nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
User centered design in rural South Africa: How well does current best practice apply for this setting?
Year: 2012

Designing ICT systems in the developing world is perceived to be a challenge. But is this really a challenge if we use state of the art development methods? Will the fact that most standards and heuristics are made in the western world render them useless as tools of making modern computer software for the underdeveloped world? In this thesis I will analyze the findings of a software development project I did for my employer, National Center for Fetal Medicine (NCFM) at St. Olav's Hospital in Trondheim, Norway. In this project we used a user centered development process as defined in ISO 9142 210 to make and test the prototype of an ultrasound help system. We tested the system using two different user groups: midwives in KwaZulu Natal participating in an ultrasound teaching and training program held by NCFM and midwives in Trondheim, Norway, receiving a post qualification course in ultrasound diagnostics also held by NCFM at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. I will analyze the test results and then do an evaluation of the methods used both the user centered design process and the usability methods to see if the methods have worked in my project.
Nasopharyngeal wash in preventing and treating upper respiratory tract infections: Could it prevent COVID 19?
Venue: Lung India official organ of Indian Chest Society
Year: 2020

Rapid transmission of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has led to the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) pandemic. The current emphasis is on preventive strategies such as social distancing, face mask, and hand washing. The technique of nasopharyngeal wash to prevent the virus from inhabiting and replicating in the nasal and pharyngeal mucosa has been suggested to be useful in reducing symptoms, transmission, and viral shedding in cases of viral acute respiratory tract infections. In rapid systematic review, we found studies showing some improvement in prevention and treatment of upper respiratory tract infections. We postulate that hypertonic saline gargles and nasal wash may be useful in prevention and for care of patients with COVID 19. The present evidence emphasizes the need of randomized controlled trials to evaluate the role and mechanism of nasopharyngeal wash in COVID 19.
Energy use in the global food system
Year: 2020

The global food system is a major energy user and a relevant contributor to climate change. To date, the literature on the energy profile of food systems addresses individual countries and/or food products, and therefore a comparable assessment across regions is still missing. This paper uses a global multi regional environmentally extended input output database in combination with newly constructed net energy use accounts to provide a production and consumption based stock take of energy use in the food system across different world regions for the period 2000 2015. Overall, the ratio between energy use in the food system and the economy is slowly decreasing. Likewise, the absolute values point toward a relative decoupling between energy use and food production, as well as to relevant differences in energy types, users, and consumption patterns across world regions. The use of (inefficient) traditional biomass for cooking substantially reduces the expected gap between per capita figures in high and low income countries. The variety of energy profiles and the higher exposure to energy security issues compared to the total economy in some regions suggests that interventions in the system should consider the geographical context. Reducing energy use and decarbonizing the supply chains of food products will require a combination of technological measures and behavioral changes in consumption patterns. Interventions should consider the effects beyond the direct effects on energy use, because changing production and consumption patterns in the food system can lead to positive spillovers in the social and environmental dimensions outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Global emergence of nurse practitioner/advanced practice nursing roles.
Venue: Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners
Year: 2018

There is growing recognition worldwide that advanced nursing practice (ANP) in diverse clinical settings should be developed, acknowledged, and legitimized. Based on membership in the International Council of Nurses (ICN) Nurse Practitioner (NP)/Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) Network, over 90 countries indicate an interest in ANP; however, this does not represent an active presence of these roles. Circumstances that influence a willingness to explore ANP as an option for provision of health care services include physician shortages, health care reform, increased demand for highly specialized nurses, greater emphasis on primary care, expanded home based care, and a desire to enhance the professional status of nurses (Buchan, O'May, Dussault, 2013; Delamaire LaFortune, 2010; Schober, 2016) The predicted global deficit of 12.9 million physicians, nurses, and midwives by 2035 has accelerated a renewed examination of skill mix including options for introducing new types of health care professionals such as APNs (World Health Organization [WHO] 2013) When defining and redefining roles for health care professionals, enthusiasm and motivation to support a climate of advocacy for change are not enough. The evolving international dynamics necessitates clarity on who the APN is and the place of advanced nursing roles within the health care sector; however, diversity reigns as different countries and regions select a variety of titles, definitions, and scopes of practice when attempting to describe this new nursing discipline. Internationally, the terms APN, ANP and NP are often used interchangeably, contributing to confusion and lack of clarity in role definition. While recognizing that "NP" is the most prevalent advanced nursing role in the United States, for the purpose of this article, ANP is used as a comprehensive term referring to the discipline or field of advanced clinical nursing. Advanced practice nurse refers to the nurse practicing in an advanced clinical capacity (Schober, 2016)
Application of the sustainable logistics plan in the public administration
Year: 2018

