Search Results (106,764)

The integration of digital technologies in managing technical and design information is transforming architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) processes within educational institutions. Despite this, construction education lacks practical, interactive learning tools, and there is insufficient collaboration between academia and the construction industry. To address these challenges, the CAMPUS 2.0 project at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana developed a web-based platform that integrates building information modeling (BIM) and gamification elements. This platform improves project coordination, facilitates interdisciplinary learning, and enhances the management of technical and design information for campus buildings. CAMPUS 2.0 also promotes collaboration and active user engagement, filling a critical gap in the practical tools in construction education. This study assesses the usability of CAMPUS 2.0 among 235 students, teachers, and staff members, demonstrating a positive impact on the university community. The findings provide insights into how digital tools can improve project management, interdisciplinary collaboration, and knowledge sharing within educational settings, offering broader implications for other institutions. Full article

Background: The aim of this study was to clarify the effects of a theater training program intervention on the physical and cognitive functions in community-dwelling older people. Methods: Of the 59 participants, 30 were the control group, and 29 were the intervention group. We assessed physical and mental/cognitive functions and criteria of physical frailty. Results: Statistical analysis showed that the usual walking speed (UWS) (p < 0.01), grip strength (GS) (p < 0.01), and GDS-15 (p < 0.05) improved significantly in the intervention group, whereas the Geriatric Depression Scale short-form (GDS-15) (p < 0.01) worsened significantly in the control group. Cognitive function was not significantly different between the two groups. Physical frailty was unchanged in the control group but significantly improved in the intervention group (p < 0.05), and a significant interaction was found for GDS-15 in ANOVA (F = 5.76, p < 0.05). Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that a theater intervention for the older adults may be effective in preventing and improving depression and physical frailty in old age. Full article

Microbes have inhabited the earth for hundreds of millions of years longer than humans. The microbiota–gut–brain axis (MGBA) represents a bidirectional communication pathway. These communications occur between the central nervous system (CNS), the enteric nervous system (ENS), and the emotional and cognitive centres of the brain. The field of research on the gut–brain axis has grown significantly during the past two decades. Signalling occurs between the gut microbiota and the brain through the neural, endocrine, immune, and humoral pathways. A substantial body of evidence indicates that the MGBA plays a pivotal role in various neurological diseases. These include Alzheimer’s disease (AD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Rett syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), non-Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration and dementias, fronto-temporal lobe dementia (FTLD), Wilson–Konovalov disease (WD), multisystem atrophy (MSA), Huntington’s chorea (HC), Parkinson’s disease (PD), multiple sclerosis (MS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), depression, and schizophrenia (SCZ). Furthermore, the bidirectional correlation between therapeutics and the gut–brain axis will be discussed. Conversely, the mood of delivery, exercise, psychotropic agents, stress, and neurologic drugs can influence the MGBA. By understanding the MGBA, it may be possible to facilitate research into microbial-based interventions and therapeutic strategies for neurological diseases. Full article

Making cities resilient and secure remains a central goal in urban policy strategies, where established methods, technologies, and best experiences are applied or replicated when the knowledge of a threat is already well established. The scientific community and specialized bodies are invited to comprehend and evaluate disastrous events that are still not well explored to broaden the concept of resilient cities. Among these, terrorism in the European-built environment remains an underexplored topic, despite various studies assessing its economic, social, and political dimensions, exploring the radicalist matrix, or examining the post-effects of high-impact disastrous events. Within this framework, this work presents an algorithm for the risk assessment of historic urban open areas (uOAs) in Europe, combining theories of the terrorism phenomenon, the normative experiences, and the phenomenological results of violent acts in uOAs. Specifically, the algorithm is determined by studying physical qualities/properties and elements that usually feature the uOAs, using a limited set of descriptors. The descriptors and their formulation are set starting from their qualification, in compliance with the risk determinant (Hazard, Vulnerability, and Exposure), and discussed starting from participatory methods (Delphi and AHP). The algorithm is finally applied to Italian historic squares, testing the mathematical approach, verifying theories of the phenomenon, and setting up a comprehensive three-dimensional risk matrix for both soft and hard targets. This latest constitutes an operative tool to assess the investigated built environment exposed to terrorist threats aimed at developing more detailed mitigative strategies. Full article

