bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A single-step firm-level identification of classification shifting
Authors: Mamatzakis Emmanuel , Tsionas Mike 
Published: March 2024

PurposeThis study proposes a new model to measure unexpected core earnings, using Bayesian dynamic latent method.Design/methodology/approachThe Bayesian dynamic latent modeling approach identifies the effects that stem from complex, multidimensional variables related to culture and legal framework, on unexpected core earnings. It also allows testing whether there is persistence over time in unexpected core earnings. We use sequential Bayesian Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle filtering, that simplify estimations.FindingsIn an international empirical application, we find evidence of persistence in unexpected core earnings as well as classification shifting. The impact of the legal framework on classification shifting shows variability across samples. Religion reduces classification shifting, whereas the cultural variables of power distance, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance enhances it. Interestingly, the persistence in unexpected core earnings is strong and moderates the ability of legal framework and religion in abating classification shifting.Research limitations/implicationsIn terms of policy implications, we show that strengthening legal framework would improve financial reporting and reduce the scope for manipulation. This could involve stricter enforcement mechanisms, increased penalties for non-compliance and regular audits to detect and deter classification shifting practices. Given that religion plays a role in moderating classification shifting, policymakers may explore partnerships or collaborations with religious institutions to promote ethical financial practices. Engaging religious leaders and organizations can help emphasize the importance of integrity and ethical behavior in financial reporting, potentially influencing the behavior of individuals and organizations.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge this is the first study that opts for Bayesian dynamic latent model for an international sample.
Student engagement in a differentiated higher education system in Ethiopia: a multilevel analysis
Authors: Moges Bekalu Tadesse , Gebremeskel Melaku Mengistu , Tilwani Shouket Ahmad , Assefa Yalalem 
Published: March 2024

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine effects of classroom-level and student-level factors on student engagement in the context of a higher education system vertically differentiated into research, applied and comprehensive university types.Design/methodology/approachThe study used a cross-sectional multilevel design to explain student engagement based on class and student variables. Specifically, the study collects data from 656 students and 61 randomly selected teachers at both levels and uses multilevel modeling to explain relationship patterns.FindingsThe results show that institutions vary significantly in student engagement scores. In addition, while a significant variation is found at the student and classroom level, the effects of academic achievement, instructional quality, teaching experience and teacher qualifications on student engagement vary across classrooms in institutions. However, the interaction effect of classroom and student-level variables on student engagement remains non-significant.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this lies in the explanation of student engagement using classroom and student level factors in a vertically differentiated higher education system using multilevel modeling. Student engagement varied in classrooms research universities applied and comprehensive universities.
Positioning UAE archaeological sites in tourism supply chains
Authors: De Man Adriaan 
Published: March 2024

Purpose The purpose of this study is to address the relevance of archaeological heritage in the context of supply chains for the tourism industry. It does so by providing converging ideas on the usefulness of individual sites, not in their strict scientific or latent value but as an enhancer for optimizing cultural production in a wider scenario of aggregate demand.Design/methodology/approach While examples from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) illustrate this reasoning, the underlying principles have a widespread application and point to a need for defragmenting and realigning tangible heritage as a key production factor. Methods used consist of an inductive approach, based on secondary sources and semi-structured interviews.Findings Results indicate that, while archaeological resources remain central to the promotion of cultural tourism in the UAE, suppliers face challenges when incorporating particular sites into consumer-friendly packages.Practical implications The study contributes to the identification of common risks and opportunities for archaeological resource management in the development of UAE tourism products.Originality/value This represents an original angle, given the focus on the specific regional, cooperative added value of archaeological resources and the need for optimizing them in a functional supply chain.
The promotion of Spanish travel agencies from the 20th century to the present
Authors: Araque-Hontangas Natividad 
Published: March 2024

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unexplored part of the historical evolution of travel agencies in Spain, from the end of the 20th century to the 21st century. When examining promotion strategies, the study focuses on the change in marketing and public relations strategies based on the incorporation of information and communication technologies and, in particular, the use of the internet.

Design/methodology/approach
This study draws on a qualitative analysis of the different strategies used by traditional agencies and online agencies in Spain from the mid-19th century to the present. This analysis shows how traditional communication strategies survived at the beginning of the 21st century, together with other more innovative ones, while some disappeared, being eliminated by the new online travel agencies, which created a particular conception of marketing and communication. This paper is divided into the following parts: the introduction; the beginnings of travel agency promotion in the 20th century; the evolution of promotion in travel agencies since the late 20th century; communication innovation at the beginning of the 21st century; online travel agencies; and conclusions.

