Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Medytacja w praktyce filozoficznej jako „żywa metafizyka” (praktyki medytacyjne w szkole stoickiej)

Autor artykułu wysuwa tezę, że jeśli współczesne poradnictwo filozoficzne chce zachować ducha filozofii antycznej, to musi być zaangażowane metafizycznie. Takie zaangażowanie oznacza między innymi uznanie za istotne praktyk medytacyjnych w filozofii, które stanowiły jej immanentną cechę w szkołach Wschodu, ale także w filozofii zachodniej (co autor pokazuje na przykładzie Rozmyślań Marka Aureliusza). Te praktyki prowadziły do specyficznego stanu psychofizycznego, zwanego ataraksją, w którym radyklanie zmienia się percepcja rzeczywistości. Ich efektem były czasem stany w literaturze psychologicznej nazywane „odmiennymi stanami świadomości”. Praktyki takie autor artykułu nazywa „żywą metafizyką”. Twierdzi przy tym, że bez takiej metafizyki coaching i poradnictwo filozoficzne tracą eudajmonistyczny charakter i stają się środkiem do hedonistycznego zaspokojeniem liberalnego ego współczesnego człowieka.
Timing is everything: Early and late neural measures of auditory habituation and discrimination in autism and their relationship to autistic traits and sensory overresponsivity

BackgroundSensory differences are included in the DSM-5 criteria of autism for the first time, yet it is unclear how sensory behaviors are related to neural indicators of perception. We sought to disentangle this complex relationship by studying early brain signatures of perception using event-related potentials (ERPs) and examining their relationship to sensory overresponsivity and autistic traits.MethodsThirteen autistic children and 13 Typically Developing (TD) children matched on chronological age and nonverbal IQ participated in a passive oddball task, in which P1 habituation and P1 and MMN discrimination were evoked by pure tones. ERPs were compared between groups, and correlations were conducted between ERPs and autistic traits and sensory features.ResultsAutistic children had marginally enhanced neural discrimination and reduced habituation to auditory stimuli compared to the TD group. Better P1 and MMN discrimination and lower P1 habituation corresponded with more autistic traits. Further, the MMN component, but not P1 components, mapped on to sensory overresponsivity.LimitationsStimuli in the oddball paradigm were not counterbalanced in their presentation as standards or deviants, and participants were not directly asked about their reactions to the auditory stimuli, which would be advantageous in determining whether appraisal of stimuli moderates neural response. The sample size is small and warrants replication.ConclusionsSignificant correlations between auditory ERP components and autistic traits, even when group differences were not present, suggests benefits to taking a more dimensional approach to autism than using strictly categorical methods. Our findings highlight the significance of temporal and contextual factors in neural information processing as it relates to autistic traits and sensory behaviors.
A Low-Cost Platform for Environmental Smart Farming Monitoring System Based on IoT and UAVs

When integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) occurred, tens of applications including smart agriculture have emerged to offer innovative solutions to modernize the farming sector. This paper aims to present a low-cost platform for comprehensive environmental parameter monitoring using flying IoT. This platform is deployed and tested in a real scenario on a farm in Medenine, Tunisia, in the period of March 2020 to March 2021. The experimental work fulfills the requirements of automated and real-time monitoring of the environmental parameters using both under- and aboveground sensors. These IoT sensors are on a farm collecting vast amounts of environmental data, where it is sent to ground gateways every 1 h, after which the obtained data is collected and transmitted by a drone to the cloud for storage and analysis every 12 h. This low-cost platform can help farmers, governmental, or manufacturers to predict environmental data over the geographically large farm field, which leads to enhancement in crop productivity and farm management in a cost-effective, and timely manner. Obtained experimental results infer that automated and human-made sets of actions can be applied and/or suggested, due to the innovative integration between IoT sensors with the drone. These smart actions help in precision agriculture, which, in turn, intensely boost crop productivity, saving natural resources.
Effect of a Behavioral Intervention on Outcomes for Caregivers of Veterans with PTSD

