bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Entropy-based fuzzy clustering of interval-valued time series
Authors: Vitale Vincenzina , D’Urso Pierpaolo , De Giovanni Livia , Mattera Raffaele 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThis paper proposes a fuzzy C-medoids-based clustering method with entropy regularization to solve the issue of grouping complex data as interval-valued time series. The dual nature of the data, that are both time-varying and interval-valued, needs to be considered and embedded into clustering techniques. In this work, a new dissimilarity measure, based on Dynamic Time Warping, is proposed. The performance of the new clustering procedure is evaluated through a simulation study and an application to financial time series.
Comparison of Methods in the Serologic Diagnosis of Cystic Echinococcosis
Authors: Erganis Sidre , Sarzhanov Fakhriddin , Al Funda Doğruman , Cağlar Kayhan 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Purpose
Cystic echinococcosis (CE) is caused by the larval form of Echinococcus granulosus. Clinical, radiologic, pathologic, and serologic findings should be evaluated together for the diagnosis of CE. The sensitivity and specificity oalf serologic tests may vary depending on the method used. In this study, we aimed to detect IgG antibodies specific to E. granulosus using indirect hemagglutination assay (IHA), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), indirect fluorescent antibodies (IFA) and western blot (WB) tests.

Methods
In our study, the serum samples of 74 patients sent to our laboratory with suspicion of CE were studied using two different commercial IHA tests, ELISA, IFA and WB test. The test results were evaluated along with radiological findings and histopathological examinations, the latter being the gold standard.

Results
Of all the patients, 51 (69%) were female and 23 (31%) were male. There was a statistically significant difference between males and females (χ2 = 9.7, p = 0.002). Out of 74 patients, positivity rates for Siemens IHA, Fumouze IHA, ELISA, IFA and WB test were positive as 33 (44.6%), 35 (47.3%), 43 (58.1%), 42 (56.7%) and 38 (51.3%), respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of the tests were as follows: 66.67 and 2.31% for Siemens IHA; 70.83% and 96.15% for Fumouze IHA; 85.42%, and 88.46% for ELISA; 83.33% and 88.46% for IFA; 72.92% and 88.46% for WB test.

Conclusion
There were statistically significant differences in between all five methods (p < 0,001). While the tests with the highest specificity was Fumouze IHA, the test with the highest sensitivity was the ELISA test. It was concluded that IHA and ELISA tests were more practical in practice because of their greater applicability.
Improving Energy Harvesting from Cantilever-like Structures Based on Beam Geometry
Authors: Kurt Polat , Orhan Sadettin 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Purpose
Power gain from piezoelectric harvesters depends on several parameters and one of them is to design the substructure as to increase the mechanical strain occurred in the piezoelectric material. In this study, the effect of geometrical modification of the beam on the harvested power was investigated and new geometries were offered for increased power response from cantilever type energy harvesters.

Method
First, the effectiveness of auxetic structures on harvested power was investigated to see the effect of the negative Poisson’s ratio on harvested power. These structures are very popular in recent years on energy harvesting applications; however, their performances were generally compared to plain structures which is not a fair comparison. Rather, in this study, their performances were compared to non-auxetic nonlinear structures as well as plain geometry. Then, three new shapes inspired by re-entrant auxetic structure were presented for increased power response, and harvested power from these structures were evaluated under different conditions.

Results
It was shown that the power gain from auxetic structures is very high compared to plain structures; however, this increase in power could also be achieved using a non-auxetic simple rectangular structure in some cases. On the other hand, new geometries offered in this study performed better than the auxetic and non-auxetic geometries in most cases.
Recognizing Bearings’ Degradation Stage Using Multimodal Autoencoder to Learn Features from Different Time Series
Authors: Alfeo Antonio Luca , Cimino Mario G. C. A. , Gagliardi Guido 
Published: March 2024