Findings
This study shows that although online agencies did not manage to position themselves with a large turnover, they generated advantages and sharpened their imagination to create a new, more economical advertising model, eliminating the costs of public relations and advertising campaigns. In addition, they allowed clients to have greater independence when making their reservations, while enabling them to monitor the tastes of potential and real clients and add blogs so that consumers could express their degree of satisfaction with the product or services provided by the agency.

Originality/value
The focus of attention is the travel agency sector in Spain and, more specifically, communication. Studies on travel agencies and their marketing have been very scarce and partial, impeding professionals in the tourism sector from having a broad vision to direct their promotional and public relations actions. The originality of this article lies in its making a comparison between two different visions of tourism marketing and, specifically, of travel agencies, that is, the traditional vision and the innovative one. It thus helps all professionals in the sector to value and improve their marketing and communication strategies.
Measuring performance of metasearch engines to access information: an exploratory study based on precision metrics
Authors: Bhardwaj Raj Kumar , Kumar Ritesh , Nazim Mohammad 
Published: March 2024

PurposeThis paper evaluates the precision of four metasearch engines (MSEs) – DuckDuckGo, Dogpile, Metacrawler and Startpage, to determine which metasearch engine exhibits the highest level of precision and to identify the metasearch engine that is most likely to return the most relevant search results.Design/methodology/approachThe research is divided into two parts: the first phase involves four queries categorized into two segments (4-Q-2-S), while the second phase includes six queries divided into three segments (6-Q-3-S). These queries vary in complexity, falling into three types: simple, phrase and complex. The precision, average precision and the presence of duplicates across all the evaluated metasearch engines are determined.FindingsThe study clearly demonstrated that Startpage returned the most relevant results and achieved the highest precision (0.98) among the four MSEs. Conversely, DuckDuckGo exhibited consistent performance across both phases of the study.Research limitations/implicationsThe study only evaluated four metasearch engines, which may not be representative of all available metasearch engines. Additionally, a limited number of queries were used, which may not be sufficient to generalize the findings to all types of queries.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study can be valuable for accreditation agencies in managing duplicates, improving their search capabilities and obtaining more relevant and precise results. These findings can also assist users in selecting the best metasearch engine based on precision rather than interface.Originality/valueThe study is the first of its kind which evaluates the four metasearch engines. No similar study has been conducted in the past to measure the performance of metasearch engines.
Low pH condition impairs BP‐IgG binding to the basement membrane zone
Authors: Im Dongjun , Ueda Keisuke , Niwa Hirofumi , Tanaka Kayoko , Iwata Hiroaki 
Published: March 2024

AbstractBullous pemphigoid (BP), an autoimmune subepidermal blistering disease, shows tense blisters associated with urticarial erythema. Tissue‐bound Immunoglobulin G (IgG) at the basement membrane zone (BMZ) detected by direct immunofluorescence (DIF) is strong evidence for a diagnosis of BP. The sensitivity of DIF is higher in complement component 3 (C3) than in IgG, but the reason for this different sensitivity is not fully understood. In this study, we performed several ex vivo studies to investigate the possible mechanism of IgG negativity and C3 positivity at the BMZ by DIF in some BP cases. First, sera from BP patients showing IgG negativity by DIF were found to clearly react to the BMZ in their own DIF skin samples. Next, indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) was performed using sera diluted with different pH phosphate‐buffered saline (PBS), pH 7.4, 6.0, and 3.0. Patients' sera diluted with pH 7.4 PBS showed linear staining at the BMZ, but sera diluted with pH 6.0 PBS and pH 3.0 PBS showed lower fluorescence intensities. Finally, sections of skin from BP patients were pre‐incubated with different pH PBS (pH 3.0, 6.0, and 7.4), followed by staining with anti‐human IgG and C3. The fluorescence intensities were notably lower for IgG and C3 that had been pre‐incubated with pH 3.0 PBS and pH 6.0 PBS than for IgG and C3 that had been pre‐incubated with pH 7.4 PBS. These results suggest that a low pH condition hinders the binding of autoantibodies to the BMZ, that is, the drop in tissue pH induced by inflammation inhibits autoantibodies from depositing at the BMZ. Furthermore, the drop in tissue pH causes tissue‐bound autoantibodies to detach from the BMZ. Complement fragments are activated not only on IgG but also on the cell surface of cells close to IgG during complement activation. IgG may detach from the BMZ under low pH condition induced by inflammation, but some complement fragments remain at the BMZ. These phenomena may help to explain why C3 is more sensitive than IgG when DIF is used to diagnose BP.
Scalable semantic 3D mapping of coral reefs with deep learning
Authors: Sauder Jonathan , Banc‐Prandi Guilhem , Meibom Anders , Tuia Devis 
Published: March 2024

Abstract

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on our planet, and essential to the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people who depend on them for food security, income from tourism and coastal protection. Unfortunately, most coral reefs are existentially threatened by global climate change and local anthropogenic pressures. To better understand the dynamics underlying deterioration of reefs, monitoring at high spatial and temporal resolution is key. However, conventional monitoring methods for quantifying coral cover and species abundance are limited in scale due to the extensive manual labor required. Although computer vision tools have been employed to aid in this process, in particular structure‐from‐motion (SfM) photogrammetry for 3D mapping and deep neural networks for image segmentation, analysis of the data products creates a bottleneck, effectively limiting their scalability.