The Public Administration, when it consumes the natural resources in a conscious way, contributes to diminishing the negative repercussions of its activities on the environment. It is important to highlight the relevance of sustainable decisions of public managers, contributing to the achievement of positive results for the planet and the quality of life of people in the next fifteen years, supported by Agenda 2030. It is the primary objective of this study, of the constitutional principle of sustainable development foreseen in Article 225, Brazilian Federal Constitution and how it has been applied in the socio environmental management of the Judicial Branch of the State of Rio de Janeiro, consistent with the assumptions of Agenda 2030, evaluating the main initiatives underway regarding the incorporation of the Goals of Sustainable Development (SDG) To this end, the stages of implementation of the Sustainable Logistics Plan (PLS) of the Rio de Janeiro State Court of Justice (TJERJ) are presented, based on exploratory and documentary research, in search for theoretical and legal support. The importance of establishing monitoring and evaluation processes was also verified, guiding the public manager in the construction of a new institutional culture in public bodies.
Transformational Leadership for Parental Involvement: How Teachers Perceive the School Leadership Practices to Promote Parental Involvement in Children's Education
Venue: Leadership and Policy in Schools
Year: 2019

Teachers are the key agents in the promotion of parental involvement in education. In this study, we examined the concept of transformational leadership for parental involvement (TLPI) The Transformational Leadership for Parental Involvement Questionnaire (TLPIQ) was developed to assess teachers' perceptions of support from school leaders in inviting parents to be involved in their children's education. Participants were 90 primary school teachers in 18 schools in urban and rural areas of Java, Indonesia. Results showed that teachers' perceptions of transformational leadership was positively associated with their invitational behaviors toward parents. This study points to the supporting role school leaders can play in the context of parental involvement.
The effects of consuming a high protein diet (4.4 g/kg/d) on body composition in resistance trained individuals
Venue: Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition
Year: 2014

BackgroundThe consumption of dietary protein is important for resistance trained individuals. It has been posited that intakes of 1.4 to 2.0 g/kg/day are needed for physically active individuals. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to determine the effects of a very high protein diet (4.4 g/kg/d) on body composition in resistance trained men and women.MethodsThirty healthy resistance trained individuals participated in this study (mean SD; age: 24.1 5.6 yr; height: 171.4 8.8 cm; weight: 73.3 11.5 kg) Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following groups: Control (CON) or high protein (HP) The CON group was instructed to maintain the same training and dietary habits over the course of the 8 week study. The HP group was instructed to consume 4.4 grams of protein per kg body weight daily. They were also instructed to maintain the same training and dietary habits (e.g. maintain the same fat and carbohydrate intake) Body composition (Bod Pod(r) training volume (i.e. volume load) and food intake were determined at baseline and over the 8 week treatment period.ResultsThe HP group consumed significantly more protein and calories pre vs post (p 0.05) Furthermore, the HP group consumed significantly more protein and calories than the CON (p 0.05) The HP group consumed on average 307 69 grams of protein compared to 138 42 in the CON. When expressed per unit body weight, the HP group consumed 4.4 0.8 g/kg/d of protein versus 1.8 0.4 g/kg/d in the CON. There were no changes in training volume for either group. Moreover, there were no significant changes over time or between groups for body weight, fat mass, fat free mass, or percent body fat.ConclusionsConsuming 5.5 times the recommended daily allowance of protein has no effect on body composition in resistance trained individuals who otherwise maintain the same training regimen. This is the first interventional study to demonstrate that consuming a hypercaloric high protein diet does not result in an increase in body fat.
Motion robust rain detection and removal from videos
Venue: 2012 IEEE 14th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)
Year: 2012

Weather such as rain and snow cause difficulties in processing the videos captured. Since the appearance of rain drops can affect the performance of human tracking and reduce the efficiency of video compression, detection and removal of rain is a challenging problem in outdoor surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for rain detection, which is based on joint spatial and wavelet domain features. This approach is robust to the videos with moving objects in the rain. Experimental results demonstrated its better performance in comparison with the existing approaches in the subjective quality.
Detecting adversarial examples via prediction difference for deep neural networks
Venue: Inf. Sci.
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks (DNNs) perform effectively in many computer vision tasks. However, DNNs are found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples which are generated by adding imperceptible perturbations to original images. To address this problem, we propose a novel defense method, transferability prediction difference (TPD) to drastically improve the adversarial robustness of DNNs with small sacrificing verified accuracy. We find out that the adversarial examples have lager prediction difference for various DNN models due to their various complicated decision boundaries, which can be used to identify the adversarial examples by converging decision boundaries to a prediction difference threshold. We adopt the K means clustering algorithm on benign data to determine transferability prediction difference threshold, by which we can detect adversarial examples accurately and efficiently. Furthermore, TPD method neither modifies the target model nor needs to take knowledge of adversarial attacks. We perform four state of the art adversarial attacks (FGSM, BIM, JSMA and C W) to evaluate TPD models trained on MNIST and CIFAR 10 and the average detection accuracy is 96.74% and 86.61% The results show that TPD model has high detection ratio on the demonstrably advanced white box adversarial examples while keeping low false positive rate on benign examples.
"What a stay at home order means for migrant dairy workers"
Venue: Agriculture and human values
Year: 2020

