Geoscientists are increasingly tasked with spatially predicting a target variable in the presence of auxiliary information using supervised machine learning algorithms. Typically, the target variable ...is observed at a few sampling locations due to the relatively time-consuming and costly process of obtaining measurements. In contrast, auxiliary variables are often exhaustively observed within the region under study through the increasing development of remote sensing platforms and sensor networks. Supervised machine learning methods do not fully leverage this large amount of auxiliary spatial data. Indeed, in these methods, the training dataset includes only labeled data locations (where both target and auxiliary variables were measured). At the same time, unlabeled data locations (where auxiliary variables were measured but not the target variable) are not considered during the model training phase. Consequently, only a limited amount of auxiliary spatial data is utilized during the model training stage. As an alternative to supervised learning, semi-supervised learning, which learns from labeled as well as unlabeled data, can be used to address this problem. However, conventional semi-supervised learning techniques do not account for the specificities of spatial data. This paper introduces a spatial semi-supervised learning framework where geostatistics and machine learning are combined to harness a large amount of unlabeled spatial data in combination with typically a smaller set of labeled spatial data. The main idea consists of leveraging the target variable’s spatial autocorrelation to generate pseudo labels at unlabeled data points that are geographically close to labeled data points. This is achieved through geostatistical conditional simulation, where an ensemble of pseudo labels is generated to account for the uncertainty in the pseudo labeling process. The observed labels are augmented by this ensemble of pseudo labels to create an ensemble of pseudo training datasets. A supervised machine learning model is then trained on each pseudo training dataset, followed by an aggregation of trained models. The proposed geostatistical semi-supervised learning method is applied to synthetic and real-world spatial datasets. Its predictive performance is compared with some classical supervised and semi-supervised machine learning methods. It appears that it can effectively leverage a large amount of unlabeled spatial data to improve the target variable’s spatial prediction.
•Semi-supervised learning framework dedicated to spatial data.•Can be used with any given supervised base learner.•Account for uncertainty in the pseudo labeling process.•Very easy to implement.
Implementing social-emotional learning skills into Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), the current study intended to extend the efficacy of CSR for teaching reading strategies when applying it to ...students in rural areas from a working-class community. To this purpose, forty-four students who made the comparison and the experimental groups were taught reading strategies through CSR and ECSR (Extended Collaborative Strategic Reading), respectively. A reading comprehension test with different question types was given to the students as pretest and posttest, and an interview was given at the end of the study to investigate the perception of the students toward reading strategy instruction through CSR and ECSR. Analysis of data indicated that only the ECSR group improved significantly in overall reading comprehension, but the componential analysis of the reading test showed that despite the fact that the CSR group showed no significant improvement in the reading tests in four formats (true–false, multiple-choice, matching, and cloze), the ECSR group improved significantly in reading tests with multiple-choice and cloze test formats. Moreover, although the students in both groups showed a positive view toward the interventions, the students in the ECSR group improved in social-emotional and communication skills. It seems that CSR can be improved to be effective by implementing the emotional component to it.
Mineral deposits are metal enrichment anomalies, occurring as local manifestations of the interplay between various geological processes that operate at a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. ...Mineral prospectivity maps are generated by integrating several proxy maps that represent critical geological processes in a mineral system conceptual model. The derivation of mineral prospectivity maps is subject to several types of uncertainty, including systematic (inadequate knowledge of mineralisation processes), stochastic (incomplete geoscience data), and model uncertainty (multiple choices for predictive models and their parameters). Traditional approaches to mineral prospectivity mapping often fail to fully appreciate different sources of uncertainty and spatiotemporal interdependencies between proxy maps associated with the mineral system components. Therefore, these traditional approaches are biased and understate the overall uncertainty. For instance, spatial proxies are mapped using univariate deterministic approaches that ignore stochastic uncertainty and spatial dependencies (i.e., auto- and cross-correlations). This study presents a multivariate stochastic model for prediction and uncertainty quantification of mineral exploration targets by combining multivariate geostatistical simulations and spatial machine learning algorithms. The spatial machine learning algorithm used in the stochastic model is a spatially aware random forests algorithm based on higher-order spatial statistics. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach can detect intrinsic heterogeneity, spatial interdependencies, and complex spatial patterns in proxy maps that are related to the mineralisation type of interest. The approach is illustrated using a synthetic case study with multiple geochemical, geophysical, and lithological attributes.
