Natural Settings Research Articles

Deictic demonstrative variation in Jordanian Arabic: The role of visual prominence in encoding competing referents

This study aims to know the determinants of demonstrative selection in contexts where speakers of Jordanian Arabic (JA) use deictic demonstratives without aid from distinguishing descriptions or gestures to individuate a referent that exists with a similar entity in the same communicative situation. Data collection depended on a prolonged observation of JA use in natural settings. Our findings show that when multiple similar entities are in a status of competing referents in the same context, the speaker's selection of a demonstrative to individuate a specific entity is primarily determined by perceptions of the degree of visual prominence concerning that entity in relation to the similar entity. Visual prominence in our data involved the domains of more/less visibility, foreground/background, front side/back side, vertical/horizontal position, and more/less motion. Within each of these domains, ‘proximals’, were generally associated with the modes of access of high visibility, foreground, vertical position, and more motion; the opposite modes were associated with ‘distals’. As a cognitive consequence of the perceptions concerning the visual prominence of a referent in relation to these modes, entities that were encoded with ‘proximals’ can be considered as having high accessibility while those encoded with ‘distals’ can be considered as having low accessibility.

How small changes to one eye’s retinal image can transform the perceived shape of a very familiar object

Vision can provide useful cues about the geometric properties of an object, like its size, distance, pose, and shape. But how the brain merges these properties into a complete sensory representation of a three-dimensional object is poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated a visual illusion in which humans misperceive the shape of an object due to a small change in one eye's retinal image. We first show that this illusion affects percepts of a highly familiar object under completely natural viewing conditions. Specifically, people perceived their own rectangular mobile phone to have a trapezoidal shape. We then investigate the perceptual underpinnings of this illusion by asking people to report both the perceived shape and pose of controlled stimuli. Our results suggest that the shape illusion results from distorted cues to object pose. In addition to yielding insights into object perception, this work informs our understanding of how the brain combines information from multiple visual cues in natural settings. The shape illusion can occur when people wear everyday prescription spectacles; thus, these findings also provide insight into the cue combination challenges that some spectacle wearers experience on a regular basis.

Birth outcomes associated with a natural delivery approach in a perinatal center: A comparative retrospective study.

At our center, natural home-like delivery settings have been established in or near conventional labor wards, for the care of pregnant women who prefer little or no medical intervention during labor and birth. We compared obstetrical and neonatal outcomes of women in active spontaneous labor, between those who chose to deliver in a natural-delivery setup and those who chose a conventional setting. This retrospective study included low-risk women who delivered at term between March 1, 2020 and December 31, 2022, in a single tertiary university affiliated medical center. Birth outcomes were compared between 124 women who delivered by natural birth (the study group) and 244 who gave birth in a conventional setting (the control group). No cesarean deliveries were performed in the study group, compared to 18 (7.4%) of the control group, p = 0.004. Intrapartum fever, postpartum hemorrhage, and uterotonic administration were similar between the groups. For the study compared to the control group, breastfeeding was more common (71.3% vs. 12.3%, p < 0.001), analgesia administration within 48 h delivery was lower (4.1% vs. 10.7%, p = 0.033), and maternal and neonatal length of hospitalization were shorter. Of the women initially admitted to the natural-delivery room, 14 (11.5%) were transferred to a conventional-delivery room. Birth in a hospital natural-delivery setting was associated with increased likelihood of vaginal birth, increased immediate breastfeeding and breastfeeding at discharge, and lower postpartum pain.

Does Social Distancing Affect the Stress Reduction and Attention Restoration of College Students in Different Natural Settings?

The restorative benefits of the natural environment are crucial for human well-being and sustainable development. Although stress reduction and attention restoration through natural exposure have been quantified through physiological and psychological pathways, numerous studies have intentionally constructed idealized natural settings devoid of individuals to minimize interference. This deliberate approach has raised concerns about the accuracy of these restorative results, as real-world settings invariably involve other people. To address this issue, we designed and executed a randomized controlled experiment. By measuring physiological and psychological indicators and utilizing a two-way ANOVA and Tukey post-hoc comparison, we explored the restorative potential of natural settings within seven distinct social distances across five landscape types in virtual reality environments. The results revealed that beyond a social distance of 3.8 m, the presence of people had minimal impact on stress reduction, with attention restoration effects remaining consistently positive. Optimal physiological and psychological restoration is achieved when the social distance exceeded 20 m. Further exploration is warranted to elucidate the influence of landscape types on the restoration of natural environments. The findings provide valuable insights for the planning and design of restorative natural settings, supporting research endeavors aimed at improving human health and well-being and allowing for sustainable management.