Like farms across the United States, Vermont's farms have been deemed "essential businesses" as the COVID19 pandemic ravages the nation's health and economy. By extension, those working on these farms including the 1000 1200 Latinx immigrant farmworkers laboring in Vermont's dairy economy are classified as "essential workers." The cruel irony of immigrant farmworkers being seen as essential while simultaneously facing further repression and exploitation is perhaps most blatant in Trump's recent proposition (crafted by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Agriculture Secretary Perdue) to lower the pay for an estimated 250,000 guest workers in the food system as a supposed solution to the economic consequences of the pandemic. Indeed, as many labor advocates have postulated, perhaps a better classifier for these essential workers in the food systems during these harrowing times is "sacrificial." In my 2019 book, Life on the Other Border, I described the forces political, economic, and social that have pushed Vermont's farmworkers deep into the state's shadow economy:
Usability Testing of MOOC: Identifying User Interface Problems
Venue: ICEIS
Year: 2019

In the modern world, more and more information systems are actively used in the educational process. Examples of such systems are platforms for hosting remote MOOC (massive online open course) However, multiple MOOCs are perceived differently by users and have various levels of completion. It was proved that the existing problems of such systems are related to the usability of their user interface. A number of techniques are used to investigate user satisfaction with the interface. Most of them evaluate, first of all, the user satisfaction index after the course completion or at the stage of prototype creation and testing. The authors of the article carried out a research of existing approaches and proposed their own methodology for the evaluation of user satisfaction with the interface design on the basis of questionnaires UMUX Lite, SUS, Testbirds Company approach and the ISO standards. The study allowed identifying gaps in the design of each of the analyzed platforms and its perception by users.
The Association of Major Depressive Disorder with Activation of NLRP3 Inflammasome, Lipid Peroxidation, and Total Antioxidant Capacity
Venue: Journal of Molecular Neuroscience
Year: 2019

Increasing number of studies indicates that chronic inflammation and oxidative stress play an essential role in pathophysiology and some symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD) In the present study, the inflammasome activity and oxidative stress status in untreated and antidepressant treated MDD patients were compared to the healthy group. Blood samples were taken from 20 MDD patients receiving treatment, 20 first episode MDD patients not receiving treatment, and 20 healthy controls. The expression level of NLRP3 and caspase 1 was measured by real time PCR and the serum TAC and MDA were examined in the patients and the control groups. The results showed that the mRNA level of NLRP3 and caspase 1 genes was significantly elevated in MDD groups compared with that in the healthy volunteers P 0.005) The expression level of NLRP3 and caspase 1 has slightly decreased in the treated group compared with that in the untreated one, but it was not a meaningful decrease. Moreover, the serum MDA was significantly higher and TAC statistically was lower in untreated MDD patients compared with those in the healthy control group P 0.001, P 0.001) It can be concluded that NLRP3 inflammasome is upregulated in MDD patients. Statistically significant reduction in the level of TAC along with increased lipid peroxidation was detectable in MDD patient's plasma. In contrast, there was no significant difference between the treated and non treated groups in terms of oxidative stress P 0.6, P 0.1) Our results suggested that inflammasome signaling pathway is a therapeutic potential for MDD.
The Effects of Natural and Anthropogenic Microparticles on Individual Fitness in Daphnia magna
Venue: PloS one
Year: 2016