AbstractUtilizing machine learning technologies to monitor assets’ health conditions can improve the effectiveness of maintenance activities. However, accurately recognizing the current health degradation stages of industrial assets requires a time-consuming manual feature extraction due to the wide range of observable measures (e.g., temperature, vibration) and behaviors characterizing assets’ degradation. To address this issue, feature learning technology can transform minimally processed time series into informative features, i.e., able to simplify the classification task (e.g., recognizing degradation stages) regardless of the specific machine learning classifier employed. In this work, minimally preprocessed time series of vibration and temperature of industrial bearings are exploited by an autoencoder-based architecture to extract degradation-representative features to be used for recognizing their degradation stages. Different autoencoder architectures are employed to compare their data fusion strategies. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of recognition performance and the quality of the learned features by using a publicly available real-world dataset and comparing the proposed approach against a state-of-the-art feature learning technology. We tested three different multimodal autoencoder-based feature learning approaches, i.e., shared-input autoencoder (SAE), multimodal autoencoder (MMAE), and partition-based autoencoder (PAE). All the AE-based architecture results in classification performances greater or comparable with the state-of-the-art feature learning technology, despite being trained in an unsupervised fashion. Also, the features provided via PAE correspond to the greatest performances in recognizing bearings’ degradation stage, providing high-quality features both from a classification and clustering perspective. Unsupervised feature learning methodologies based on multimodal autoencoders are capable of learning high-quality features. These result in greater degradation stages recognition performances when compared to supervised state-of-the-art feature learning technology. Also, this enables the correct representation of the expected progressive degradation of the bearing.
Embedded Object Detection and Mapping in Soft Materials Using Optical Tactile Sensing
Authors: Solano-Castellanos Jose A. , Do Won Kyung , Kennedy Monroe D. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractIn this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the location of the embedded objects is built using a Bayesian approach. The exploration phase is then followed by a mapping phase which exploits the probabilistic map to reconstruct the underlying topography of the workspace by sampling in more detail regions where there are expected to be embedded objects. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we tested our approach on an experimental setup that consists of a series of quartz beads located underneath a polyethylene foam that prevents direct observation of the configuration and requires the use of tactile exploration to recover the location of the beads. We show the performance of our methodology using ten different configurations of the beads where the proposed approach is able to approximate the underlying configuration. We benchmark our results against a random sampling policy. Our empirical results show that our method outperforms the fully random policy in both the exploration and mapping phases. The exploration phase produces a better probabilistic map with fewer samples which enables an earlier transition to the mapping phase to reconstruct the underlying shape. On both the exploration and mapping phases, our proposed method presents a better consistency as compared to the random policy, with smaller standard deviation across the ten different bead configurations.
MPC-Based Routing and Tracking Architecture for Safe Autonomous Driving in Urban Traffic
Authors: Emam Mostafa , Gerdts Matthias 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThis paper presents a configurable routing and tracking architecture that uses multi-objective Model Predictive Control (MPC) as its driving algorithm to guarantee safe autonomous driving of different vehicle types. The architecture consists of three main components and primarily relies on labeled map data to generate optimal path and velocity trajectories in accordance with the vehicle type and the desired control objectives. We begin with introducing the overall system architecture and its different inputs, outputs, and components. We also briefly explain the open-source services utilized in this work for trajectory generation, namely OpenStreetMap and GraphHopper. We then focus on formulating the multi-objective MPC problem and its vehicle-specific constraints, which is solved offline to generate the reference path and velocity trajectories. Afterwards, we discuss some adaptions to the system model and the controller operating strategy to incorporate real-time tracking of these trajectories while guaranteeing collision avoidance. Finally, we successfully demonstrate the system’s feasibility by numerically evaluating its performance in a typical urban driving scenario for different vehicles.
Insular dwarfism in horses from the Aegean Sea and the Japanese archipelago
Authors: Ming Keesha M. , Le Verger Kévin , Geiger Madeleine , Schmelzle Thomas , Georgalis Georgios L. , Shimbo Genya , Sasaki Motoki , Ohdachi Satoshi D. , Sánchez-Villagra Marcelo R. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractThe horse (Equus caballus) varieties from Skyros and Rhodes islands (Greece) in the Aegean archipelago are extremely small, reaching shoulder heights of only about 1 m. Furthermore, the Japanese archipelago is home to eight small, native horse breeds. We investigated the evolutionary morphology and provided a review of historical documentations of these horses of cultural interest in Greece and Japan, thus providing a comparison of the independent evolution of small size in islands. We integrate cranial data from historical literature with data from newly gathered and curated skulls and analyse a measurement dataset featuring various domestic and mainland horse breeds and varieties. We use non-invasive imaging to study and measure 3D models of the bony labyrinth, housing the inner ear, and the braincase endocast. When considering the effects of allometry by regressing each PC1 scores (for each set of measurements) with the cranial geometric mean from linear measurements as a body size proxy, we show that size explains a large amount of the shape variation in horse crania, the bony labyrinths and brain endocasts. We found high intrabreed variation in all the analysed datasets. Globally, there are at least 30 distinct horse populations on islands, offering the chance to further study processes of convergence in morphological divergence and evaluate the effect of drift and the environment.
Australia in World Affairs 1961–1965
Authors: Greenwood Gordon , Harper Norman 
Published: March 2024