Background: Mazandaran Province is one of the provinces with a high suicide rate. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the epidemiology of relief missions following suicide in the pre-hospital ...emergency system of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. Materials and Methods: This descriptive study was conducted from September 2019 to 2021 in the pre-hospital emergency department of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. Statistical information related to the missions carried out after suicide was extracted using the data contained in the emergency national mission form recorded in Asayar software. According to the questionnaire, demographic information including age, gender, accident location, time, method of suicide, as well as mission outcome were extracted. To examine the results, frequency percentage, Mean±SD were used, and to examine the qualitative variables, the Chi-square test, and Fisher’s exact test were used. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS software, version 26 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). A significance level of 0.05 was considered. Results: In this study, 712(53.7%) were men and 615(46.3%) were women. The mean age of patients was 32.12±2.03 years. Fisher›s exact test revealed a statistically significant relationship between age groups and suicide methods (P=0.02). The Chi-square test was used to investigate the relationship between the suicide method and gender. According to the results of this test, a statistically significant relationship was observed between gender and suicide methods (P=0.00). The most common methods of suicide among clients were drug poisoning (32.1%), other cases (30.06%), and self-harm (20.6%), respectively. The highest frequency of suicide attempts occurred between evening and night among 497 people (37.5%) in terms of accident time. Conclusion: Young and productive age groups are among the most vulnerable groups among suicides. Men died about five times more than women after committing suicide in a pre-hospital emergency room. According to the results, more planning is required regarding mental health self-care education in families and schools, implementation of psychological counseling, diagnosis, and prompt treatment in vulnerable groups.
The aim of the present study was to investigate EFL university students' attitude towards self-regulated learning strategies in writing academic papers. A further aim of the study was to compare the ...attitudes of two groups of university students (third and fourth years) in the employment of self-regulated learning strategies to find out whether academic education assists students to become more self-regulated writers with the passage of time. A questionnaire was developed and administered to 98 college students majoring in English language. The questionnaire consisted of 60 items assessing six dimensions of self-regulated learning, namely, motive, method, time, physical environment, social environment, and performance. Descriptive analyses revealed that the participants were moderate to slightly high in the use of self-regulatory strategies and processes. Furthermore, the findings indicated that certain writing strategies including pre-writing, goal-setting and self-consequence were not appropriately employed by the participants, suggesting an important need to acquire additional strategies for their writing. Using independent samples t-tests, we found that the fourth year students more frequently employed self-regulatory learning strategies in writing (i.e. method and social environment) than did the third year students in this study. The implications of the study which may benefit writing instructors are discussed.
In an EFL context reading is a very important skill in language learning. This study aims at finding if instruction of reading strategies in two different collaborative and non-collaborative ...approaches affects reading comprehension and attitude toward reading differently. Forty-five Iranian adult female EFL learners at pre-intermediate general English proficiency level in Iran Language Institute (ili) were selected and divided into three groups of 15 students. One group functioning as the control group did not receive any strategy instruction; the second group, as the first experimental group, received reading strategy instruction in collaborative groups (Collaborative Strategic Reading or csr), and the third group considered as the second experimental group received reading strategy instruction in a non-collaborative way. A reading comprehension test and a reading attitude questionnaire were given to all three groups at the beginning of the term as pretests and after the experiment as posttests. The results obtained through one-way anova indicated that though both experimental groups outperformed the control group, there was no significant difference between the two experimental groups in reading comprehension and attitude toward reading. Therefore, it is up to teachers to weigh the advantages of using the collaborative approach to teaching reading against its disadvantages.
