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Do deeper levels of processing produce equivalent priming effects at all stages of task performance? In Experiment 1, we varied the level of processing factorially across two task stages--target selection and response selection. Each stage required perceptual (e.g., color) or conceptual (e.g., friendliness) processing of stimulus items (i.e., animal names). Negative priming was substantially greater when deeper processing was required at the target selection stage, but it was unaffected by the level of processing at the response selection stage. In contrast, positive priming was greater when deeper processing was required at the response selection stage, but it was unaffected by processing at the target selection stage. In Experiment 2, we generalized this finding using a task in which numeric targets were selected on the basis of their parity. As in Experiment 1, the deeper level of processing at the target selection stage produced a larger negative priming effect. These results illuminate the role of target selection demands in modulating the strength of negative priming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image steganalysis, detecting hidden data in digital images, is essential for enhancing digital security. Traditional steganalysis methods typically rely on large, pre-labeled image datasets, which are difficult and costly to compile. To address this, this paper introduces an innovative approach that combines active learning and off-policy Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to improve image steganalysis with minimal labeled data. Active learning allows the model to intelligently choose which unlabeled images should be annotated, thus reducing the amount of labeled data needed for effective training. Traditional active learning strategies often use static selection methods that restrict flexibility and do not adjust well to dynamic environments. To overcome this, our method incorporates off-policy DRL for strategic data selection. The off-policy in DRL can increase sample efficiency and significantly enhance learning outcomes. We also use the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to fine-tune the hyperparameters of the model, reducing its sensitivity to different settings and ensuring more stable results. Our testing on the extensive BossBase 1.01 and BOWS-2 datasets demonstrates the robust ability of the approach to distinguish between unaltered and steganographic images, achieving an average F-measure of 93.152% on BossBase 1.01 and 91.834% on the BOWS-2 dataset. In summary, this research enhances digital security by employing advanced image steganalysis to detect hidden data, significantly improving detection accuracy with minimal labeled data., Competing Interests: Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2025. The Author(s).)

Lung cancer is the second foremost cause of cancer due to which millions of deaths occur worldwide. Developing automated tools is still a challenging task to improve the prediction. This study is specifically conducted for detailed posterior probabilities analysis to unfold the network associations among the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) features. We then ranked the features based on t-test. The Cluster Prominence is selected as target node. The association and arc analysis were determined based on mutual information. The occurrence and reliability of selected cluster states were computed. The Cluster Prominence at state ≤330.85 yielded ROC index of 100%, relative Gini index of 99.98%, and relative Gini index of 100%. The proposed method further unfolds the dynamics and to detailed analysis of computed features based on GLCM features for better understanding of the hidden dynamics for proper diagnosis and prognosis of lung cancer., Competing Interests: The author(s) declares that they do not have any conflict of interest., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

Oil palm is a key agricultural resource in Malaysia. However, palm disease, most prominently basal stem rot caused at least RM 255 million of annual economic loss. Basal stem rot is caused by a fungus known as Ganoderma boninense . An infected tree shows few symptoms during early stage of infection, while potentially suffers an 80% lifetime yield loss and the tree may be dead within 2 years. Early detection of basal stem rot is crucial since disease control efforts can be done. Laboratory BSR detection methods are effective, but the methods have accuracy, biosafety, and cost concerns. This review article consists of scientific articles related to the oil palm tree disease, basal stem rot, Ganoderma Boninense , remote sensors and deep learning that are listed in the Web of Science since year 2012. About 110 scientific articles were found that is related to the index terms mentioned and 60 research articles were found to be related to the objective of this research thus included in this review article. From the review, it was found that the potential use of deep learning methods were rarely explored. Some research showed unsatisfactory results due to limitations on dataset. However, based on studies related to other plant diseases, deep learning in combination with data augmentation techniques showed great potentials, showing remarkable detection accuracy. Therefore, the feasibility of analyzing oil palm remote sensor data using deep learning models together with data augmentation techniques should be studied. On a commercial scale, deep learning used together with remote sensors and unmanned aerial vehicle technologies showed great potential in the detection of basal stem rot disease., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Yan Chai Hum is a PeerJ Academic Editor. Xin Ye is employed by Y. L. Z. Eaccessy Information Technology Co., Ltd. and declare no competing interest., (© 2023 Haw et al.)