This study investigates airborne bacterial and fungal communities in south-eastern Italy and Albania using advanced DNA-based techniques and compositional data analysis (CoDa). We assess the significance of airborne microbial communities, detailing our methodologies for site selection, sample collection, DNA extraction, and data analysis. Our results reveal distinct differences in microbial composition between the two regions, driven by local environmental factors. Specifically, Albanian samples showed higher abundances of bacterial species such as Rubellimicrobium roseum and Sphingomonas cynarae, while Italian samples were characterized by a prevalence of Truepera radiovictrix and Rubrobacter radiotolerans. In terms of fungi, Albanian sites exhibited greater abundance of Mycosphaerella tassiana, Aureobasidium pullulans, and Ascochyta herbicola. Aitchison distance-based dendrograms and principal component analysis (PCA) biplots, utilizing singular value decomposition, clearly delineated a geographical separation of microbial communities, underscoring the impact of regional atmospheric conditions on microbial composition. In the discussion, we interpret these findings in the context of regional environmental factors, highlighting their implications for understanding regional differences in airborne microbial communities. The conclusion emphasizes the effectiveness of advanced DNA techniques and CoDa in environmental microbiology, offering insights into how local environmental conditions shape microbial communities and suggesting directions for future research and public health considerations. Full article

As the most common psychiatric symptom, depression represents a subject of high interest for the medical community. Background/Objectives: International guidelines consider selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) the first-line treatment of depression. Although having better efficacy and tolerability in comparison to tricyclic antidepressants or monoamine oxidase inhibitors, the diversity and potential severity of adverse effects and interactions manifested by SSRIs, combined with the frequency of prescriptions, lead to the necessity of evaluating real-world data. The aim of this study was to identify and evaluate the drug interactions reported in EudraVigilance (EV) for the six SSRIs representatives that are authorized in Europe: fluoxetine (FXT), fluvoxamine (FVM), citalopram (CIT), escitalopram (ESC), paroxetine (PAR) and sertraline (SER). The entire class of SSRIs was examined as a comparator to identify whether one of the representatives was more prone to reporting. Methods: Descriptive analysis and disproportionality analysis were conducted on data extracted from the EV database. Results: A total of 326,450 adverse reactions (ADRs) were reported for the SSRIs group. Approximately a quarter of these (n = 83,201; 25.46%) were reported for SER and 22.37% (n = 73,131) for PAR. Of the total ADRs reported, 2.12% (n = 6925) represent preferred terms related to drug-drug interactions (DDIs): SER (n = 1474; 22.37%), CIT (n = 1272, 19.86), and FXT (n = 1309, 19.83%). Specific ADRs related to inhibitory activity represent 0.98%, and for potentiating activity, 1.89%. Conclusions: Although representing a small value of the total ADRs, DDIs may be related to severe outcomes. Awareness should be raised for this category of ADRs that can be reduced by the joined efforts of physicians and pharmacists. Full article

Community detection enables the discovery of more connected segments of complex networks. This capability is essential for effective network analysis. But, it raises a growing concern about the disclosure of user privacy since sensitive information may be over-mined by community detection algorithms. To address this issue, the problem of community detection attacks has emerged to subtly perturb the network structure so that the performance of community detection algorithms deteriorates. Three scales of this problem have been identified in the literature to achieve different levels of concealment, such as target node, target community, or global attack. A broad range of community detection attack algorithms has been proposed, utilizing various approaches to tackle the distinct requirements associated with each attack scale. However, existing surveys of the field usually concentrate on studies focusing on target community attacks. To be self-contained, this survey starts with an overview of community detection algorithms used on the other side, along with the performance measures employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the community detection attacks. The core of the survey is a systematic analysis of the algorithms proposed across all three scales of community detection attacks to provide a comprehensive overview. The survey wraps up with a detailed discussion related to the research opportunities of the field. Overall, the main objective of the survey is to provide a starting and diving point for scientists. Full article