This paper presents a new paradigm for mapping underwater environments from ego‐motion video, unifying 3D mapping systems that use machine learning to adapt to challenging conditions under water, combined with a modern approach for semantic segmentation of images.

The method is exemplified on coral reefs in the northern Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea, demonstrating high‐precision 3D semantic mapping at unprecedented scale with significantly reduced required labor costs: given a trained model, a 100 m video transect acquired within 5 min of diving with a cheap consumer‐grade camera can be fully automatically transformed into a semantic point cloud within 5 min. We demonstrate the spatial accuracy of our method and the semantic segmentation performance (of at least 80% total accuracy), and publish a large dataset of ego‐motion videos from the northern Gulf of Aqaba, along with a dataset of video frames annotated for dense semantic segmentation of benthic classes.

Our approach significantly scales up coral reef monitoring by taking a leap towards fully automatic analysis of video transects. The method advances coral reef transects by reducing the labor, equipment, logistics, and computing cost. This can help to inform conservation policies more efficiently. The underlying computational method of learning‐based Structure‐from‐Motion has broad implications for fast low‐cost mapping of underwater environments other than coral reefs.
Flock health planning: How to move from a plan to a reflective planning process in Northern Irish sheep flocks?
Authors: Crawford Paul E. , Hamer Kim , Lovatt Fiona , Behnke Malgorzata C. , Robinson Philip A. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractFlock health planning has been advocated as part of a wider drive within livestock production for veterinarians and farmers to adopt a prevention‐focused approach to veterinary medicine. This approach has, at its core, a cyclical process of assessment, evaluation, action and re‐assessment, and is documented, at least in summary, in a health plan (HP). The HP has become a defining pillar of farm quality assurance schemes (QASs), introduced to address calls for greater transparency and accountability in food production. There is limited current information on the attitudes and behaviours surrounding flock HPs in the sheep sector and the barriers to greater involvement in an active process of continual improvement through reflective flock health planning. This study aims to address these issues with reference to the national flock in Northern Ireland. A mixed‐methods approach was used to explore farmers' and veterinarians' opinions and behaviours related to QASs and HP, with data obtained through an online scoping questionnaire, semi‐structured interviews with 27 farmers and 15 veterinarians, and discussion groups with farmers and veterinarians. No evidence of a positive association between a farm having a HP and implementation of 12 industry‐recommended flock health activities was identified using the Fisher's exact test. Farmers reported a reluctance to pay for veterinary advice while some veterinarians reported a lack of time to develop HPs for farmers, and sheep‐related work generally. Farmers predominantly saw the HP as a static, physical document, which had limited impact on their management practices, rather than a proactive, reflective and collaborative planning process. Veterinarians tasked with completing HPs felt restricted by limited knowledge of on‐farm practices, flock production data and a lack of confidence in the accuracy of on‐farm medicine records. This led some to believe that the HPs may fail to address critical issues. A new approach to engage farmers and veterinarians together in active flock health planning needs to be developed. This will need a sustainable delivery plan. Then the focus can be shifted towards ongoing reflective health planning to drive change for the betterment of sheep health and welfare.
The aged microenvironment impairs BCL6 and CD40L induction in CD4+ T follicular helper cell differentiation
Authors: Fisher Jacob S. , Adán‐Barrientos Irene , Kumar Naveen R. , Lancaster Jessica N. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractWeakened germinal center responses by the aged immune system result in diminished immunity against pathogens and reduced efficacy of vaccines. Prolonged contacts between activated B cells and CD4+ T cells are crucial to germinal center formation and T follicular helper cell (Tfh) differentiation, but it is unclear how aging impacts the quality of this interaction. Peptide immunization confirmed that aged mice have decreased expansion of antigen‐specific germinal center B cells and reduced antibody titers. Furthermore, aging was associated with accumulated Tfh cells, even in naïve mice. Despite increased numbers, aged Tfh had reduced expression of master transcription factor BCL6 and increased expression of the ectonucleotidase CD39. In vitro activation revealed that proliferative capacity was maintained in aged CD4+ T cells, but not the costimulatory molecule CD40L. When activated in vitro by aged antigen‐presenting cells, young CD4+ naïve T cells generated reduced numbers of activated cells with upregulated CD40L. To determine the contribution of cell‐extrinsic influences on antigen‐specific Tfh induction, young, antigen‐specific B and CD4+ T cells were adoptively transferred into aged hosts prior to peptide immunization. Transferred cells had reduced expansion and differentiation into germinal center B cell and Tfh and reduced antigen‐specific antibody titers when compared to young hosts. Young CD4+ T cells transferred aged hosts differentiated into Tfh cells with reduced PD‐1 and BCL6 expression, and increased CD39 expression, though they maintained their mitochondrial capacity. These results highlight the role of the lymphoid microenvironment in modulating CD4+ T cell differentiation, which contributes to impaired establishment and maintenance of germinal centers.
Effects of chronic mild stress induced from peripuberty on sexual behavior in male rats, with or without escitalopram treatment
Authors: Fischer Leonardo Wensing , Nunes Marina , Mendes Talita Biude , Simas Joana Noguères , Bernardi Maria Martha , de Oliva Samara Urban , Miraglia Sandra Maria 
Published: March 2024