From the lab to the classroom: Improving children's prospective memory in a natural setting.

Laboratory-based studies have shown that children's ability to remember intentions (i.e., prospective memory; PM) can be improved by asking them to imagine performing the PM task beforehand (i.e., episodic future thinking; EFT) or to predict their PM performance. Moreover, combining the two strategies resulted in an additional improvement in children's PM performance. However, the effectiveness of these encoding strategies on real-life PM tasks is still unknown. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of EFT instructions, performance predictions, and of their combination on children's PM in a natural setting, namely in the classroom. Twelve classes composed by a total of 121 children (53% females) aged between seven and 9 years participated to the study. As a PM task, children were asked by their teachers to deliver a letter to their parents and to bring it back to school the next day. Children were divided into four groups: control, prediction, EFT, and the EFT + prediction group. Parent reports on children's everyday prospective and retrospective memory failures were also collected. Results showed that encoding strategies were effective in enhancing children's PM performance. However, differences compared to previous laboratory-based findings emerged since predicting PM performance resulted to be most effective in enhancing real-life PM performance. Moreover, parent reports were related to children's PM performance. These novel findings highlight the importance of studying PM interventions in natural settings in order to increase their ecological validity and inform educational practices.

CSINet: Channel–Spatial Fusion Networks for Asymmetric Facial Expression Recognition

Occlusion or posture change of the face in natural scenes has typical asymmetry; however, an asymmetric face plays a key part in the lack of information available for facial expression recognition. To solve the problem of low accuracy of asymmetric facial expression recognition, this paper proposes a fusion of channel global features and a spatial local information expression recognition network called the “Channel–Spatial Integration Network” (CSINet). First, to extract the underlying detail information and deepen the network, the attention residual module with a redundant information filtering function is designed, and the backbone feature-extraction network is constituted by module stacking. Second, considering the loss of information in the local key area of face occlusion, the channel–spatial fusion structure is constructed, and the channel features and spatial features are combined to enhance the accuracy of occluded facial recognition. Finally, before the full connection layer, more local spatial information is embedded into the global channel information to capture the relationship between different channel–spatial targets, which improves the accuracy of feature expression. Experimental results on the natural scene facial expression data sets RAF-DB and FERPlus show that the recognition accuracies of the modeling approach proposed in this paper are 89.67% and 90.83%, which are 13.24% and 11.52% higher than that of the baseline network ResNet50, respectively. Compared with the latest facial expression recognition methods such as CVT, PACVT, etc., the method in this paper obtains better evaluation results of masked facial expression recognition, which provides certain theoretical and technical references for daily facial emotion analysis and human–computer interaction applications.

The marine sponge, Hymeniacidon sinapium, displays allorecognition of siblings during post-larval settling and metamorphosis to juveniles

Marine sponges, including the crumb of bread sponge, Hymeniacidon sinapium, display allorejection responses to contact with conspecifics in both experimental and natural settings. These responses have been used to infer immunocompetence in a variety of marine invertebrates. However, larvae and juveniles released from several marine sponge species fuse and form chimeras. Some of these chimeras persist, whereas others eventually break down, revealing a period of allogeneic non-responsiveness that varies depending on the species. Alternatively, for H. sinapium, most pairs of sibling post-larvae and juveniles that settle in contact initiate immediate allorecognition and show the same morphological response progression as the adults. This indicates that allorecognition and response occurs during early metamorphosis. Results from H. sinapium and other sponge species, in addition to annotations of sponge genomes, suggest that allorecognition and immunocompetence in sponges are mediated by distinct systems and may become functional at different times during or post metamorphosis for different species. Consequently, allorecognition may not be a good proxy for the onset of immunocompetence.

