bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Characterization of macadamia ringspot-associated virus, a novel Orthotospovirus associated with Macadamia integrifolia in South Africa
Authors: Roberts Ronel , Robbertse Nicola , Thompson Genevieve D. , Read David A. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractSouth Africa is the largest producer of macadamias in the world, producing an estimated 61,288 tons nut-in-shell in 2022. In order to ensure the sustainability of the industry, it is important that research focuses on the control and eradication of economically important pests and diseases. Macadamia trees in the Mpumalanga Lowveld of South Africa have for some time shown severe chlorosis, which coincides with a significant drop in production, with losses of up to 60% being recorded. The disease has since been coined Macadamia Chlorosis Disease (MCD). In an attempt to determine whether MCD may be associated with a virus, high-throughput Illumina sequencing was performed on RNA extracted from both diseased and healthy trees collected from farms in Mpumalanga. Subsequent data analyses could not link a specific virus to MCD, however, reads spanning the full genome of a novel virus belonging to the Orthotospovirus genus were obtained. An RT-PCR assay was optimized for the detection of this virus and subsequent surveys linked the virus to ringspot symptoms which are commonly observed on different macadamia cultivars. The virus has to date been identified from orchards in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal. Other viruses described in the genus are known to cause severe crop losses and it is therefore important that the virus, provisionally named macadamia ringspot-associated virus (MRSV), be further studied to determine whether association with this virus can lead to yield losses, and whether appropriate control strategies must be implemented to prevent the spread of MRSV.
Multidimensional item Response Theory Calibration of Dichotomous Response Structure Using R Language for Statistical Computing
Authors: Ayanwale Musa Adekunle , Amusa Jamiu Oluwadamilare , Oladejo Adekunle Ibrahim , Ayedun Funmilayo 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThe study focuses on assessing the proficiency levels of higher education students, specifically the physics achievement test (PHY 101) at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). This test, like others, evaluates various aspects of knowledge and skills simultaneously. However, relying on traditional models for such tests can result in inaccurate interpretations of students’ abilities. The research highlights the importance of exploring the multidimensional nature of the PHY 101 test to improve its accuracy in measuring student proficiency and enhance education and assessment quality at NOUN. Using an ex-post facto research design, the study analyzed 978 responses from NOUN’s Directorate of Examination and Assessment. Through confirmatory and exploratory DETECT techniques, the study found strong evidence supporting the test’s multidimensionality. Three distinct dimensions emerged: cognitive processing, reading ability, and problem-solving skills. A parsimonious multidimensional three-parameter logistic model was used to calibrate the test items, providing valuable insights into item difficulty, discrimination, and resistance to chance influences. While the study primarily focuses on the psychometric aspects of the PHY 101 test, it is important to consider its broader impact on the educational community. The research contributes to educational assessment by emphasizing the significance of recognizing and addressing the multidimensional nature of higher education tests. This approach can result in more accurate assessments of students’ abilities, ultimately improving education quality and fairness. The findings confirm the multidimensional nature of the PHY 101 test and identify three distinct dimensions, aligning with the study’s objective. These insights are relevant to educators and test developers, highlighting the need for a multidimensional approach to effectively assess and enhance student proficiency. For researchers interested in similar studies, it is recommended to explore the broader influence of multidimensional models in educational assessment. Investigating their impact on teaching methods, curriculum development, and student learning experiences can provide valuable insights. Longitudinal studies assessing the long-term effects of multidimensional assessment on student outcomes and success are also recommended.
Quicker Exogenous Orienting and Slower Endogenous Orienting in Autistic People
Authors: Li Shuting , Machida Keitaro , Burrows Emma L. , Johnson Katherine A. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractResearch is equivocal on whether attention orienting is atypical in autism. This study investigated two types of attention orienting in autistic people and accounted for the potential confounders of alerting level, co-occurring symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, age, and sex. Twenty-seven autistic participants (14 males; 9–43 years) and 22 age- and sex-matched non-autistic participants (13 males; 9–42 years) completed the exogenous and endogenous Posner tasks. Response time and pupillometric data were recorded. Autistic participants were faster at orienting attention to valid cues in the exogenous task and slower at disengaging from invalid cues in the endogenous task compared to non-autistic participants. With increasing age, autistic participants showed faster exogenous and endogenous orienting, whereas non-autistic participants showed faster exogenous orienting but stable speed of endogenous orienting. Higher ADHD symptoms were associated with slower exogenous orienting in both groups, whereas higher anxiety symptoms were associated with faster exogenous orienting only in autistic participants. No group differences were noted for alerting levels, sex, or pupillary responses. This study provides new evidence of superior exogenous orienting and inefficient endogenous orienting in autistic people and suggests that age and co-occurring symptoms are important to consider when assessing attention orienting in autism.
