The recently developed microscopic double folded M3Y potential results in the inverted spectra for the positive parity excited cluster states, but successfully predicts the decay halflife for the α-Pb system. These shortcoming of the M3Y based microscopic binary cluster model lead to the newly developed hybrid cluster-core potential, obtained by fitting the phenomenological Saxon-Woods Cubed and the M3Y double folding at the surface region where the two potentials coalesce. The project presents an overview on nuclear cluster models. The double folding potentials are constructed with the M3Y and the new complex effective Gaussian form factor (CEG) effective nucleon-nucleon interactions. Furthermore the recently developed self-consistent relativistic mean-field cluster-core description is presented with the relativistic Love-Franey amplitudes. The decay half-lives for α-Pb give satisfactory results for M3Y and CEG with the addition ii Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za
Electrocoagulation as an Alternative for the Removal of Chromium (VI) in Solution

Context: The contamination of water sources by the discharge of effluents contaminated with chromium (VI) is a current environmental problem because it is a toxic pollutant for humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms; it can be carcinogenic and has a high solubility in an aqueous environment. This research aims to study the electrochemical removal of hexavalent chromium by electrocoagulation using iron and aluminum electrodes with monopolar configuration, evaluating the effect of residence time, voltage, and the number of electrodes on the removal efficiency. Methodology: The experiments were conducted in a 3L batch electrocoagulation cell, using 10 and 6 aluminum and stainless steel plates as electrodes, connected at a distance of 1.5 cm in a monopolar configuration in parallel to the power source. Contaminated solution with Cr (VI) was treated at a concentration of 50 mg/L, evaluating two levels of residence time (20 and 30 min), voltage (20 and 30 V), and the number of electrodes (6 and 10 electrodes). Results: After the electrocoagulation removal tests, it was obtained removal percentages between 60.15 and 92.9%. The most significant positive variable in the process was the increase in the residence time. It can be inferred that electrocoagulation performs better at lower voltages and longer residence times and that the joint effect of the increase of the number of electrodes and the contact time would increase the performance of the process, achieving greater removal. Conclusions: The process of reduction of chromium (VI) by electrocoagulation has the potential to be used for the cost-effective removal of heavy metals from water
SCUNet++: Swin-UNet and CNN Bottleneck Hybrid Architecture with Multi-Fusion Dense Skip Connection for Pulmonary Embolism CT Image Segmentation

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a prevalent lung disease that can lead to right ventricular hypertrophy and failure in severe cases, ranking second in severity only to myocardial infarction and sudden death. Pulmonary artery CT angiography (CTPA) is a widely used diagnostic method for PE. However, PE detection presents challenges in clinical practice due to limitations in imaging technology. CTPA can produce noises similar to PE, making confirmation of its presence time-consuming and prone to overdiagnosis. Nevertheless, the traditional segmentation method of PE can not fully consider the hierarchical structure of features, local and global spatial features of PE CT images. In this paper, we propose an automatic PE segmentation method called SCUNet++ (Swin Conv UNet++). This method incorporates multiple fusion dense skip connections between the encoder and decoder, utilizing the Swin Transformer as the encoder. And fuses features of different scales in the decoder subnetwork to compensate for spatial information loss caused by the inevitable downsampling in Swin-UNet or other state-of-the-art methods, effectively solving the above problem. We provide a theoretical analysis of this method in detail and validate it on publicly available PE CT image datasets FUMPE and CAD-PE. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 83.47% and a Hausdorff distance 95th percentile (HD95) of 3.83 on the FUMPE dataset, as well as a DSC of 83.42% and an HD95 of 5.10 on the CAD-PE dataset. These findings demonstrate that our method exhibits strong performance in PE segmentation tasks, potentially enhancing the accuracy of automatic segmentation of PE and providing a powerful diagnostic tool for clinical physicians. Our source code and new FUMPE dataset are available at https://github.com/JustlfC03/SCUNet-plusplus.
Recursive Visual Attention in Visual Dialog