Cabbage Transplantation State Recognition Model Based on Modified YOLOv5-GFD

To enhance the transplantation effectiveness of vegetables and promptly formulate subsequent work strategies, it is imperative to study the recognition approach for transplanted seedlings. In the natural and complex environment, factors like background and sunlight often hinder accurate target recognition. To overcome these challenges, this study explores a lightweight yet efficient algorithm for recognizing cabbage transplantation states in natural settings. Initially, FasterNet is integrated as the backbone network in the YOLOv5s model, aiming to expedite convergence speed and bolster feature extraction capabilities. Secondly, the introduction of the GAM attention mechanism enhances the algorithm’s focus on cabbage seedlings. EIoU loss is incorporated to improve both network convergence speed and localization precision. Lastly, the model incorporates deformable convolution DCNV3, which further optimizes model parameters and attains a superior balance between accuracy and speed. Upon testing the refined YOLOv5s target detection algorithm, improvements were evident. When compared to the original model, the mean average precision (mAP) rose by 3.5 percentage points, recall increased by 1.7 percentage points, and detection speed witnessed an impressive boost of 52 FPS. This enhanced algorithm not only reduces model complexity but also elevates network performance. The method is expected to streamline transplantation quality measurements, minimize time and labor inputs, and elevate field transplantation quality surveys’ automation levels.

How to Hide a Clique?

AbstractIn the well known planted clique problem, a clique (or alternatively, an independent set) of size k is planted at random in an Erdos-Renyi random G(n, p) graph, and the goal is to design an algorithm that finds the maximum clique (or independent set) in the resulting graph. We introduce a variation on this problem, where instead of planting the clique at random, the clique is planted by an adversary who attempts to make it difficult to find the maximum clique in the resulting graph. We show that for the standard setting of the parameters of the problem, namely, a clique of size $$k = \sqrt{n}$$ k = n planted in a random $$G(n, \frac{1}{2})$$ G ( n , 1 2 ) graph, the known polynomial time algorithms can be extended (in a non-trivial way) to work also in the adversarial setting. In contrast, we show that for other natural settings of the parameters, such as planting an independent set of size $$k=\frac{n}{2}$$ k = n 2 in a G(n, p) graph with $$p = n^{-\frac{1}{2}}$$ p = n - 1 2 , there is no polynomial time algorithm that finds an independent set of size k, unless NP has randomized polynomial time algorithms.

Effects of increasing atmospheric CO2 on leaf water δ18O values are small and are attenuated in grasses and amplified in dicotyledonous herbs and legumes when transferred to cellulose δ18O values.

The oxygen isotope composition of cellulose (δ18O values) has been suggested to contain information on stomatal conductance (gs) responses to rising pCO2. The extent by which pCO2 affects leaf water and cellulose δ18O values (δ18OLW and δ18OC) and the isotope processes that determine pCO2 effects on δ18OLW and δ18OC are, however, unknown. We tested the effects of pCO2 on gs, δ18OLW and δ18OC in a glasshouse experiment, where six plant species were grown under pCO2 ranging from 200 to 500 ppm. Increasing pCO2 caused a decline in gs and an increase in δ18OLW, as expected. Importantly, the effects of pCO2 on gs and δ18OLW were small and pCO2 effects on δ18OLW were not directly transferred to δ18OC but were attenuated in grasses and amplified in dicotyledonous herbs and legumes. This is likely because of functional group-specific pCO2 effects on the model parameter pxpex. Our study highlights important uncertainties when using δ18OC as a proxy for gs. Specifically, pCO2-triggered gs effects on δ18OLW and δ18OC are possibly too small to be detected in natural settings and a pCO2 effect on pxpex may render the commonly assumed negative linkage between δ18OC and gs to be incorrect, potentially confounding δ18OC based gs reconstructions.