AbstractBackgroundAfter the Coronavirus Disease pandemic, depression became more present, including in adolescents. Escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, was approved in 2009 for treatment of the major depressive disorder, both in children and adolescents. The undesirable effects of antidepressants on sexual dysfunction are usually underestimated.AimsTo investigate the effects of chronic mild stress, induced from peripuberty up to adulthood, on male sexual behavior parameters, with or without the escitalopram treatment, using rats as experimental model in a translational study.Materials and methodsForty‐four peripubertal male rats were distributed into four groups: Sham control, escitalopram, stress, and stress + escitalopram. The chronic mild stress consisted of nine different stressors randomly applied one per day, for 8 weeks (from 41 to 97 days postpartum). Escitalopram therapy by gavage (10 mg/kg) started at 70 days postpartum and lasted for 4 weeks. The male sexual behavior parameters were evaluated at 114 days postpartum. After that, euthanasia was performed for blood and testis collection. Histopathology of the testes and plasmatic testosterone level were carried out.ResultsThere was a reduction in sexual activity and motivation in rats exposed to the stress protocol, which were treated or not with escitalopram, as well as an increase in the total number of mounts in animals exposed to the stress and treated with escitalopram. The testosterone levels were lower in animals exposed to the stress, which were or not treated with escitalopram (stress and stress + escitalopram). The frequency of histologically normal seminiferous tubule sections was lower in animals that were exposed to the stress and/or received escitalopram (escitalopram, stress, and stress + escitalopram).ConclusionChronic mild stress induced from peripuberty, associated or not to escitalopram treatment, altered the testosterone levels and testicular histoarchitecture and seems to be related to the reduction in male sexual motivation.
Effects of edaravone on testicular torsion–detorsion injury in rats
Authors: Şahin Yaşar , Üstüner Evren , Tutun Hidayet , Yildirim Ebru , Eroğlu Oğuz , Kurtdede Efe , Ozkabadayi Yasin , Güncüm Enes , Kutluca Kürşat , Bilge Ahmet Bilgehan 
Published: March 2024

AbstractBackground and objectiveThis study aimed to assess the protective ability of edaravone on testicular torsion–detorsion injury in rats.MethodsEighteen adult male Sprague–Dawley rats were randomly divided into three groups: Sham group (control, n = 6); testicular torsion/detorsion (T/D group, n = 6) and T/D+edaravone (T/D+E group, n = 6). The spermatic cords of rats of the T/D group and the T/D+E group were rotated 720° in a clockwise direction and maintained for 120 min in this torsion position. Around 90 min after the torsion, edaravone at a dose of 10 mg/kg dissolved in saline was administered IP to the T/D+E group. The testicle was counter‐rotated to its normal position to allow reperfusion for 4 h. Left testes of each animal were excised 240 min after beginning of reperfusion. Oxidative stress markers (TAS, TOS, SOD, and MDA) and apoptotic pathways (Caspase 3, Caspase 8, Caspase 9, Bcl‐2, and Bax,) were assessed by ELISA methods. Also, testicles were subjected to the histopathologic and ultrasound examinations.ResultsUltrasound imaging showed that edaravone reduced the surface area and increased vascularization in testicles with T/D (p < 0.0001, p < 0.05, respectively). Edaravone pretreatment markedly decreased the levels of MDA, TOS, Bcl‐2, Bax, Caspase 3, Caspase 8, and Caspase 9 (p < 0.0001). Also, it increased significantly TAS levels (p < 0.0001) and reduced insignificantly SOD activity. Histopathologic examinations demonstrated that edaravone significantly attenuated the histological damage caused by T/D in testicles.ConclusionTaken together, the findings indicate that pretreatment of edaravone has protective effect against testicular T/D injury.