Visual dialog is a challenging vision-language task, which requires the agent to answer multi-round questions about an image. It typically needs to address two major problems: (1) How to answer visually-grounded questions, which is the core challenge in visual question answering (VQA); (2) How to infer the co-reference between questions and the dialog history. An example of visual co-reference is: pronouns (e.g., “they”) in the question (e.g., “Are they on or off? ”) are linked with nouns (e.g., “lamps”) appearing in the dialog history (e.g., “How many lamps are there? ”) and the object grounded in the image. In this work, to resolve the visual co-reference for visual dialog, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Recursive Visual Attention (RvA). Specifically, our dialog agent browses the dialog history until the agent has sufficient confidence in the visual co-reference resolution, and refines the visual attention recursively. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the large-scale VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets demonstrate that the proposed RvA not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, but also achieves reasonable recursion and interpretable attention maps without additional annotations. The code is available at https://github.com/yuleiniu/rva.
Information technology as a tool for teaching primary mathematics

concrete (AC) thinking is not simply the reverse of concrete-abstract thinking. Instead, it is a higher form of thinking that depends on more advanced abstract and logical reasoning abilities but is grounded in the concepts and rules derived from concrete-abstract learning (Liu & Cummings, 1997). In other words, it is not enough just to think abstractly about geometric principles; the individual must be able to apply this thinking to solve actual problems. The AC process also can be conceived of as a process of deductive thinking reasoning from general to specific. In geometry learning, the application of deductive reasoning in the problem-solving process may occur through a sequence of steps. One model that describes this process is the six-step problem solving model proposed by Hayes (1989). The six steps include: 1. Identifying the problem 2. Representing the problem 3. Planning die problem 4.Executing the plan 5. Evaluating the plan 6. Evaluating the solution The Hayes sequence depicts the way information is handled during the problem-solving process and requires children to divide a single geometric problem into a number of smaller, more basic problems. Children use steps one through four to solve each smaller problem. Then, aftw evaluating the answers to each smaller problem, they configure their solutions into a final solution to the larger problem in steps 5 and 6. In summary, concrete-abstract (CA) processes are involved as children's geometric thinking advances from the visual level to the abstract/relational level in van Hiele’s hierarchy. Once they reach the abstract thinking level, children apply abstract-concrete (AC) thinking processes to solve concrete geometric problems. Application of CA and AC processes results in inductive and deductive reasoning skills, respectively. As previously noted, the surveyed primary mathematics teachers integrate the educational technological constructivist tools into teaching to enhance students' higher order thinking skills. Two technology tools that are useful for accomplishing this purpose are PC logo, and Cabrigeometre.
Innovation inProduct Development andMarketing Process : A Study onIntroducing New Bath Soap Containing Antiseptic & Beauty Care Composition

Marketing is summation of all systematic and innovative functions which involve in value creation for customers and value capturing from customers inreturn. So Marketing is a continuous process of innovating products according to the exact need of customers. The marketers have to develop new products to keep pace with the continuous trend of changing culture and for technological advancement to fulfill modern customers’ requirements. To survive from the decline demand of products and services, it is very essential and inevitable to develop new products or update existing products according to the exact demand of customers. The continuous process of innovating and updating products and services is very needed to survive as well as to make a competitive edge in the industry.The following Parachute brand is the example of continuous process of product innovation: Parachute Gold: Inner Strength, Parachute Gold: Nourishment, Parachute Gold: Sensorial Aroma, Parachute Gold: Nourishment + Sensorial, Parachute Gold: Sensorial – Non-Stickiness, Parachute Gold: Sensorial – Easy to Rinse. The study will help to develop a conceptual framework of innovating (Bath Soap) product as well as the innovative marketing process. The research or the conceptual framework developed through this research will help marketers to develop accurate strategies to develop new products as well as to market and launch the product successfully. The commercial or marketing success or failure of a product does not rest solely on the product itself. The launch strategy adopted also determines whether a product succeeds or fails in the market. The key to success in the marketing and launching process often rests in finding the proper strategies. The main purpose of the research is to survey the market and get a clear idea about the consumer behavior regarding new kind of soap which will hold both antiseptic and beauty care quality in a single soap.
Current status of genomic evaluation