The Australia in World Affairs series commenced in 1950 and provides a continuous, researched scholarly account of Australia's foreign policy. The third volume, Australia in World Affairs 1961–1965, is crowded with major events, with the tension over Berlin, acrimonious disputes over nuclear testing and the advance to the brink of war with Cuba. Chinese troops crossed the Indian frontiers, and Indian and Pakistani armies faced one another. Indonesia's confrontation of Malaysia challenged the security and stability of yet another area of South-East Asia. The United Nations suffered a grave financial crisis which threatened to bring the organisation to a halt. There were, too, events of measureless consequence: the explosion of the Chinese atomic bomb; the bitter controversy between China and the Soviet Union, which shattered the seemingly monolithic structure of Communism; the increasing US involvement in the defence of South Vietnam; and the continued probing of outer space.
Spatial Heterogeneity of the Respiratory Health Impacts of Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 in California
Authors: Do V. , Chen C. , Benmarhnia T. , Casey J. A. 
Published: March 2024

AbstractWildfire smoke fine particles (PM2.5) are a growing public health threat as wildfire events become more common and intense under climate change, especially in the Western United States. Studies assessing the association between wildfire PM2.5 exposure and health typically summarize the effects over the study area. However, health responses to wildfire PM2.5 may vary spatially. We evaluated spatially‐varying respiratory acute care utilization risks associated with short‐term exposure to wildfire PM2.5 and explored community characteristics possibly driving spatial heterogeneity. Using ensemble‐modeled daily wildfire PM2.5, we defined a wildfire smoke day to have wildfire‐specific PM2.5 concentration ≥15 μg/m3. We included daily respiratory emergency department visits and unplanned hospitalizations in 1,396 California ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) and 15 census‐derived community characteristics. Employing a case‐crossover design and conditional logistic regression, we observed increased odds of respiratory acute care utilization on wildfire smoke days at the state level (odds ratio [OR] = 1.06, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.05, 1.07). Across air basins, ORs ranged from 0.88 to 1.57, with the highest effect estimate in San Diego. A within‐community matching design and spatial Bayesian hierarchical model also revealed spatial heterogeneity in ZCTA‐level rate differences. For example, communities with a higher percentage of Black or Pacific Islander residents had stronger wildfire PM2.5‐outcome relationships, while more air conditioning and tree canopy attenuated associations. We found an important heterogeneity in wildfire smoke‐related health impacts across air basins, counties, and ZCTAs, and we identified characteristics of vulnerable communities, providing evidence to guide policy development and resource allocation.
Seismic Observation of a New ULVZ Beneath the Southern Pacific
Authors: Li Zhi , Martin Carl , Cottaar Sanne 
Published: March 2024

AbstractWe present new observations of core‐diffracted shear waves which contain anomalous waveforms sampling the lowermost mantle beneath the southern Pacific region. Data in two distinct geometries, one from New Zealand to North America and the other from the Fiji and Solomon Islands to South America, show evidence of postcursor phases. The postcursor delays and move‐outs imply that they are caused by an ultra‐low velocity zone (ULVZ). Beamforming analyses of the observed diffracted postcursors show a strong backazimuthal deviation, suggesting this new ULVZ is likely to have a cylindrical shape similar to broad ULVZs sampled by shear diffracted waves elsewhere. Full‐waveform modeling suggests that the postcursors seen in North America might be due to the previously modeled ULVZ located to the west of the Galápagos, while those seen in South America are due to a previously unknown ULVZ beneath the Southern Pacific. We cannot fit observations in both geometries by a single ULVZ. For the new location, we propose one cylindrical ULVZ model with a radius of 400 km and a shear wave velocity decrease of 20% centered at geographical coordinates (−33.6, 130) close to the Pitcairn hotspot. Despite some uncertainty in the west‐east direction, this new ULVZ observation likely provides another example to support the hypothesis that ULVZs exist at the base of mantle plumes where primordial signatures are observed in the ocean island basalts.
Effect of pacifier and pacifier with dextrose in reducing pain during orogastric tube insertion in newborns: a randomized controlled trial*
Authors: Akkaya-Gül Ayşenur , Özyazıcıoğlu Nurcan 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Objective
This study aimed to assess the efficacy of pacifier use, with and without 25% dextrose, in reducing pain during orogastric tube insertion in newborns.

Study design
In a randomized controlled trial involving 60 newborns at a public hospital from April to December 2019, participants were divided into three groups: pacifier (n = 20), pacifier with 25% dextrose (n = 20), and control (n = 20). A pacifier, with and without dextrose, was used for the experimental groups, while the control group performed a routine procedure. Neonatal infant pain scale, crying duration, heart rate (HR), and oxygen saturation (SpO2) were evaluated.

Results
Results indicated that the control group experienced significantly higher pain levels, elevated HRs, decreased SpO2, and prolonged crying. Conversely, the pacifier with 25% dextrose group showed a notable reduction in crying duration.

Conclusion
A pacifier, with and without 25% dextrose, effectively reduces pain and improves physiological and behavioral parameters during orogastric tube insertion.

