bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Müller-Lyer illusion through mental imagery
Authors: Pérez-Fabello María José , Campos Alfredo 
Published: November 2022

AbstractPrevious studies have pointed to a link between visual perception and mental imagery. The present experiment focuses on one of the best-known illusions, the Müller-Lyer illusion, now reproduced under conditions of real perception and by means of imagery. To that purpose, a tailored ad-hoc set of combined figures was presented to a total of 161 fine art students (M age = 20,34, SD = 1,75) who individually worked with two different variations of the Müller-Lyer figures which consisted of a 10 mm long shaft and two fins set at an angle of 30º, being 15 mm long in one instance and 45 mm long in the other. In small groups, participants also completed an image control questionnaire. Results yielded that the longer the oblique lines, the larger the magnitude of the illusion both in the situation of real perception and in the imaginary situation. Also, the magnitude of the illusion augmented in the situation of perception in contrast to the imaginary situation, both with 15 mm long fins and with those of 45 mm. However, no significant differences were found in the magnitude of the illusion between high and low individuals in image control, although interactions between image control and other variables were indeed significant. The consistency of the outcome is a step forward in the study of illusions through mental images and opens the door to new lines of research that could involve innovative methods of analysis, different versions of the illusion and wider groups of participants.
Electrical, Microstructural and Physical Characteristics of Talc-based Cordierite Ceramics
Authors: Yahya Ahmed , Soltan AbdelMonem , Mahani Ragab , El-Kaliouby Baher , Kenawy Sayed , Hamzawy Esmat M A 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
The aim of this work is to study the effect of various talc rocks for the preparation of talc-based cordierite ceramics. Raw talc and sintered cordierite-based ceramic samples (1000-1375ºC for 2 h) were characterized using XRD, XRF, TGA-DTG, laser PSDs, Archimedes method, SEM-EDAX and dielectric relaxation spectrometer (DRS). Results show that impurity oxide contents, particle size and mineralogical changes of green batches influenced the microstructure densification and crystallization of orthorhombic and hexagonal cordierite. The complex electric modulus plot shows the existence of two relaxation processes associated with the capacitive contribution grain boundaries and grain at low and high frequencies, respectively. The dielectric loss reached much lower values (0.0004–0.0007) for the ceramics composed of higher cordierite phase composition (87.00 to 92.00wt.%) that sintered at 1350 and 1375ºC. Such ceramics could be promising in electronic applications like capacitors, microwave devices and wireless communication.
Behavioral economics: who are the investors with the most sustainable stock happiness, and why? Low aspiration, external control, and country domicile may save your lives—monetary wisdom
Authors: Tang Ningyu , Li Zhen , Chen Jingqiu , Tang Thomas Li-Ping 
Published: November 2022

AbstractSlight absolute changes in the Shanghai Stock Exchange Index (SHSE) corresponded to the city’s immediate increases in coronary heart disease deaths and stroke deaths. Significant fluctuations in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Index (SZSE) corresponded to the country’s minor, delayed death rates. Investors deal with money, greed, stock volatility, and risky decision-making. Happy people live longer and better. We ask the following question: Who are the investors with the highest and most sustainable stock happiness, and why? Monetary wisdom asserts: Investors apply their deep-rooted values (avaricious love-of-money aspiration and locus of control, Level 2) as a lens to frame critical concerns in the proximal-immediate (Shanghai Stock Exchange Index changes, Level 1) and the omnibus-distal contexts (domicile: city vs. country, Level 2) to maximize expected utility (portfolio changes, Level 1) and ultimate serenity (stock happiness, Level 1). We collected multilevel data—the longitudinal SHSE and 227 private investors’ daily stock happiness and portfolio changes for 36 consecutive trading days in four regions of China. Investors had an average liquid asset of $76,747.41 and $54,660.85 in stocks. This study is not a “one-shot” game with “nothing at stake.” We classified Shanghai and Beijing as the city and Shenzhen and Chongqing as the country. Our cross-level 3-D visualization reveals that regardless of SHSE volatility, investors with low aspiration, external control, and country domicile enjoy the highest and most sustainable stock happiness with minimum fluctuations. Independently, investors with low aspiration, external control, and country domicile tend to make fewer portfolio changes than their counterparts. Behaviorally, less is more, debunking the myth—risky decisions excite stock happiness. Our longitudinal study expands prospect theory, incorporates attitude toward money, and makes robust contributions to behavioral economics and business ethics. We help investors and ordinary citizens make happy, healthy, and wealthy decisions. Most importantly, the life you save may be your own.
Disaster Risk Governance as Assemblage: The Chilean Framework of the 1985 San Antonio Earthquake
Authors: González Daniela P. 
Published: November 2022