Perceptions of Adulthood: What Does it Mean to be Grown-Up?
Authors: Wright Megan , von Stumm Sophie 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Adulthood has traditionally been defined by the attainment of socio-demographic milestones such as career, marriage, and parenthood, but these milestones are increasingly delayed or have become inaccessible for young people today. As a result, young people are likely to experience a discrepancy between their expectations for and their actual reality of adulthood, which can negatively affect their well-being and psychological development. To systematically study contemporary definitions of and attitudes towards adulthood, we assessed a sample of 722 UK adults with an age range from 18 to 77 years on: (a) subjective adult status, or the extent to which people feel like adults; (b) attitudes towards adulthood, or whether people think adulthood is a positive time of life; and (c) the characteristics that people use to define adulthood today. We found that most participants felt adult and had positive attitudes towards adulthood. Our participants defined adulthood predominantly through psychological characteristics, for example “Accepting responsibility for the consequences of my actions” (endorsed by 80% of the sample), rather than by socio-demographic milestones which were endorsed by only 22–40% of participants. Both subjective adult status and attitudes towards adulthood were significantly associated with older age and the attainment of the socio-demographic milestones of marriage and parenthood. Regression analyses revealed that having a positive attitude towards adulthood was the strongest psychological predictor of subjective adult status, accounting for 10% of the variance. This suggests that fostering positive attitudes towards adulthood may help improving the well-being of contemporary adults.
Image Deblurring Using Feedback Mechanism and Dual Gated Attention Network
Authors: Chen Jian , Ye Shilin , Jiang Zhuwu , Fang Zhenghan 
Published: March 2024

AbstractRecently, image deblurring task driven by the encoder-decoder network has made a tremendous amount of progress. However, these encoder-decoder-based networks still have two disadvantages: (1) due to the lack of feedback mechanism in the decoder design, the reconstruction results of existing networks are still sub-optimal; (2) these networks introduce multiple modules, such as the self-attention mechanism, to improve the performance, which also increases the computational burden. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a novel feedback-mechanism-based encoder-decoder network (namely, FMNet) that is equipped with two key components: (1) the feedback-mechanism-based decoder and (2) the dual gated attention module. To improve reconstruction quality, the feedback-mechanism-based decoder is proposed to leverage the feedback information via the feedback attention module, which adaptively selects useful features in the feedback path. To decrease the computational cost, an efficient dual gated attention module is proposed to perform the attention mechanism in the frequency domain twice, which improves deblurring performance while reducing the computational cost by avoiding redundant convolutions and feature channels. The superiority of FMNet in terms of both deblurring performance and computational efficiency is demonstrated via comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on multiple public datasets.
Missing links of knowledge spillover effects on firm intensity and regional development
Authors: Barboza Gustavo 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThis paper investigates the presence and extent of missing links that prevent the transmission and condition the flow of knowledge spillover effects (KSE) across space and time. Findings using a comprehensive database composed of 9242 innovative startups from Italy covering the period 2008–2018 and all 20 geographic regions as well as all economic sectors at the 2-digit level of aggregation indicate that missing links related to observed differences in industry structures and availability of pools of skilled human capital amount for large and persistent differences in terms of firm intensity differential across neighboring regions. More specifically, we observe that regions with initial existent high firm intensity are more likely to continue enhancing their labor pools by both endogenously increasing high-skilled human capital and by attracting high-skilled human capital from neighboring regions. Intra- and inter-industry spillovers are marked by high levels of heterogeneity. Consequently, we find that missing links related to KSE create directional effects, and these effects are neither symmetric nor reciprocal in adjacent geographical regions. Invisible barriers to KSE transmission, imposed by the presence of missing links, prevent the work of the invisible hand.
Local banking development and SME conservative financing policy. Does bank branch density matter?
Authors: Gama Paulo Miguel , Sol Murta Fátima , Vieira Elisabete S. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractDoes bank branch density matter for the conservative financing puzzle? This paper looks at the importance of nearby physical banking services to the decision to eschew debt among SMEs. Our multivariate logistic models rely on recent information from Portugal, a small open bank-based European economy, and control for firm-level and municipality-level effects. We show that banks' branch density at the municipality level increases the odds of local SMEs following a conservative financing policy. However, the weight of local cooperative bank branches relates negatively to the odds of not using debt. Several robustness checks concerning sampling procedures, estimation methods, and variables’ definitions corroborate our baseline results. Moreover, our results show that the effect of bank branches on the decision to eschew debt is economically more relevant for the long-term than the short-term debt.