Abstract Caregivers of the approximately 9 million individuals in the US with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) face burdens that may seem overwhelming. In 2017, VA implemented the first national clinical program for caregivers of veterans with PTSD. Previous interventions have focused on caregivers more as adjuncts of persons with PTSD or included PTSD caregivers with other types of military/veteran caregivers. The REACH VA behavioral intervention, 4 one-hour sessions during 2 to 3 months, focusing on caregiver coping and managing PTSD-related concerns, was delivered centrally by telephone. In a pre/post intervention design, the 161 caregivers experienced statistically significant improvement in burden, depression, anxiety, frustrations, general stress, time providing care, number of and bother about troubling behaviors, and safety risks. Pre and post intervention improvements in burden and anxiety were also clinically significant. Reducing caregivers’ psychological distress can improve ability to provide care and positively affect health and safety of persons with PTSD. With REACH, VA has made major steps to support caregivers of veterans. The positive results of this implementation may also serve as a model to support PTSD caregivers in the general population.
LIGHT ABSORPTION BY COATED SOOT

The contribution of aerosol absorption on direct radiative forcing is still an active area of research, in part, because aerosol extinction is dominated by light scattering and, in part, because the primary absorbing aerosol of interest, soot, exhibits complex aging behavior that alters its optical properties. The consequences of this can be evidenced by the work of Ramanathan and Carmichael (2008) who suggest that incorporating the atmospheric heating due to brown clouds (plumes containing soot byproducts from automobiles, biomass burning, wood-burning kitchen stoves, and coal-fired power plants) will increase black carbon (BC) radiative forcing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change best estimate of 0.34 Wm-2 (±0.25 Wm-2) (IPCC 2007) to 0.9 Wm-2. This noteworthy degree of the uncertainty is due largely to the interdependence of BC optical properties on particle mixing state and aggregate morphology, each of which changes as the particle ages in the atmosphere and becomes encapsulated within a coating of inorganic and/or organic substances. With the advent of techniques that can directly measure aerosol light absorption with influences due to collection substrate or light scattering (e.g., photoacoustic spectroscopy (Arnott et al., 2005; Lack et al., 2006) and photothermal interferometry (Sedlacek and Lee 2007)) the potential exists for quantifying this interdependence.
Pore‐Scale Modeling of Spontaneous Imbibition in Porous Media Using the Lattice Boltzmann Method

A new color‐gradient lattice Boltzmann model is developed to simulate spontaneous imbibition in a porous media micromodel, which needs only two‐dimensional computational cost but considers essential three‐dimensional effects. A modified periodic boundary condition is introduced to deal with inlet and outlet boundaries with great ease and effectiveness. This model is first validated against analytical solutions and micromodel experiment. It is then used to study the spontaneous imbibition process in a homogeneous micromodel for varying viscosity ratios and contact angles. Depending on the viscosity ratio (λ) of wetting to nonwetting fluids, three different imbibition patterns are observed, namely unstable displacement (UD), stable displacement (SD), and crossover from UD to SD, which occur at λ≤0.1 , λ≥10 , and 0.1
An External Validation of Scoring Systems in Mortality Prediction in Veno-Venous Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. Veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VV ECMO) offers the last resort in the treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Various scoring systems have been established, yet external validation of these scoring systems in the Asian population remains scarce. We aim to identify factors associated with hospital mortality and to validate various scoring systems in the prediction of hospital mortality. A retrospective analysis of adults admitted to Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital intensive care unit who received VV ECMO from January 1, 2010 to June 30, 2019 was performed. Demographics, ventilation strategies, rescue therapies, and clinical outcomes were compared. The primary outcome was hospital mortality and secondary outcomes were intensive care unit (ICU) mortality, ICU, and hospital length of stay. There were 122 VV ECMO performed for ARDS, of which 78 survived and 44 died. VV ECMO performed for viral pneumonitis was significantly associated with better survival (55.1% vs. 25%, p = 0.001) compared with other causes. As for prediction scores, the PREdiction of Survival on ECMO Therapy-Score had the highest area under receiver operator curve of 0.733 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.643–0.823), whereas that of PRedicting dEath for SEvere ARDS on VV ECMO score was 0.662 (95% CI: 0.561–0.764), Respiratory Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Survival Prediction score was 0.657 (95% CI: 0.553–0.761), Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score was 0.652 (95% CI: 0.547–0.757), and VV ECMO mortality score was 0.637 (95% CI: 0.532-0.742). In our cohort, VV ECMO performed for viral pneumonitis was associated with a higher hospital survival. Prediction scores are helpful in our population and provide a useful reference to hospital mortality.
Accelerating Convolutional Neural Network Using Discrete Orthogonal Transforms