Clinical trial number
NCT05462964

Clinical trial registration
The protocol for this randomized controlled experimental trial is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. The clinical trial registration number is https://clinicaltrials.gov; NCT05462964.
Simultaneous detection of the shuttling motion of liquid metal droplets in channels under alternating pressure and capacitive sensor signals
Authors: Bono Shinji , Nakai Ryotaro , Konishi Satoshi 
Published: March 2024

AbstractImplementing a signal-switching mechanism for the selective use of integrated sensors and actuators plays a crucial role in streamlining the functionality of miniaturized devices. Here, a liquid metal droplet (LMD)-based signal-switching mechanism is introduced to achieve such functionality. Pressure modulation with a 100-μm spatial resolution enabled precise control of the position of the LMDs within a channel. After integrating the channel with asymmetrically structured electrodes, the effect of the shuttle-like movement of LMD on the temporal changes in the overall capacitance was investigated. Consequently, analysis of the capacitive peaks revealed the directional movement of the LMDs, enabling estimation of the position of the LMDs without direct observation. In addition, we achieved successful signal extraction from the capacitive sensor that was linked to the activated electrodes, thereby enabling selective data retrieval. The proposed signal-switching mechanism method achieved a detection accuracy of ~0.1 pF. The sensor’s ability to simultaneously detect the LMD position and generate a signal underscores its significant potential for multiplexing in multisensing systems, particularly in concealed environments, such as in vivo settings.
Brain stars take the lead during critical periods of early postnatal brain development: relevance of astrocytes in health and mental disorders
Authors: Vivi Eugenia , Di Benedetto Barbara 
Published: March 2024

AbstractIn the brain, astrocytes regulate shape and functions of the synaptic and vascular compartments through a variety of released factors and membrane-bound proteins. An imbalanced astrocyte activity can therefore have drastic negative impacts on brain development, leading to the onset of severe pathologies. Clinical and pre-clinical studies show alterations in astrocyte cell number, morphology, molecular makeup and astrocyte-dependent processes in different affected brain regions in neurodevelopmental (ND) and neuropsychiatric (NP) disorders. Astrocytes proliferate, differentiate and mature during the critical period of early postnatal brain development, a time window of elevated glia-dependent regulation of a proper balance between synapse formation/elimination, which is pivotal in refining synaptic connectivity. Therefore, any intrinsic and/or extrinsic factors altering these processes during the critical period may result in an aberrant synaptic remodeling and onset of mental disorders. The peculiar bridging position of astrocytes between synaptic and vascular compartments further allows them to “compute” the brain state and consequently secrete factors in the bloodstream, which may serve as diagnostic biomarkers of distinct healthy or disease conditions. Here, we collect recent advancements regarding astrogenesis and astrocyte-mediated regulation of neuronal network remodeling during early postnatal critical periods of brain development, focusing on synapse elimination. We then propose alternative hypotheses for an involvement of aberrancies in these processes in the onset of ND and NP disorders. In light of the well-known differential prevalence of certain brain disorders between males and females, we also discuss putative sex-dependent influences on these neurodevelopmental events. From a translational perspective, understanding age- and sex-dependent astrocyte-specific molecular and functional changes may help to identify biomarkers of distinct cellular (dys)functions in health and disease, favouring the development of diagnostic tools or the selection of tailored treatment options for male/female patients.
Constructing regulable supports via non-stoichiometric engineering to stabilize ruthenium nanoparticles for enhanced pH-universal water splitting
Authors: Zhao Sheng , Hung Sung-Fu , Deng Liming , Zeng Wen-Jing , Xiao Tian , Li Shaoxiong , Kuo Chun-Han , Chen Han-Yi , Hu Feng , Peng Shengjie 
Published: March 2024

AbstractEstablishing appropriate metal-support interactions is imperative for acquiring efficient and corrosion-resistant catalysts for water splitting. Herein, the interaction mechanism between Ru nanoparticles and a series of titanium oxides, including TiO, Ti4O7 and TiO2, designed via facile non-stoichiometric engineering is systematically studied. Ti4O7, with the unique band structure, high conductivity and chemical stability, endows with ingenious metal-support interaction through interfacial Ti–O–Ru units, which stabilizes Ru species during OER and triggers hydrogen spillover to accelerate HER kinetics. As expected, Ru/Ti4O7 displays ultralow overpotentials of 8 mV and 150 mV for HER and OER with a long operation of 500 h at 10 mA cm−2 in acidic media, which is expanded in pH-universal environments. Benefitting from the excellent bifunctional performance, the proton exchange membrane and anion exchange membrane electrolyzer assembled with Ru/Ti4O7 achieves superior performance and robust operation. The work paves the way for efficient energy conversion devices.