Efficient FPGA implementation for sound source separation using direction-informed multichannel non-negative matrix factorization
Authors: Diel Philipp , Muñoz-Montoro Antonio J. , Carabias-Orti Julio J. , Ranilla Jose 
Published: March 2024

AbstractSound source separation (SSS) is a fundamental problem in audio signal processing, aiming to recover individual audio sources from a given mixture. A promising approach is multichannel non-negative matrix factorization (MNMF), which employs a Gaussian probabilistic model encoding both magnitude correlations and phase differences between channels through spatial covariance matrices (SCM). In this work, we present a dedicated hardware architecture implemented on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for efficient SSS using MNMF-based techniques. A novel decorrelation constraint is presented to facilitate the factorization of the SCM signal model, tailored to the challenges of multichannel source separation. The performance of this FPGA-based approach is comprehensively evaluated, taking advantage of the flexibility and computational capabilities of FPGAs to create an efficient real-time source separation framework. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent, high-quality results in terms of sound separation.
Estimators of various kappa coefficients based on the unbiased estimator of the expected index of agreements
Authors: Martín Andrés A. , Álvarez Hernández M. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractTo measure the degree of agreement between R observers who independently classify n subjects within K categories, various kappa-type coefficients are often used. When R = 2, it is common to use the Cohen' kappa, Scott's pi, Gwet’s AC1/2, and Krippendorf's alpha coefficients (weighted or not). When R > 2, some pairwise version based on the aforementioned coefficients is normally used; with the same order as above: Hubert's kappa, Fleiss's kappa, Gwet's AC1/2, and Krippendorf's alpha. However, all these statistics are based on biased estimators of the expected index of agreements, since they estimate the product of two population proportions through the product of their sample estimators. The aims of this article are three. First, to provide statistics based on unbiased estimators of the expected index of agreements and determine their variance based on the variance of the original statistic. Second, to make pairwise extensions of some measures. And third, to show that the old and new estimators of the Cohen’s kappa and Hubert’s kappa coefficients match the well-known estimators of concordance and intraclass correlation coefficients, if the former are defined by assuming quadratic weights. The article shows that the new estimators are always greater than or equal the classic ones, except for the case of Gwet where it is the other way around, although these differences are only relevant with small sample sizes (e.g. n ≤ 30).
Acute necrotizing duodenitis in diabetic ketoacidosis
Authors: Gadsby Zeena , Thompson Melissa , Tse Rexson 
Published: March 2024

AbstractAcute necrotizing esophagitis (ANE), acute necrotising duodenitis (AND), and Wishnesky’s lesions (WLs) are three peculiar upper gastrointestinal pathologies that can be seen in death from diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). Amongst these three, AND has only been recently described. Morphologically, ANE and AND present as generalized black discoloration of the intestinal tract, and florid necrosis and inflammation. Whereas WLs are discrete black lesions in the stomach with necrosis and muted inflammation. We report a case of isolated AND with an unusual morphology not previously reported. A man in his 60s was found dead at home who died from pneumonia complicated by DKA. The gastrointestinal tract showed isolated patchy and discrete AND in which macroscopically resembled WLs, but microscopy resembled ANE with florid necrosis and acute inflammation. This case, together with the literature, documented AND can be macroscopically diffuse or discrete resembling ANE or WLs respectively but microscopically resemble ANE. Furthermore, the potential of these lesions being found in isolation in DKA raises the possibility of both general and local mechanisms playing a role on their morphology and presentation.
“Let the State Decide It All for Me”: The Role of Migration and Integration Policy in the Decision-Making of Ukrainian Refugee Women in Germany
Authors: Lazarenko Valeria 
Published: March 2024

AbstractWhile German migration policies aim to provide temporary protection and integrate Ukrainian refugees into German society as early as possible, the procedures and ideas of integration might be perceived differently by the beneficiaries. The feeling of “permanent temporariness” has been persistent among Ukrainians since March 2022. In this situation, some of the refugees renounce their agency and put responsibility on decision-making onto the state, while others oppose the idea of “being integrated” since they see their time in Germany as temporary, and their future in Ukraine as soon as the security situation allows them to return.Drawing on the experiences of single Ukrainian women who received protection in Germany, the paper presents an anthropological perspective on person–state interactions in the context of refugees’ future-planning. How do German policies for supporting Ukrainian refugees impact their “stay or return” decision-making? Do the policies address their needs now and allow them to make investments for the future, or, on the contrary, contribute to their decision to return to Ukraine, which appears to be “simpler” and “more predictable”? How does the experience of going through bureaucratic procedures contribute to the sense of having agency and being capable of shaping their today and tomorrow? To answer these questions, I am going to present the reasonings and emotions concerning bureaucratic procedures that are closely intertwined with the planning of their future by Ukrainian refugees in Germany.