Concerns are being raised that microplastic pollution can have detrimental effects on the feeding of aquatic invertebrates, including zooplankton. Both small plastic fragments (microplastics, MPs) produced by degradation of larger plastic waste (secondary MPs; SMPs) and microscopic plastic spheres used in cosmetic products and industry (primary MPs; PMPs) are ubiquitously present in the environment. However, despite the fact that most environmental MPs consist of weathered plastic debris with irregular shape and broad size distribution, experimental studies of organism responses to MP exposure have largely used uniformly sized spherical PMPs. Therefore, effects observed for PMPs in such experiments may not be representative for MP effects in situ. Moreover, invertebrate filter feeders are generally well adapted to the presence of refractory material in seston, which questions the potential of MPs at environmentally relevant concentrations to measurably affect digestion in these organisms. Here, we compared responses to MPs (PMPs and SMPs) and naturally occurring particles (kaolin clay) using the cladoceran Daphnia magna as a model organism. We manipulated food levels (0.4 and 9 mg C mL 1) and MP or kaolin contribution to the feeding suspension <1 to 74% and evaluated effects of MPs and kaolin on food uptake, growth, reproductive capacity of the daphnids, and maternal effects on offspring survival and feeding. Exposure to SMPs caused elevated mortality, increased inter brood period and decreased reproduction albeit only at high MP levels in the feeding suspension (74% by particle count) No such effects were observed in either PMP or kaolin treatments. In daphnids exposed to any particle type at the low algal concentration, individual growth decreased by ~15% By contrast, positive growth response to all particle types was observed at the high algal concentration with 17% 54% and 40% increase for kaolin, PMP and SMP, respectively. When test particles comprised 22% in the feeding suspension, both MP types decreased food intake by 30% while kaolin had no effect. Moreover, SMPs were found to homoaggregate in a concentration dependent manner, which resulted in a 77% decrease of the ingested SMPs compared to PMPs. To better understand MP processing in the gut, gut passage time (GPT) and evacuation rate of MPs were also assayed. SMPs and PMPs differed in their effects on daphnids; moreover, the particle effects were dependent on the MP: algae ratio in the suspension. When the MP contribution to the particle abundance in the medium changed from 1 to 4% GPT for daphnids exposed to SMPs increased 2 fold. Our results suggest that MPs and, in particular, SMPs, have a greater capacity to negatively affect feeding in D. magna compared to naturally occurring mineral particles of similar size. Moreover, grazer responses observed in experiments with PMPs cannot be extrapolated to the field where SMPs dominate, because of the greater effects caused by the latter.
Pharmacokinetics of Three Neonicotinoid Insecticides upon Contact Exposure in the Western Honey Bee, Apis mellifera.
Venue: Chemical research in toxicology
Year: 2019

Neonicotinoid insecticides differ in their acute contact toxicity to honey bees. We investigated the uptake, metabolic fate, and excretion of imidacloprid and two much less toxic chemotypes, thiacloprid and acetamiprid, upon contact exposure in honey bees because ADME data for this mode of entry are lacking. Pharmacokinetic parameters were analyzed by tracking a 14C label and by HPLC coupled to ESI MS. Imidacloprid penetrates the honey bee cuticle much faster and more readily compared to thiacloprid and acetamiprid, thus revealing a pharmacokinetic component, i.e. faster penetration and higher steady state internal body concentrations, contributing to its higher acute contact toxicity.
Recall and Learn: Fine tuning Deep Pretrained Language Models with Less Forgetting
Venue: EMNLP
Year: 2020

Deep pretrained language models have achieved great success in the way of pretraining first and then fine tuning. But such a sequential transfer learning paradigm often confronts the catastrophic forgetting problem and leads to sub optimal performance. To fine tune with less forgetting, we propose a recall and learn mechanism, which adopts the idea of multi task learning and jointly learns pretraining tasks and downstream tasks. Specifically, we propose a Pretraining Simulation mechanism to recall the knowledge from pretraining tasks without data, and an  Shifting mechanism to focus the learning on downstream tasks gradually. Experiments show that our method achieves state of the art performance on the GLUE benchmark. Our method also enables BERT base to achieve better performance than directly fine tuning of BERT large. Further, we provide the open source RecAdam optimizer, which integrates the proposed mechanisms into Adam optimizer, to facility the NLP community.
Gold nanoparticle decorated single walled carbon nanotube nanocomposite with synergistic peroxidase like activity for D alanine detection
Year: 2015

In this report, a gold nanoparticle decorated single walled carbon nanotube (SWCNTs) nanocomposite was shown to possess synergistic intrinsic peroxidase like activity and enhanced affinity towards H2O2 oxidation. The gold nanoparticle decorated SWCNTs nanocomposite was characterized by high catalytic activity, enhanced stability from the gold nanoparticles and improved dispersion from the SWCNTs. Subsequently, this nanocomposite was proved to be a novel peroxidase mimetic with great potential to catalyze the oxidation of 3,3',5,5' tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) in the presence of H2O2 to yield a blue colored product. As a proof of concept, the gold nanoparticle decorated SWCNTs composite was used as a robust nanoprobe for the detection of D alanine with improved analytical characteristics. Taking into account the valuable intrinsic peroxidase activity of the nanohybrid, the present work may find widespread applications in the field of sensors and biosensors for diverse applications.