All experiments are implemented in Python, using the PyTorch and the Torch-DCT libraries under the Google Colab environment. The Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.00GHz and a Tesla V100-SXM2-16GB GPU were assignment to the Google Colab runtime when profiling the DOT models. It should be noted that the current stable version of the PyTorch library, version 1.8. 1, offers only the implementation of the FFT algorithm. Therefore, the implementations of the Hartley and Cosine transforms, listed in Table 1, are not implemented using the same optimizations (algorithm and code wise) adopted in the FFT. We benchmark the DOT methods using the LENET-5 network shown in Figure 10. The ReLU activation function is adopted a non-linear operation across the entire architecture. In this network, the convolutional operations have a kernel of size K = 5. The convolution is of type “valid”, i.e., padding is not applied to the input. Hence the output size M of each layer is smaller than its input size N, that is M=N−K+1. The optimizers used in our experiments are Adam, SGD, SGD with Momentum of 0.9, and RMSProp with α = 0.99. The StepLR scheduler is used with a step size of 20 epochs and a γ = 0.5. We train our model for 40 epochs using a mini-batch of size 128 and a learning rate of 0.001. Five datasets are used in order to benchmark the proposed DOT methods. Among them, we have the MNIST dataset and some variants of the MNIST dataset such as EMNIST, KMNIST and Fashion-MNIST. Additionally, a more complex dataset, CIFAR-10 is also used in our benchmark.
Anorectal Manometry on Children: A Moroccan Series and Literature Review

BACKGROUND: Anorectal manometry (ARM) is a test used to evaluate the rectum and anus functions. It also helps to diagnose several conditions such as fecal incontinence and constipation. This test is being increasingly performed on children of all ages. AIM: The aim of our study is to determine the benefit of ARM on children and to report our experience. METHODS: Over a period of 4 years, data and test results of 273 children were analyzed. RESULTS: Out of 273 patients (68.5% boys and 31.5% girls with a mean age of 9 years), 154 patients (51.6%) had fecal incontinence (Group 1), 75 children (27.5%) had chronic constipation (CC) (Group 2), and 37 children (13.6%) had both of them (Group 3). An awake manometry was performed on 248 children (91%); however, under sedation, the test allowed us the exclusion of Hirschsprung’s disease (HD) in 21 children (84%). Bad anal contraction was present in 25% of patients in group 1 and 21.6% of patients in group 3. The statistical analysis showed a significant difference in age (p = 0.022) and resting pressure (p = 0.050) between the three groups. Children with fecal incontinence had a higher rate of dyssynergy, 80.2% and 83.8%, in groups 1 and 3, respectively, compared to 60.4% in patients with CC (p = 0.852). CONCLUSION: ARM is the gold standard for terminal constipation and encopresis exploration on children. In our study, this test was efficient for the exclusion of HD in infants suffering from constipation, in the other hand, we found a high rate of dyssynergy on children with fecal incontinence (80%) and a biofeedback therapy was proposed in this case. Edited by: Ksenija Bogoeva-Kostovska Citation: Delsa H, Serraj I, Khalis M, Kabbaj N. Anorectal Manometry on Children: A Moroccan Series and Literature Review. Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2021 May 27; 9(B):337-343. https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2021.6058
The Hepatoprotection Provided by Taurine and Glycine against Antineoplastic Drugs Induced Liver Injury in an Ex Vivo Model of Normothermic Recirculating Isolated Perfused Rat Liver