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to analyze disaster risk governance through assemblage theory, identifying how—during the altered political context of a military regime with a centralized disaster risk management as in the case of Chile in 1985—new actors emerge during the disaster response phase as a de/reterritorialization effect that is influenced by their agencies and relationships, disfiguring the edges of the assemblage. Based on this conceptualization, it is possible to investigate the interactions between the different actors, their power relations, and their reconfigurations in the governance exercise. For this purpose, we reviewed the response phase of the 1985 San Antonio earthquake that affected the central zone of Chile, where strategic functions, institutions, and forms of power are concentrated. To describe and visualize the actors during the response phase in the disaster risk governance framework, a map of actors was developed that identifies the existing relationships and their different weights. The central scale proved to be dominant and occupied a political space that was transfigured by its overrepresentation—enforced by allies such as the banking system and business associations—enhancing a neoliberal agenda. The leaps in scale from the central scale to the local scale cancel agency of the last, destabilizing its capacity to deal with the effects of the earthquake and isolating it from the decision-making processes. Consequently, delays in providing aid demonstrate that authoritarian governments do not provide better management in the disaster response phase.
DynK-hydra: improved dynamic architecture ensembling for efficient inference
Authors: Ileni Tudor Alexandru , Darabant Adrian Sergiu , Borza Diana Laura , Marinescu Alexandru Ion 
Published: November 2022

AbstractAccessibility on edge devices and the trade-off between latency and accuracy is an area of interest in deploying deep learning models. This paper explores a Mixture of Experts system, namely, DynK-Hydra, which allows training of an ensemble formed of multiple similar branches on data sets with a high number of classes, but uses, during the inference, only a subset of necessary branches. We achieve this by training a cohort of specialized branches (deep network of reduced size) and a gater/supervisor, that decides dynamically what branch to use for any specific input. An original contribution is that the number of chosen models is dynamically set, based on how confident the gater is (similar works use a static parameter for this). Another contribution is the way we ensure the branches’ specialization. We divide the data set classes into multiple clusters, and we assign a cluster to each branch while enforcing its specialization on this cluster by a separate loss function. We evaluate DynK-Hydra on CIFAR-100, Food-101, CUB-200, and ImageNet32 data sets and we obtain improvements of up to 4.3% accuracy compared with state-of-the-art ResNet. All this while reducing the number of inference flops by a factor of 2–5.5 times. Compared to a similar work (HydraRes), we obtain marginal accuracy improvements of up to 1.2% on the pairwise inference time architectures. However, we improve the inference times by up to 2.8 times compared to HydraRes.
A swarm-optimizer-assisted simulation and prediction model for emerging infectious diseases based on SEIR
Authors: Shi Xuan-Li , Wei Feng-Feng , Chen Wei-Neng 
Published: November 2022

AbstractMechanism-driven models based on transmission dynamics and statistic models driven by public health data are two main methods for simulating and predicting emerging infectious diseases. In this paper, we intend to combine these two methods to develop a more comprehensive model for the simulation and prediction of emerging infectious diseases. First, we combine a standard epidemic dynamic, the susceptible–exposed–infected–recovered (SEIR) model with population migration. This model can provide a biological spread process for emerging infectious diseases. Second, to determine suitable parameters for the model, we propose a data-driven approach, in which the public health data and population migration data are assembled. Moreover, an objective function is defined to minimize the error based on these data. Third, based on the proposed model, we further develop a swarm-optimizer-assisted simulation and prediction method, which contains two modules. In the first module, we use a level-based learning swarm optimizer to optimize the parameters required in the epidemic mechanism. In the second module, the optimized parameters are used to predicate the spread of emerging infectious diseases. Finally, various experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and method.
A Scoping Review of the Effect of Classroom Acoustic Conditions on Primary School Children’s Numeracy Performance and Listening Comprehension
Authors: Mealings Kiri 
Published: November 2022