The ferricrete units (Fe oxide cemented colluvial-alluvial sediment) of the Yilgarn Craton in Western Australia formed during the humid tropical and sub-tropical climates of the Cenozoic. Ferricretes ...are generally developed on long-lived paleodrainage systems and are products of the ferruginisation of detritus provided by the continuous erosion of upslopes. These iron-rich accumulations can become Au-enriched, as is the case in several locations previously discovered in the Yilgarn Craton; many of these host economic secondary gold deposits (e.g., Moolart Well, Mt Gibson, and Bulchina), typically occurring downslope of low saprolite hills and near paleovalleys (i.e., inset-valleys). Inset-valleys are a common paleotopographic feature buried under Quaternary alluvial and colluvial sedimentary cover. Maps of these ancient channel networks can be used as a proxy for targeting ferricrete gold deposits. These inset-valley systems generally form dendritic and noisy patterns in high-resolution aeromagnetic data due to the presence of maghemite-rich nodules and detrital magnetic pisoliths on their flanks. The main aim of this study was to use high-resolution aeromagnetic data to target ferricrete units related to inset-valleys systems across the Yilgarn Craton. A spatial predictive model was used to learn and predict the geological units of interest from pre-processed aeromagnetic data. The predicted inset-valleys systems were able to confine the exploration space and define a new exploration frontier for ferricrete gold deposits.
Motivation in reading performance is important, as reading motivation facilitates effective learning. The decline in reading motivation that has typically been observed in Iranian universities is ...thus a serious concern for Iranian EFL learners. The aim of this study was to promote the reading literacy of Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) learners. A total number of 285 participants from six different fields of study (social sciences, math, primary education, chemistry, biology, and Persian literature) took part in this study. The researchers gave the instruments over a 2-day period; the Language Proficiency Test was given on day one and the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ) and the Reading Comprehension Test were given on day two after a 1-week interval. Participants' responses to the reading motivation statements, reading comprehension questions, and English language proficiency questions were analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis test, T-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and Chi-Square. The findings indicated that learners with higher motivation in reading comprehension performed much better in reading comprehension than other learners with lower motivation. It was also demonstrated that the participants' discipline was a significant contributing factor to the relationship between reading motivation and reading performance. The findings further proved that the higher the students' proficiency level, the higher their reading motivation level. In sum, the present study indicated conclusively that there are different dimensions of reading motivation that relate differentially to the participants' reading performance. The findings of this study are fruitful for both teachers and students.
The current study attempts to put to the test the nature of interdependence between L2 and L1 in a bilingual mind. It aims to find out if reading strategy instruction (RSI) in L2, a) affects reading ...comprehension ability and attitude toward reading both in L2 and L1, and b) if so, in which language (source (L2) or target (L1)) each of these two dependent variables are more affected. To meet the purposes of the study, a quasi-experimental design was employed. Measures of reading comprehension and attitude toward reading in L2 and L1 were distributed as pretests and posttests to 48 Iranian EFL learners. The experimental group received RSI in L2, but the control group received traditional reading instruction. Reading comprehension and attitude toward reading improved significantly both in L2 and L1 for the experimental group, but not for the control group; however, for the experimental group the magnitude of improvement in reading comprehension was more in L1 than in L2, and the magnitude of improvement in attitude toward reading was more in L2 than in L1. Therefore, although languages are interdependent in one mind, cross-linguistic influences are not the same in magnitude in terms of the languages and domains involved.
Background: Every year, many people die due to drowning and its complications as a severe health problem in Northern provinces. The first step in planning health problems in any society is to ...prioritize problems based on epidemiological trends. This is an epidemiological study on drowning missions performed by Mazandaran Emergency Medical Services for 5 years. Methods: This retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted on mission forms of all drowning victims in Mazandaran pre-hospital emergency from the beginning of 2017 to August 1400. The data of age, gender, drowning place, mission result (dispatch, mission cancellation, outpatient treatment, and death), and accident time and date were collected and analyzed using SPSS Software (Version 19) and the chi-square test. Results: Out of the 1127 rescued drowning cases, most incidents occurred between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM and between 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM. A total of 720 cases (63.9%) were men and the remaining 407 cases (36.1%) were women. In addition, 506 (44.9%) cases were dispatched, 167 (14.8%) died, 341 (30.3%) were treated on-site, and the remaining 10% of missions were canceled. Most cases of drowning were in the age group of 20-30 years old. The most common place of drowning was in the unpatrolled area of the beach with 891 cases (79%). Following the COVID19 spread and lockdown in 2020-2021, the drowning cases in the river and water channels increased so that 9 cases in 2017 reached 101 cases in August 2021. Conclusion: Most of the drowning cases occurred in unpatrolled areas among the young and productive age group of society. Development and maintenance of protected swimming beaches, as well as public education on first aid for drowning victims, seem necessary. Further, public warning and relief systems should be strengthened to make people aware of the dangers of swimming in unpatrolled and unsafe areas.
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