In this review, current studies on hospital readmission due to infection of COVID-19 were discussed, compared, and further evaluated in order to understand the current trends and progress in mitigation of hospital readmissions due to COVID-19. Boolean expression of ("COVID-19" OR "covid19" OR "covid" OR "coronavirus" OR "Sars-CoV-2") AND ("readmission" OR "re-admission" OR "rehospitalization" OR "rehospitalization") were used in five databases, namely Web of Science, Medline, Science Direct, Google Scholar and Scopus. From the search, a total of 253 articles were screened down to 26 articles. In overall, most of the research focus on readmission rates than mortality rate. On the readmission rate, the lowest is 4.2% by Ramos-Martínez et al. from Spain, and the highest is 19.9% by Donnelly et al. from the United States. Most of the research ( n = 13) uses an inferential statistical approach in their studies, while only one uses a machine learning approach. The data size ranges from 79 to 126,137. However, there is no specific guide to set the most suitable data size for one research, and all results cannot be compared in terms of accuracy, as all research is regional studies and do not involve data from the multi region. The logistic regression is prevalent in the research on risk factors of readmission post-COVID-19 admission, despite each of the research coming out with different outcomes. From the word cloud, age is the most dominant risk factor of readmission, followed by diabetes, high length of stay, COPD, CKD, liver disease, metastatic disease, and CAD. A few future research directions has been proposed, including the utilization of machine learning in statistical analysis, investigation on dominant risk factors, experimental design on interventions to curb dominant risk factors and increase the scale of data collection from single centered to multi centered., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Loo, Hasikin, Suhaimi, Yee, Teo, Xia, Qian, Jiang, Zhang, Dhanalakshmi, Azizan and Lai.)

Opportunistic routing is an emerging routing technology that was proposed to overcome the drawback of unreliable transmission, especially in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Over the years, many forwarder methods were proposed to improve the performance in opportunistic routing. However, based on existing works, the findings have shown that there is still room for improvement in this domain, especially in the aspects of latency, network lifetime, and packet delivery ratio. In this work, a new relay node selection method was proposed. The proposed method used the minimum or maximum range and optimum energy level to select the best relay node to forward packets to improve the performance in opportunistic routing. OMNeT++ and MiXiM framework were used to simulate and evaluate the proposed method. The simulation settings were adopted based on the benchmark scheme. The evaluation results showed that our proposed method outperforms in the aspect of latency, network lifetime, and packet delivery ratio as compared to the benchmark scheme., Competing Interests: The authors declare there are no competing interests., (©2020 Yee et al.)

Malaysia is the second largest palm oil producer in the world and this industry generates more than 80 million tonnes of biomass every year. When considering the potential of this biomass to be used as a fermentation feedstock, many studies have been conducted to develop a complete process for sugar production. One of the essential processes is the pre-treatment to modify the lignocellulosic components by altering the structural arrangement and/or removing lignin component to expose the internal structure of cellulose and hemicellulose for cellulases to digest it into sugars. Each of the pre-treatment processes that were developed has their own advantages and disadvantages, which are reviewed in this study., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The most appropriate organizational software is always a real challenge for managers, especially, the IT directors. The illustration of the term "enterprise software selection", is to purchase, create, or order a software that; first, is best adapted to require of the organization; and second, has suitable price and technical support. Specifying selection criteria and ranking them, is the primary prerequisite for this action. This article provides a method to evaluate, rank, and compare the available enterprise software for choosing the apt one. The prior mentioned method is constituted of three-stage processes. First, the method identifies the organizational requires and assesses them. Second, it selects the best method throughout three possibilities; indoor-production, buying software, and ordering special software for the native use. Third, the method evaluates, compares and ranks the alternative software. The third process uses different methods of multi attribute decision making (MADM), and compares the consequent results. Based on different characteristics of the problem; several methods had been tested, namely, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality (ELECTURE), and easy weight method. After all, we propose the most practical method for same problems.