Abstract Early application of genomic selection relied on SNP estimation with phenotypes or de-regressed proofs (DRP). Chips of 50k SNP seemed sufficient for an accurate estimation of SNP effects. Genomic estimated breeding values (GEBV) were composed of an index with parent average, direct genomic value, and deduction of a parental index to eliminate double counting. Use of SNP selection or weighting increased accuracy with small data sets but had minimal to no impact with large data sets. Efforts to include potentially causative SNP derived from sequence data or high-density chips showed limited or no gain in accuracy. After the implementation of genomic selection, EBV by BLUP became biased because of genomic preselection and DRP computed based on EBV required adjustments, and the creation of DRP for females is hard and subject to double counting. Genomic selection was greatly simplified by single-step genomic BLUP (ssGBLUP). This method based on combining genomic and pedigree relationships automatically creates an index with all sources of information, can use any combination of male and female genotypes, and accounts for preselection. To avoid biases, especially under strong selection, ssGBLUP requires that pedigree and genomic relationships are compatible. Because the inversion of the genomic relationship matrix (G) becomes costly with more than 100k genotyped animals, large data computations in ssGBLUP were solved by exploiting limited dimensionality of genomic data due to limited effective population size. With such dimensionality ranging from 4k in chickens to about 15k in cattle, the inverse of G can be created directly (e.g., by the algorithm for proven and young) at a linear cost. Due to its simplicity and accuracy, ssGBLUP is routinely used for genomic selection by the major chicken, pig, and beef industries. Single step can be used to derive SNP effects for indirect prediction and for genome-wide association studies, including computations of the P-values. Alternative single-step formulations exist that use SNP effects for genotyped or for all animals. Although genomics is the new standard in breeding and genetics, there are still some problems that need to be solved. This involves new validation procedures that are unaffected by selection, parameter estimation that accounts for all the genomic data used in selection, and strategies to address reduction in genetic variances after genomic selection was implemented.
Provably Approximated Point Cloud Registration

The goal of the alignment problem is to align a (given) point cloud P = {p1, ⋯,pn} to another (observed) point cloud Q = {q1, ⋯,qn}. That is, to compute a rotation matrix R ∈ ℝ3×3 and a translation vector t ∈ ℝ3 that minimize the sum of paired distances between every transformed point Rpi − t, to its corresponding point qi, over every i ∈ {1, ⋯,n}. A harder version is the registration problem, where the correspondence is unknown, and the minimum is also over all possible correspondence functions from P to Q. Algorithms such as the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and its variants were suggested for these problems, but none yield a provable non-trivial approximation for the global optimum.We prove that there always exists a "witness" set of 3 pairs in P × Q that, via novel alignment algorithm, defines a constant factor approximation (in the worst case) to this global optimum. We then provide algorithms that recover this witness set and yield the first provable constant factor approximation for the: (i) alignment problem in O(n) expected time, and (ii) registration problem in polynomial time. Such small witness sets exist for many variants including points in d-dimensional space, outlier-resistant cost functions, and different correspondence types.Extensive experimental results on real and synthetic datasets show that, in practice, our approximation constants are close to 1 and our error is up to x10 times smaller than state-of-the-art algorithms.
On the Minimal Loading of Sensorless Series-Series Compensated Inductive WPT Link Operating at Load Independent Voltage Output Frequency Without Feedback