AbstractObtaining adequate numeracy skills and listening comprehension skills at primary school are vital for children’s future success. However, classrooms are often noisy and reverberant which may interfere with learning these skills. Two scoping reviews were conducted to synthesise research assessing the effect of different classroom acoustic conditions on (1) children’s numeracy performance and (2) children’s listening comprehension and to identify areas for future research. The PRISMA-ScR protocol was used for these scoping reviews. A comprehensive search of four online databases was conducted in September 2021 using the search term classroom AND (noise OR reverberation OR acoustics) AND (numeracy OR math* OR arithmetic) for the first scoping review, and in May 2022 using the search term classroom AND (acoustic* OR noise OR reverb*) AND ("listening comprehension" OR "auditory comprehension" OR "spoken language comprehension" OR "speech comprehension”) for the second scoping review. The effect of the acoustic conditions on children’s numeracy was varied with most studies showing a negative or no effect of noise, but two showed a positive effect. Therefore, future research is needed to better understand the effect of different classroom acoustic conditions on children’s numeracy performance. For listening comprehension overall, signal-to-noise ratios below + 10 dB mostly had a negative effect on children’s listening comprehension compared to quiet conditions; however, variables such as the noise type, signal-to-noise ratio tested, the listening comprehension domain examined, the population studied, and the voice used for the stimuli affected this. Future research avenues to better understand these effects are proposed.
Generalized class polynomials
Authors: Houben Marc , Streng Marco 
Published: November 2022

AbstractThe Hilbert class polynomial has as roots the j-invariants of elliptic curves whose endomorphism ring is a given imaginary quadratic order. It can be used to compute elliptic curves over finite fields with a prescribed number of points. Since its coefficients are typically rather large, there has been continued interest in finding alternative modular functions whose corresponding class polynomials are smaller. Best known are Weber’s functions, which reduce the size by a factor of 72 for a positive density subset of imaginary quadratic discriminants. On the other hand, Bröker and Stevenhagen showed that no modular function will ever do better than a factor of 100.83. We introduce a generalization of class polynomials, with reduction factors that are not limited by the Bröker–Stevenhagen bound. We provide examples matching Weber’s reduction factor. For an infinite family of discriminants, their reduction factors surpass those of all previously known modular functions by a factor at least 2.
Regional industrial growth and biopharma patent networks: empirical insights from the UK
Authors: Gao Yuan , Zhu Zhen 
Published: November 2022

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought the significance of biopharmaceutical and medical technology sectors to the spotlight. Seeing that some of the most critical medical breakthroughs such as the speedy mRNA vaccine development were results of cross-border patenting collaboration, we have proposed in a previous work a new method to identify the cross-border collaborative regional centres in the patent networks, using a clustering comparison approach based on adjusted mutual information (AMI). In this paper, we focus on the UK industrial landscape. We use the UK bioscience and health technology sector statistics from 2015 to 2020 and look into the regional growth of each postcode area. We compare the top growth regions with the cross-border collaborative centres identified using AMI comparison at the postcode area level, and find that both long-term and short-term AMI gains show an increase in the correlation with regional annual growth rates of firm numbers in the studied sectors from 2016 to 2020, and the increase is more consistent with the short-term AMI gain. We also found that areas more central in the long-term cross-regional R&D collaboration demonstrate a stronger association with more developed industrial settings indicated by more firms and, potentially more employment and turnover in the field. However, AMI gains are found to have negative correlations with the industrial growths as a sign of possible trade-offs of being central.
Combining sentiment analysis classifiers to explore multilingual news articles covering London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics
Authors: Mello Caio , Cheema Gullal S. , Thakkar Gaurish 
Published: November 2022