Taurine (2-aminoethane sulfonic acid) is a non-protein amino acid found in high concentration in different tissues. Glycine (Amino acetic acid) is the simplest amino acid incorporated in the structure of proteins. Several investigations indicate the hepatoprotective properties of these amino acids. On the other hand, antineoplastic agents-induced serum transaminase elevation and liver injury is a clinical complication. The current investigation was designed to screen the possible hepatoprotective properties of taurine and glycine against antineoplastic drugs-induced hepatic injury in an ex vivo model of isolated perfused rat liver. Rat liver was perfused with different concentration (10 µM, 100 µM and 1000 µM) of antineoplastic drugs (Mitoxantrone, Cyclophosphamide, Cisplatin, 5‑Fluorouracil, Doxorubicin and Dacarbazine) via portal vein. Taurine and glycine were administered to drug-treated livers and liver perfusate samples were collected for biochemical measurements (ALT, LDH, AST, and K+). Markers of oxidative stress (reactive oxygen species formation, lipid peroxidation, total antioxidant capacity and glutathione) were also assessed in liver tissue. Antineoplastic drugs caused significant pathological changes in perfusate biochemistry. Furthermore, markers of oxidative stress were significantly elevated in drug‑treated livers. It was found that taurine (5 and 10 mM) and glycine (5 and 10 mM) administration significantly mitigated the biomarkers of liver injury and attenuated drug‑induced oxidative stress. Our data indicate that taurine and glycine supplementation might help as potential therapeutic options to encounter anticancer drugs-induced liver injury.
The modified control charts for monitoring the shape parameter of weighted power function distribution under classical estimator

Zaka et al provided a new distribution called the Weighted Power function distribution (WPFD), which has application in reliability engineering and survival analysis. They used different estimation methods to estimate the unknown parameters of WPFD and proved that modified maximum likelihood estimator (MMLE) is best to consider for the estimation of parameters. We have constructed the memoryless and memory‐based control charts based on the assumption that the distribution of the underlying process does not follow the normal distribution. In this paper, we provide modified control charts using MMLE of the shape parameter for WPFD. We develop control charts to keep the process in control when the distribution of errors of underlying process follows WPFD. We propose the modified memoryless control chart, that is, Shewhart control chart and modified memory‐based control chart, that is, Exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) and Hybrid exponentially weighted moving average (HEWMA) control charts. We have made the comparison of the proposed control charts using Monte Carlo simulation and the real‐life application for both and the memoryless control charts and memory‐based control charts. We see that HEWMA based on MMLE performs better as compared to other proposed control charts.
Die Rolle der Stimulationsart für den weiblichen Orgasmus: Psychometrische Eigenschaften der deutschsprachigen Version der Female Orgasm Scale (FOS) und der Clitoris Self-Stimulation Scale (CSSS)