Implementation of Library Management in Increasing Interest in Reading at the University of Lampung

The background of this research is the declining interest in reading by students and lecturers in the UNILA library, which is still low as they are reluctant to read in the campus library. One of the causes of low interest in reading in the library is inadequate services, such as a lack of librarians to assist students in selecting the books, limited availability, and lack of a variety of books can also affect students’ reading interest and uncomfortable library conditions, such as seating. Ergonomics, poor lighting, and poor ventilation can make students feel uncomfortable in the library. This study uses a qualitative descriptive research method. Qualitative research is data collection in a natural setting to interpret phenomena that occur where the researcher is a key instrument, sampling of data sources is carried out purposively, collection techniques are triangulation (combined), data analysis is inductive or qualitative, and the results of qualitative research are more emphasize the meaning of generalizations. The subjects of this study used the library and students of UNILA. The data collection technique used in this research is using interview data collection techniques, observation, and documentation. The results of this study indicated that the implementation of library services in UNILA was according to library operational standards. The implementation of library services carried out to increase students’ reading interest includes using the Elip application, digitizing books into e-books, interesting book titles to read, and desk arrangements that must be tidy to encourage reading interest. Despite of the shortage in facilities and amenities, the implementation of library management is still being carried out properly with accomplished policies and procedures. Obstacles faced by the head and library staff in library services in increasing student interest in reading includes less of facilities available and lack of fiction reading books. As well as the limited staff of the existing library.&#x0D; Keywords: reading interests, library services

Separating insider and informed behavior: Evidence from a natural setting

AbstractPrevious literature has established the need to separate insider from expert trading in both financial and betting markets. This type of separation proves difficult to achieve because experts and insiders co‐exist in most market settings. Utilizing novel betting markets in which expert skill bettors are unable to use their expert knowledge, this study uncouples insider from expert betting, and allows more direct measurement of insider trading than in previous empirical tests. Evidence is presented in favor of some predictions from the highly cited Shin model of insider trading. Price setters charge an extra premium in markets with high proportions of insiders when compared to equivalent markets. The insiders accurately predict event outcomes, and their presence exacerbates a well known bias in betting market prices whereby returns on betting favorites is higher than for bets on longshots.

Do Sitcom Conversations Fully Depict Those in Natural Settings: A Corpus-Based Lexical Analysis

An increasing number of studies in pragmatics, second language acquisition, and related fields have opted to use sitcom conversations as a substitute for natural conversations in their analyses. However, few studies have critically examined the validity of this substitution. Taking this into consideration, the present study aims to examine the lexical similarities and differences between sitcom and natural conversations by utilizing the Friends Corpus and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English as samples under a synthesized analytic framework of six lexical categories that have been frequently examined in previous research. The findings indicate that there are significant differences between sitcom and natural conversations at the lexical level, particularly in terms of word lengths, keywords, and the use of discourse markers, personal pronouns, vocatives, and religious words. While sitcom conversations tend to be more concise, interactive, evaluative, and involving, natural conversations provide more explanations for their speech acts and refer to their parties who are not present in the conversations. Additionally, sitcom conversations use more intensifiers and vocatives while using fewer tentative modals, expletives, and religious words. Based on these results, it can be concluded that sitcom conversations do not fully depict the conversations in sitcoms, and thus substituting natural conversations with those in sitcoms should be approached with caution in language teaching and research. This study provides insight into the differences in lexical patterns between two types of conversations, and highlights the importance of using natural conversations as a basis for language teaching and research.

Automatic facial expression recognition under partial occlusion based on motion reconstruction using a denoising autoencoder

Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) plays a valuable role in various fields, including health, road safety, and marketing, where providing feedback on the user’s condition is crucial. While significant progress has been made in controlled environments (such as frontal, unconcluded, and well-lit conditions), recognizing facial expressions in unconstrained environments (natural settings) remains challenging. The presence of occlusions poses a particular difficulty as they obscure parts of the facial information captured in the image. To address this issue, researchers have proposed different solutions, broadly categorized into two approaches: those focusing on visible regions of the face and those attempting to reconstruct hidden parts. Currently, most solutions rely on texture or geometry-based methods, with only a few utilizing motion-based approaches. However, incorporating motion appears to be particularly promising in adapting to occlusions due to its unique characteristics, such as close-range propagation and local coherence. In this paper, our focus lies on leveraging motion to overcome the challenges posed by occlusions in FER tasks.