It is well-known that continuous conduction mode (CCM) operation at certain frequency yields nearly load-independent voltage gain in practical series-series compensated inductive wireless power transfer links (SS-IWPTL). Such an operation is usually referred to as “load independent voltage output” (LIVO). Residual load dependence is due to the presence of non-zero equivalent series resistances in both transmitter and receiver. On the other hand, it has been shown that voltage gain remains load-dependent at the same operating frequency in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) irrespectively of equivalent series resistances values. Consequently, the output voltage of SS-IWPTL operated at LIVO frequency resides within a range with lower bound corresponding to rated load and upper bound corresponding to zero loading for a given input voltage. The upper bound expression (typically attained in CCM) is derived using the first harmonic approximation (FHA) based equivalent circuit and is well-established by previous works. On the contrary, derivation of the lower bound (achieved in DCM) requires differential equation (DE) based analysis and was barely treated in the literature. The paper demonstrates that lumped capacitance of receiving side coil and input capacitance of receiving side rectifier must be taken into account during DE-based analysis since they impose significant receiving side voltage oscillations, which may give rise to safety issues. In order to damp these oscillations and keep the output DC voltage below a predetermined limit, minimal loading should be applied at the SS-IWPTL output, creating an RCD-snubber equivalent. Guidelines for the minimal load sizing are derived in the paper analytically. Simulations and experiments based on a 400V, 1kW SS-IWPTL operating at LIVO frequency demonstrate excellent matching, validating the proposed analysis.
Behavioral economics of preferences, choices, and happiness

Part I Attitude toward Risk and Time. - 1 Risk and Time Preferences: Linking Experimental and Household Survey Data from Vietnam (Tanaka, Camerer, Nguyen). - 2 Simultaneous Measurement of Time and Risk Preferences: Stated Preference Discrete Choice Modeling Analysis Depending on Smoking Behavior (Ida, Goto). - 3 Time discounting: Declining impatience and interval effect (Kinari, Ohtake, Tsutsui). - 4 Non-parametric Test of Time Consistency: Present Bias and Future Bias (Takeuchi, Kan). - 5 Loss of self-control in intertemporal choice may be attributable to logarithmic time-perception (Takahashi). - 6 Experiments on Risk Attitude : the Case of Chinese Students (Sasaki, Xie, Ohtake, Qin, Tsutsui). -Part II Addiction. - 7 Interdependency among Addictive Behaviors and Time/Risk Preferences: Discrete Choice Model Analysis of Smoking, Drinking, and Gambling (Ida, Goto). - 8 Discounting delayed and probabilistic monetary gains and losses by smokers of cigarettes (Ohmura, Takahashi, Kitamura). - 9 Time discounting and smoking behavior: Evidence from a panel survey (Kang, Ikeda). - 10 Smokers, smoking deprivation, and time discounting (Yamane, Yoneda, Takahashi, Kamijo, Komori, Hiruma, Tsutsui). - 11 The effects of the social norm on cigarette consumption: Evidence from Japan using panel data (Yamamura). -Part III Health. - 12 Hyperbolic discounting, the sign effect, and the body mass index (Ikeda, Kang, Ohtake). - 13 Economic and Behavioral Factors in an Individual's Decision to Take the Influenza Vaccination in Japan (Tsutsui, Benzion, Shahrabani). - Part IV Social Preferences. - 14 Another Avenue for Anatomy of Income Comparisons: Evidence from Hypothetical Choice Experiments (Yamada, Sato). - 15 Social capital, household income, and preferences for income redistribution (Yamamura). - Part V Happiness and Well-being. - 16 Koizumi Carried the Day: Did the Japanese Election Results Make People Happy and Unhappy? (Tsutsui, Kimball, Ohtake). - 17 Asking about changes in happiness in a daily web survey and its implication for the Easterlin paradox (Tsutsui, Ohtake). - 18 Welfare States and the Redistribution of Happiness (Ono, Lee). -Part VI Decisions. - 19 Revealed Attention (Yusufcan, Nakajima, Ozbay). - 20 Subjective random discounting and intertemporal choice (Higashi, Hyogo, Takeoka). - 21 A geometric approach to temptation (Abe). - Part VII Biological Foundation. - 22 Prediction of immediate and future rewards differently recruits cortico-basal ganglia loops (Tanaka, Doya, Okada, Ueda, Okamoto, Yamawaki). - 23 Second to fourth digit ratio and the sporting success of sumo wrestlers (Tamiya, Lee, Ohtake). -Part IIX Investor Behavior. - 24 Investors' Herding on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Iihara, Kato, Tokunaga). - 25 The characteristics of online investors (Uchida). -26 Can margin traders predict future stock returns in Japan? (Hirose, Kato, Bremer).