One-pot Microwave Synthesis of Cobalt, Nitrogen, and Sulfur Co-Doped Carbon Quantum Dots for Efficient Monosodium Glutamate Determination in Food Samples
Authors: Hamid Mohamed Ahmed Abdel , Elagamy Samar H. , Gamal Aya , Mansour Fotouh R. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThe synthesis of cobalt, nitrogen and sulfur co doped carbon quantum dots (Co-NS-CQDs) has become a subject of significant research interest. These CQDs were produced using a single-step microwave method, which is considered environmentally friendly, and the entire process was completed in just 90 seconds. In this synthesis, citric acid was utilized as the carbon source, methionine served as the source for both nitrogen and sulfur, and cobaltous acetate was used to introduce cobalt ions into the CQDs structure. The synthesized carbon quantum dots (CQDs) exhibit a narrow size distribution and a high quantum yield of 51.5%, which is notably superior to non-metal-doped CQDs with a yield of 38%. Characterization of these CQDs was performed using different techniques such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution TEM (HRTEM), Fourier transformation infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The developed CQDs have blue luminescence at emission wavelength 438 nm after excitation at 350 nm. Different factors affecting the CQDs synthesis including dialysis duration, reaction time and reaction temperature. These CQDs were utilized as a probe for the detection of monosodium glutamate (MSG) in various food products. The intensity of the fluorescence of the CQDs showed a direct and linear increase with the concentration of MSG within the range of 25–250 µg/mL. The detection and quantitation limits for MSG were 2.78 µg/mL and 8.44 µg/mL, respectively. Additionally, the developed method is environmentally friendly, as confirmed by assessments using the analytical Eco scale, Green Analytical Procedure Index (GAPI), and Analytical Greenness calculator (Agree). The proposed method presents several advantages over other reported methods in terms of convenience, rapid response, and attainment of accurate and precise results.
Experimental Research on the Carbon Dioxides Reduction Potential by Substitution Gasoline with Ethanol and Propane Under Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition in a Single Cylinder Engine
Authors: Lee Jeongwoo , Chu Sanghyun , Kang Jaegu , Min Kyoungdoug 
Published: March 2024

AbstractIn this experiment, it was experimentally investigated the combustion and exhaust characteristics, as well as the thermal efficiency, of RCCI combustion using gasoline, ethanol, and propane as low-reactivity fuels under four operating conditions. For each operating condition, gISNOx was limited to 0.15 g/kWh, and gISSmoke was limited to below 15 mg/kWh. The experiment was conducted by determining the operating conditions that satisfied these limitations and resulted in the highest city thermal efficiency. The low-reactivity fuels were supplied by port injection, while diesel was directly injected into the combustion chamber using a diesel injector. As a result, when gasoline is replaced with low-carbon fuels like ethanol and propane, the reduction in CO2 emissions occurred. Under maximum power conditions, using ethanol allowed for a maximum reduction in CO2 emissions of 6.81%. Depending on the driving conditions, ethanol showed a reduction ranging from 3.60 to 6.81%, while propane exhibited a reduction ranging from 3.10 to 5.64%. Additionally, by substituting with ethanol and propane, the GIE could be improved up to 44.73 and 43.56%, respectively.
Co-existing with Drones: A Virtual Exploration of Proxemic Behaviours and Users’ Insights on Social Drones
Authors: Bretin Robin , Cross Emily , Khamis Mohamed 
Published: March 2024

AbstractNumerous studies have investigated proxemics in the context of human–robot interactions, but little is known about whether these insights can be applied to human–drone interactions (HDI). As drones become more common in social settings, it is crucial to ensure they navigate in a socially acceptable and human-friendly way. Understanding how individuals position themselves around drones is vital to promote user well-being and drones’ social acceptance. However, real-world constraints and risks associated with drones flying in close proximity to participants have limited research in this field. Virtual reality is a promising alternative for investigating HDI, as prior research suggests. This paper presents a proxemic user study (N = 45) in virtual reality, examining how drone height and framing influence participants’ proxemic preferences. The study also explores participants’ perceptions of social drones and their vision for the future of flying robots. Our findings show that drone height significantly impacts participants’ preferred interpersonal distance, while framing had no significant effect. Thoughts on how participants envision social drones (e.g., interaction, design, applications) reveal interpersonal differences but also shows overall consistency over time. While the study demonstrates the value of using virtual reality for HDI experiments, further research is necessary to determine the generalizability of our findings to real-world HDI scenarios.