Kebijakan Redesain Sistem Perencanaan Dan Penganggaran: Implementasi Pada Pusat Pelaporan Dan Analisis Transaksi Keuangan

Government budgeting system reform policies or in Indonesia call “Redesain Sistem Perencanaan dan Penganggaran” (RSPP) is a system initiated by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Development Planning that is effective for all ministries and institutions in 2021. RSPP aims to be a real implementation of the money follow program policy and strengthen the application of performance-based budgeting. This research aims to analyse the implementation of RSPP, along with its constraints and impacts. This research used a qualitative research method using a case study approach by interviewing 4 informants. This research was conducted at one of the state institutions, namely the Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (INTRAC). Data collection is carried out in a natural setting, primary data sources, and data collection techniques are more on direct observation, and interviews. From the analysis conducted by researchers, the implementation of INTRAC budgeting in 2023, which was carried out in 2022, is in accordance with the RSPP based on the Joint Circular Letter of the Minister of Finance and the Ministry of National Development Planning. This has an impact on budget documents that are easier to understand, and more visible activities and outputs produced by INTRAC. RSPP makes it easier for leaders to carry out monitoring, evaluation and increase effectiveness and efficiency in government budgeting.

Disentangling direct vs indirect effects of microbiome manipulations in a habitat-forming marine holobiont

Host-associated microbiota are critical for eukaryotic host functioning, to the extent that hosts and their associated microbial communities are often considered “holobionts”. Most studies of holobionts have focused on descriptive approaches or have used model systems, usually in the laboratory, to understand host-microbiome interactions. To advance our understanding of host-microbiota interactions and their wider ecological impacts, we need experimental frameworks that can explore causation in non-model hosts, which often have highly diverse microbiota, and in their natural ecological setting (i.e. in the field). We used a dominant habitat-forming seaweed, Hormosira banksii, to explore these issues and to experimentally test host-microbiota interactions in a non-model holobiont. The experimental protocols were aimed at trying to disentangle microbially mediated effects on hosts from direct effects on hosts associated with the methods employed to manipulate host-microbiota. This was done by disrupting the microbiome, either through removal/disruption using a combination of antimicrobial treatments, or additions of specific taxa via inoculations, or a combination of thew two. The experiments were done in mesocosms and in the field. Three different antibiotic treatments were used to disrupt seaweed-associated microbiota to test whether disturbances of microbiota, particularly bacteria, would negatively affect host performance. Responses of bacteria to these disturbances were complex and differed substantially among treatments, with some antibacterial treatments having little discernible effect. However, the temporal sequence of responses antibiotic treatments, changes in bacterial diversity and subsequent decreases in host performance, strongly suggested an effect of the microbiota on host performance in some treatments, as opposed to direct effects of the antibiotics. To further test these effects, we used 16S-rRNA-gene sequencing to identify bacterial taxa that were either correlated, or uncorrelated, with poor host performance following antibiotic treatment. These were then isolated and used in inoculation experiments, independently or in combination with the previously used antibiotic treatments. Negative effects on host performance were strongest where specific microbial antimicrobials treatments were combined with inoculations of strains that were correlated with poor host performance. For these treatments, negative host effects persisted the entire experimental period (12 days), even though treatments were only applied at the beginning of the experiment. Host performance recovered in all other treatments. These experiments provide a framework for exploring causation and disentangling microbially mediated vs. direct effects on hosts for ecologically important, non-model holobionts in the field. This should allow for better predictions of how these systems will respond to, and potentially mitigate, environmental disturbances in their natural context.