Zusammenfassung Einleitung Ob Frauen Orgasmen erleben und welche subjektive Bedeutung diese haben, kann deutlich nach Stimulationsart variieren. Trotzdem wird Orgasmuserleben in Fragebögen häufig eindimensional erfasst, ohne auf die Stimulationsart einzugehen, was zu Verzerrungen der Antworten führen kann. Auch ob der Orgasmus eigenverantwortlich angestrebt wird, bleibt unbeachtet. Forschungsziele Das Ziel dieser Studie ist es, eine sprachlich adaptierte Version der Female Orgasm Scale (FOS) und der Clitoris Self-Stimulation Scale (CSSS) zu erstellen und eine psychometrische Überprüfung an einer deutschen Stichprobe vorzunehmen. Methoden Die Female Orgasm Scale (FOS) erfasst, wie regelmäßig Orgasmen durch verschiedene Stimulationsarten (vaginaler Geschlechtsverkehr mit und ohne zusätzliche Klitorisstimulation, Stimulation durch die Hand des Partners, Oralsex, Selbststimulation) erlebt werden, sowie die Zufriedenheit mit Anzahl und Qualität der Orgasmen. Die Clitoris Self-Stimulation Scale (CSSS) erfasst das Verhalten, den Affekt und die Einstellung bezüglich Klitorisselbststimulation, um beim Sex mit dem Partner einen Orgasmus zu erleben. Mittels einer Online-Umfrage, die 412 Frauen bearbeiteten, wurden die Instrumente deskriptiv und faktorenanalytisch überprüft. Ergebnisse Es ergaben sich überwiegend gute Testgütekriterien, die interne Konsistenz der FOS-D ergab α = . 77 und die der CSSS-D α = . 81. Für die FOS-D konnten zwei Faktoren extrahiert werden: 1. Orgasmuskonsistenz durch vaginale Penetration und Orgasmuszufriedenheit und 2. Orgasmuskonsistenz durch klitorale Stimulationsarten. Für die CSSS-D ergab sich nur ein Faktor. Schlussfolgerung Die Instrumente können die Diagnostik und Therapie von sexuellen Funktionsstörungen der Frau unterstützen, da sie ein differenziertes Bild des Orgasmuserlebens sowie des damit verbundenen Verhaltens bei partnerschaftlicher Sexualität liefern.
TCF7L2 Polymorphisms in Type 2 Diabetes, Insight from HRM and ARMS Techniques

Introduction: Diabetes is a biological problem of life in a new way in human societies, especially in developing countries. Environmental and genetic factors are mutually influential in the incidence and exacerbation of this disease. One of the genes is the transcription factor TCF7L2 that has been proven in many studies in different communities to play a role in diabetes and is located on chromosome 10. Two SNPs for this gene, rs12255372 and rs7903146, have been recorded on the NCBI site and have a direct and significant correlation with type 2 diabetes. In this study, the genotypic frequency of these two SNPs was studied using ARMS and HRM techniques. Materials: This study was performed on 100 patients with type 2 diabetes and 100 healthy individuals as non-diabetic controls. Diabetics were selected from patients referred to Ali Asghar Diabetes Clinic in Zahedan. The control group consisted of individuals who did not meet the criteria for diabetes or had no family history of diabetes in first- or second-degree relatives. DNA extraction was performed using the phenol-chloroform method and finally, PCR was performed for a specific primer. Results: ARMS results showed that the number of people with SNP rs7903146 ​​in diabetic patients is significantly higher than those in the control. However, the difference was not significant for rs12255372. HRM results were also highly correlated with ARMS and showed very precise allelic differentiation in the studied population for both positions. Conclusion: In general, since HRM is a relatively inexpensive technique and a large number of samples can be analyzed in a few hours, the results of this study can be used in the preparation of diagnostic kits based on this method in these two and other sites related to diabetes.
Advancing production of marine fish in the
 United States: Olive
 flounder,
 
 Paralichthys olivaceus
 
 , aquaculture

The potential for marine aquaculture development in the United States is significant and recent factors have highlighted the benefits of developing a shortened seafood supply chain to service domestic markets. Marine finfish in particular hold tremendous potential as technological advancements, improvements in production efficiencies, and market forces have aligned to create opportunities for growth within this sector of the aquaculture industry. Olive flounder, Paralichthys olivaceus , also commonly known as the Japanese flounder or hirame , is a candidate species for the U.S. aquaculture industry, which has a demonstrated track record of culture success and high market value. Although cultivation of the species is novel to the United States, olive flounder has been produced commercially for decades in other regions, notably Korea and Japan. With a number of favorable production characteristics, including a relatively short growout time compared with other flatfish species, an efficient food conversion ratio, and a well-established market presence, the species has been shown to be commercially viable. This study examines the opportunities for olive flounder to be developed in the United States, while also discussing the potential for land-based recirculating aquaculture systems culture of this species in coastal areas to provide increased resilience for working waterfront communities.