AbstractThis study aims to present an approach for the challenges of working with Sentiment Analysis (SA) applied to news articles in a multilingual corpus. It looks at the use and combination of multiple algorithms to explore news articles published in English and Portuguese. It presents a methodology that starts by evaluating and combining four SA algorithms (SenticNet, SentiStrength, Vader and BERT, being BERT trained in two datasets) to improve the quality of outputs. A thorough review of the algorithms’ limitations is conducted using SHAP, an explainable AI tool, resulting in a list of issues that researchers must consider before using SA to interpret texts. We propose a combination of the three best classifiers (Vader, Amazon BERT and Sent140 BERT) to identify contradictory results, improving the quality of the positive, neutral and negative labels assigned to the texts. Challenges with translation are addressed, indicating possible solutions for non-English corpora. As a case study, the method is applied to the study of the media coverage of London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympic legacies. The combination of different classifiers has proved to be efficient, revealing the unbalance between the media coverage of London 2012, much more positive, and Rio 2016, more negative.
Transforming Waste to Wealth, Achieving Circular Economy
Authors: Kalkanis Konstantinos , Alexakis Dimitrios E. , Kyriakis Efstathios , Kiskira Kyriaki , Lorenzo-Llanes Junior , Themelis Nickolas J. , Psomopoulos Constantinos S. 
Published: November 2022

AbstractWastes are usually thought of as unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance which is discarded after primary use, or considered worthless, defective, and of no use. The term is often subjective, as not every application has identical raw material requirements and sometimes even objectively inaccurate. A starting point towards managing waste is the division in basic categories, ranging from municipal and agricultural waste to radioactive and explosive waste. Through proper collection of municipal solid waste, very important metals and other valuable sources can be recovered and used in new products, thus achieving significantly lower production cost and environmental impact. Success stories in waste management are reported in countries around the world. These typically showcase optimal waste transformation to wealth. Furthermore, applied waste management methods are specified. These actions should be adapted by every organization handling waste. At a managerial level, these must be considered as potential resources, commodities with significant economic, environmental and sociological added value. This paper attempts to identify and present the valuable resources and products that exist in waste streams, focusing mainly on their monetary value, based on data recovered from literature and raw materials stock markets. Municipal solid waste and non-hazardous commercial and industrial wastes are considered in this context. The methodology followed was based on identification and analysis of cities-communities and countries that have successfully adopted waste management policies towards circular economy and waste to wealth transformation.
Effects of Erythrocytapheresis Procedures on Delayed Bone Marrow Conversion in Sickle Cell Disease
Authors: Popham Emily , Moeller Karen , Raj Ashok 
Published: November 2022

AbstractThe imaging appearances of the skeletal system have been well documented in sickle cell disease (SCD) but there is limited information about the impact of SCD treatments on skeletal abnormalities. We present two patients with SCD maintained on long-term erythrocytapheresis and the changes to their skeletal abnormalities on neuroimaging with this treatment. We observed a reversal of the bone marrow conversion process and the skull appearance was age appropriate without any radiographic findings of iron overload in the patients.
Non-abelian Mellin transformations and applications
Authors: Liu Yongqiang , Maxim Laurenţiu , Wang Botong 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
We study non-abelian versions of the Mellin transformations, originally introduced by Gabber-Loeser on complex affine tori. Our main result is a generalisation to the non-abelian context and with arbitrary coefficients of the t-exactness of Gabber-Loeser’s Mellin transformation. As an intermediate step, we obtain vanishing results for the Sabbah specialisation functors. Our main application is to construct new examples of duality spaces in the sense of Bieri-Eckmann, generalising results of Denham-Suciu.
Implementation of a 24-hour infection diagnosis protocol in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU)
Authors: Chitalia Reema A. , Benscoter Alexis L. , Chlebowski Meghan M. , Hart Kelsey J , Iliopoulos Ilias , Misfeldt Andrew M. , Sawyer Jaclyn E. , Alten Jeffrey A. 
Published: November 2022