Experiencing Exclusion among Iranian-Canadian Muslim Women

Summary This case study includes three narratives of Iranian-Canadian Muslim women who describe their experience of visiting natural spaces in Canada. They wear Islamic hijabs and follow Islamic rules, which may cause them to experience natural spaces differently compared to other Canadians. These narratives resulted from a series of interviews I conducted in which I aimed to understand how Iranian Canadians used Canada’s natural environment and the opportunities or challenges they face. Their stories revealed their joy in nature-based leisure and recreation while also unfolding their feelings of social exclusion in some natural settings where dogs were off-leash. In dogs’ off-leash areas, participants encountered serious constraints and exclusion or felt in need of protection from spouses. Information © CAB International 2024

Domain Adaptation Curriculum Learning for Scene Text Detection in Inclement Weather Conditions

AbstractScene text detection has been widely studied on haze‐free images with reliable ground truth annotation. However, detecting scene text in inclement weather conditions remains a major challenge due to the severe domain distribution mismatch problem. This paper introduces a domain adaptation curriculum learning method to address this problem. The scene text detector is self‐trained in an easy‐to‐hard manner using the pseudo‐labels predicted from foggy images. Thus, our method reduces the pseudo‐labeling noise level. Then, a feature alignment module is introduced to help the network learn domain‐invariant features by training a domain classifier. Experimental results show that our method improved significantly on both synthetic foggy data sets and natural foggy data sets, outperforming many state‐of‐the‐art scene text detectors. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

ARCHIVES GOVERNANCE IN SMP NEGERI 6 ONE ROOF DULUPI BOALEMO GORONTALO PROVINCE

The purpose of the study is to analyze and describe the management of school archives. Research uses a qualitative approach, because the qualitative approach utilizes direct data sources in a natural context (natural setting) to reveal various aspects of observed phenomena. The type of research applied is descriptive research that aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of the situation and conditions of a particular phenomenon.&#x0D; The results showed that archive management at SMP Negeri 6 Satu Atap Dulupi still has many obstacles. From the policy specs, there are still limited human resources specifically in the field of archives, lack of understanding of records management among teachers, and poorly structured organization of archives causing records management to be ineffective. Furthermore, looking at the determinants of records management, the results of the study show that financial management is not optimal, limitations of digital management, limitations of physical storage, and lack of a structured management system. Increased understanding, utilization of technology, the role of stakeholders, more focused supervision, and increased structuring in managing archives are needed to increase their efficiency and effectiveness.

Speciation controls on Ni adsorption to birnessite and organo-birnessite

Nickel (Ni) is an essential micronutrient for phytoplankton. Its importance to both the modern and ancient Earth system has encouraged development of Ni and its isotopes as biogeochemical tracers. To interpret these signatures however, understanding of how Ni and its isotopes are recorded in marine archives is required. Here we simulate different inorganic and organic Ni species in seawater and investigate their adsorption behaviours to variably crystalline phyllomanganates and organo-mineral phyllomanganate. We conduct pH adsorption edge experiments to determine the binding affinity of the different Ni species to the minerals and then perform desorption experiments to operationally define Ni bonding strength. We also use thermodynamic surface complexation modelling to constrain Ni adsorption mechanisms. From the adsorption edges and stability constants generated from our modelling, the binding affinity increases in the order of Ni-formate+ (aq) < NiCl+ (aq) < Ni2+ (aq). From the desorption experiments, desorption at pH 8 is non quantitative and increases in the opposite order of Ni-formate+ (aq) > NiCl+ (aq) ∼ Ni2+ (aq). For the organo-mineral however, Ni desorption at pH 8 is non quantitative and similar for all three experiments, and is significantly higher compared to the variably crystalline phyllomanganates. Although both our adsorption and desorption experiments were performed over 48 h, it is possible that desorption is somewhat slower than adsorption such that a longer desorption period may result in further Ni loss to solution and thus greater adsorption reversibility. Taken together however, the Ni-formate+ (aq) and Ni organo-birnessite desorption experiments suggest that Ni bonding strength is decreased by the presence of organic carbon, compared to NiCl+ (aq) and Ni2+ (aq). Because bonding strength governs equilibrium stable isotope fractionation, we use our experimental findings to suggest how Ni speciation in seawater might influence Ni isotope behaviour during adsorption to phyllomanganate. We find that our suggestions are consistent with isotopic measurements from natural sediments. Although the balance of Ni adsorption versus incorporation during uptake to phyllomanganates may play a greater part in explaining the variation in the Ni isotope composition in Mn-rich sediments, Ni speciation and the presence of organics might increase the range of δ60Ni values measured in natural settings.