Background: Porcine circovirus type 2 is the primary etiological agent associated with a group of complex multi-factorial diseases classified as Porcine Circovirus Associated Diseases (PCVAD). Sporadic cases reported in Malaysia in 2007 caused major economic losses to the 2.2 billion Malaysian ringgit (MYR) (approximately 0.7 billion US dollar) swine industry. The objective of the present study was to determine the association between the presence of PCV2 and occurrences of PCVAD., Results: This study showed that 37 out of 42 farms sampled were positive for PCV2 using PCR screening. Thirteen whole genome of PCV2 isolates from pigs with typical PCVAD symptoms were successfully sequenced. These isolates shared 98.3-99.2% similarities with sequences of isolates from The Netherlands. All thirteen isolates fell into the same clade as PCV2b isolates from other countries. Amino acid sequence analysis of the putative capsid protein (ORF2) of the PCV2 revealed that there are three clusters found in Malaysia, namely cluster 1C and 1A/1B. Of interest, three of the isolates (isolates Mal 005, Mal 006 and Mal 010) had a proline substitution for arginine or isoleucine encoded at nt. position 88-89. Eight of the isolates had mutations at the C terminus of the putative capsid protein suggestive of higher pathogenicity which may account for the high reports of PCVAD clinical symptoms in 2007., Conclusion: Phylogenetic study suggests that there may be a link between movements of animals by import of breeders into the country being the route of entry of the virus. While it is not possible to eradicate the virus from commercial pigs, the swine industry in Malaysia can be safeguarded by control measures implemented throughout the country. These measures should include improved biosecurity, disease surveillance; vaccination as well as enforcement of regulations formulated to control and prevent the spread of this disease on a national scale.

Nitrification of mature sanitary landfill leachate with high-strength of N-NH(4) + (1080-2350 mg L(-1)) was performed in a 10 L continuous nitrification activated sludge reactor. The nitrification system was acclimatized with synthetic leachate during feed batch operation to avoid substrate inhibition before being fed with actual mature leachate. Successful nitrification was achieved with an approximately complete ammonium removal (99%) and 96% of N-NH(4) + conversion to N-NO(-) (3) . The maximum volumetric and specific nitrification rates obtained were 2.56 kg N-NH(4) (+) m(-3) day(-1) and 0.23 g N-NH(4) ( +) g(-1) volatile suspended solid (VSS) day(-1), respectively, at hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 12.7 h and solid retention time of 50 days. Incomplete nitrification was encountered when operating at a higher nitrogen loading rate of 3.14 kg N-NH(4) (+) m(-3) day(-1). The substrate overloading and nitrifiers competition with heterotrophs were believed to trigger the incomplete nitrification. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) results supported the syntrophic association between the ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria. FISH results also revealed the heterotrophs as the dominant and disintegration of some AOB cell aggregates into single cells which further supported the incomplete nitrification phenomenon.

Many healthcare organizations have implemented patient safety initiatives aimed at creating a safer healthcare environment. At North Carolina Children's Hospital at University of North Carolina Hospitals, patient safety rounds were established in the fall of 2005. Rounds are held weekly and involve all members of the healthcare team. Senior leadership actively participates and helps staff seek out solutions for the identified issues. Within the first year of operation, 191 issues were identified, of which 58% were resolved. Rounds continue to occur and have expanded over to the Women's services. Other initiatives such as Just Culture and Six Sigma have been established and help further cultivate a climate that strives toward optimizing patient safety.

PsyScope is a graphically oriented, script-based program for the control of experiments on Macintosh computers that has been made freely available to the psychology community by its developers (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993) at Carnegie Mellon University. We describe a graduated tutorial that was written for new users of PsyScope (instructors or students); the text and scripts can be retrieved from a website at Hamilton College (http:/(/)cogito.hamilton.edu/tutorial/). The tutorial examples may be used as classroom demonstrations or as pedagogical aids in teaching students how to use PsyScope in their own research projects. The four examples include a Stroop test, simple and choice reaction time, and a sentence-verification task.

Two studies investigated the cross-temporal stability and cross-situational consistency of cognitive interference. In Study 1, 70 college students reported on the intrusive thoughts they experienced during 2 course examinations and a self-reflective task. In Study 2, 55 college athletes reported on intrusive thoughts following 2 course examinations and 2 regular season football games. Major findings were (a) cognitive interference showed both cross-temporal stability and cross-situational consistency, (b) it was predicted by a measure of dispositional intrusive thinking, (c) the link between cognitive interference and dispositional intrusive thinking was not accounted for by indices of depressive symptomatology and trait anxiety, and (d) the degree of cross-situational consistency of cognitive interference and the content of these intrusive thoughts were influenced by situational factors.