AbstractObjectives:To reduce unnecessary antibiotic exposure in a pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU).Design:Single-center, quality improvement initiative. Monthly antibiotic utilization rates were compared between 12-month baseline and 18-month intervention periods.Setting:A 25-bed pediatric CICU.Patients:Clinically stable patients undergoing infection diagnosis were included. Patients with immunodeficiency, mechanical circulatory support, open sternum, and recent culture-positive infection were excluded.Interventions:The key drivers for improvement were standardizing the infection diagnosis process, order-set creation, limitation of initial antibiotic prescription to 24 hours, discouraging indiscriminate vancomycin use, and improving bedside communication and situational awareness regarding the infection diagnosis protocol.Results:In total, 109 patients received the protocol; antibiotics were discontinued in 24 hours in 72 cases (66%). The most common reasons for continuing antibiotics beyond 24 hours were positive culture (n = 13) and provider preference (n = 13). A statistical process control analysis showed only a trend in monthly mean antibiotic utilization rate in the intervention period compared to the baseline period: 32.6% (SD, 6.1%) antibiotic utilization rate during the intervention period versus 36.6% (SD, 5.4%) during the baseline period (mean difference, 4%; 95% CI, −0.5% to −8.5%; P = .07). However, a special-cause variation represented a 26% reduction in mean monthly vancomycin use during the intervention period. In the patients who had antibiotics discontinued at 24 hours, delayed culture positivity was rare.Conclusions:Implementation of a protocol limiting empiric antibiotic courses to 24 hours in clinically stable, standard-risk, pediatric CICU patients with negative cultures is feasible. This practice appears safe and may reduce harm by decreasing unnecessary antibiotic exposure.
On moments of downward passage times for spectrally negative Lévy processes
Authors: Behme Anita , Strietzel Philipp Lukas 
Published: November 2022

AbstractThe existence of moments of first downward passage times of a spectrally negative Lévy process is governed by the general dynamics of the Lévy process, i.e. whether it is drifting to
$+\infty$
,
$-\infty$
, or oscillating. Whenever the Lévy process drifts to
$+\infty$
, we prove that the
$\kappa$
th moment of the first passage time (conditioned to be finite) exists if and only if the
$(\kappa+1)$
th moment of the Lévy jump measure exists. This generalizes a result shown earlier by Delbaen for Cramér–Lundberg risk processes. Whenever the Lévy process drifts to
$-\infty$
, we prove that all moments of the first passage time exist, while for an oscillating Lévy process we derive conditions for non-existence of the moments, and in particular we show that no integer moments exist.
Should mild obstructive sleep apnoea be treated? A systematic review from the standpoint of disease progression
Authors: Fong P Y , Tay Z Y , Soh R Y , Fook S M C , Li H H , Phua C Q 
Published: November 2022

AbstractObjectiveThis study was a systematic review to investigate the progression of untreated obstructive sleep apnoea in order to evaluate whether mild obstructive sleep apnoea should be treated from the standpoint of disease progression.MethodThe database search study outcomes that were collected included Apnea Hypopnea Index and Respiratory Disturbance Index. A meta-analysis of obstructive sleep apnoea severity over time intervals was performed.ResultsA total of 17 longitudinal studies and 1 randomised, controlled trial were included for review. For patients with mild obstructive sleep apnoea, mean pre-study and post-study Apnea Hypopnea Index was 5.21 and 8.03, respectively, over a median interval of 53.1 months. In patients with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnoea, mean pre-study and post-study Apnea Hypopnea Index was 28.9 and 30.3, respectively, over a median interval of 57.8 months. Predictors for disease progression in mild obstructive sleep apnoea are patients aged less than 60 years and those with a baseline body mass index less than 25.ConclusionMild obstructive sleep apnoea progression is observed, but it does not appear to reach any clinically significant progression to moderate or severe obstructive sleep apnoea.