More patients with repetitive strain injuries (RSIs) are being seen in occupational therapy clinics in Hong Kong. To reduce the incidence of work-related RSIs, it is necessary to identify problem jobs and/or specific tasks that are associated with an increased risk of these disorders. Physical assessment, videotaping, ergonomic evaluations, and analyses of workstation designs are used for this purpose. In Hong Kong, however, these methods cannot be implemented at the jobsite without the approval of the employer. This restriction constitutes a major problem in planning the rehabilitation of workers who have RSIs. A self-assessment method using the Work Evaluation Systems Technology (WEST) Tool Sort and the LLUMC Activity Sort was adopted as part of the evaluation of clients with RSIs. The questionnaires were translated into Chinese and reviewed and revised for content validity by ten occupational therapists. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the occupational therapy intervention program based on this self-report instrument. The questionnaires were found to be efficient and useful in assessing the client's abilities at work and in explaining to the client the relationship of his or her working conditions to the RSIs.

Abstract Stressful life events and learned helplessness attributional styles have been shown to impact a variety of personal outcomes. This study examined how these factors influence two classes of cognitive behaviors: the occurrence of intrusive thoughts and performance in memory and verbal-spatial reasoning tasks. Negative life change and attributions for negative events predicted different types of cognitive responses. Individuals reporting higher levels of life stress were more likely to experience distracting thoughts that were unrelated to the current task, whereas individuals with learned helplessness attributional styles tended to have more worrisome thoughts about their task performance. In general, individuals reporting high levels of negative life stress tended to perform more poorly in tasks, whereas individuals with learned helplessness attributional styles tended to perform better than those who did not share this explanatory style. These results suggest that life stress and attributional style have important influecnes on cognitive processes, and that a learned helplessness attributional style can have beneficial effects on behavior in some situations.

In many tasks people have to coordinate the information from several sources. An example would be driving a car while listening to directions. The driver has to establish a correspondence between a visual picture and verbal instructions. This paper addresses two questions concerning information coordination. Is there an ability to coordinate information received from several sources that is different from the ability to deal with information from each source, alone? Does coordination simply involve allocating resources to deal with the component tasks, or does the act of coordination itself constitute a separate task? Four experiments examined the coordination of a verbal component task with a visual-spatial and with an auditory component task. The results showed that the ability to coordinate perceptual and verbal information is separate from the ability to deal with either perceptual or verbal information, alone. A simple resource sharing model was not adequate in explaining how coordination occurred. We relate our results to a model in which perceptual reasoning occurs independently of verbal processing, but transforming perceptual information into a propositional form is affected by concurrent verbal processing.

Kahneman and Chajczyk (1983) found that naming a colored bar was slowed when a color word was nearby but that this decrement was reduced when a neutral word was also present. This has been referred to as the dilution effect. They accounted for their results with an attention-capture hypothesis. Response time distributions to stimuli that contained a color word and a neutral word within individuals were examined. The dilution effect did not appear within individuals. Some individuals exhibited strong Stroop interference effects, whereas others exhibited no interference. Experiment 2 showed that the interference pattern within individuals was consistent across days. Experiment 3 showed that performance could not be explained by a selection strategy that was based on word length. These experiments showed that performance in a color-plus-neutral word condition reflects a systematic pattern of interference or noninterference that varies across individuals.

Two experiments investigated inhibitory processes in visual spatial attention. In particular, factors influencing the suppression of ignored visual stimuli were investigated. Subjects responded to geometric shapes while distractors were presented in the periphery. Distractors consisted of a single word, a pair of unrelated words, or a single word paired with a string of non-linguistic symbols. Semantic processing of the ignored words was measured with a subsequent lexical decision task. Test probes presented after the prime displays revealed suppression effects for words semantically related to a previously ignored word, but only for conditions in which two distractor words were presented. Suppression was not observed when the prime consisted of a single word or a single word paired with non-linguistic symbols. In Experiment 2 two different time delays between the onset of the primes and the onset of the test probes were used. At the shorter interval facilitatory priming was observed, while at longer intervals suppression was observed. The facilitation-suppression pattern suggests that ignored items are recognized before being suppressed. In summary, the results suggest the following: (1) that selectively attending does not restrict ignored items from gaining access to their semantic representations, and (2) that inhibition is an important process in determining the focus of attention. These results are discussed within a selective attention framework in which all items in a display gain access to memory representations, and attention to selected items causes competing items to be inhibited.