In modern cloud environments, container orchestration tools are essential for effectively managing diverse workloads and services, and Kubernetes has become the de facto standard tool for automating the deployment, scaling, and operation of containerized applications. While Kubernetes plays an important role in optimizing and managing the deployment of diverse services and applications, its default scheduling approach, which is not optimized for all types of workloads, can often result in poor performance and wasted resources. This is particularly true in environments with complex interactions between services, such as microservice architectures. The traditional Kubernetes scheduler makes scheduling decisions based on CPU and memory usage, but the limitation of this arrangement is that it does not fully account for the performance and resource efficiency of the application. As a result, the communication latency between services increases, and the overall system performance suffers. Therefore, a more sophisticated and adaptive scheduling method is required. In this work, we propose an adaptive pod placement optimization technique using multi-tier inspection to address these issues. The proposed technique collects and analyzes multi-tier data to improve application performance and resource efficiency, which are overlooked by the default Kubernetes scheduler. It derives optimal placements based on the coupling and dependencies between pods, resulting in more efficient resource usage and better performance. To validate the performance of the proposed method, we configured a Kubernetes cluster in a virtualized environment and conducted experiments using a benchmark application with a microservice architecture. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing Kubernetes scheduler, reducing the average response time by up to 11.5% and increasing the number of requests processed per second by up to 10.04%. This indicates that the proposed method minimizes the inter-pod communication delay and improves the system-wide resource utilization. This research aims to optimize application performance and increase resource efficiency in cloud-native environments, and the proposed technique can be applied to different cloud environments and workloads in the future to provide more generalized optimizations. This is expected to contribute to increasing the operational efficiency of cloud infrastructure and improving the quality of service. Full article

Marine sponges are well-known for hosting rich microbial communities. Sponges are the most prolific source of marine bioactive compounds, which are frequently synthesized by their associated microbiota. Calyx nicaeensis is an endemic Mediterranean sponge with scarce information regarding its (bioactive) secondary metabolites. East Mediterranean specimens of mesophotic C. nicaeensis have never been studied. Moreover, no research has inspected its associated bacteria. Thus, we studied the sponge’s bacterial diversity and examined bacterial interspecific interactions in search of a promising antibacterial candidate. Such novel antimicrobial agents are needed since extensive antibiotic use leads to bacterial drug resistance. Bacteria cultivation yielded 90 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). A competition assay enabled the testing of interspecific interactions between the cultured OTUs. The highest-ranked antagonistic bacterium, identified as Paenisporosarcina indica (previously never found in marine or cold habitats), was mass cultured, extracted, and separated using size exclusion and reversed-phase chromatographic methods, guided by antibacterial activity. A pure compound was isolated and identified as 3-oxy-anteiso-C₁₅-fatty acid-lichenysin. Five additional active compounds await final cleaning; however, they are lichenysins and surfactins. These are the first antibacterial compounds identified from either the C. nicaeensis sponge or P. indica bacterium. It also revealed that the genus Bacillus is not an exclusive producer of lichenysin and surfactin. Full article

Indigenous foods are used to prepare delicious delicacies (Imefino) in South Africa, and are consumed for their medicinal, food security, and nutritional value. Many of them are rich in macro- and micronutrients and contribute to improving the households’ income. However, the commercialization of many indigenous foods remains problematic with poor market penetration. This study investigates the commercialization status and determinants of indigenous floral food (IFF) commercialization using descriptive statistics, and the double- and triple-hurdle analysis. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect cross-sectional data from 240 rural households in Amathole District Municipality in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. The result shows that most (60%) of the rural households rely solely on agriculture and agricultural-related activities as their source of employment. Ironically, among the rural household heads who are solely engaged in agriculture, most (83%) do not sell IFFs despite being involved solely in agriculture. More so, there is poor commercialization of IFF with the evidence of a low-commercialization index and low-income generation from IFF. However, IFF consumed for medicinal value has a higher commercialization index. Indigenous foods show potential for commercialization if well harnessed. The results also show that if the rural householder is a male and adds value to indigenous floral foods, he is more likely to make a decision that entails him being involved in the commercialization of indigenous floral foods. The result further proves that the influence of households’ willingness to pay for the improved seed of IFFs will not necessarily affect the intensity of IFF commercialization. Household size is among the determinants of IFF commercialization. Commercialization indicators reveal that rural household heads are committing to IFF commercialization. Based on the study’s overall findings, factors such as seasonality, price, demand fluctuation, and other identified challenges in this study affect IFF commercialization. Programs addressing value addition and the domestication of indigenous floral foods, application of marketing philosophy, and marketing mix, among others, are recommended. Full article

(1) Background: The significant progress observed over the last two decades in coherent beam combining (CBC) technology has mainly focused on its applications in high-energy physics and laser weapons. This work provides insight into the basic principles of CBC and the search for an alternative, namely optical angular momentum (OAM) generation using CBC. (2) Methods: A semi-analytical model based on the paraxial wave equation was explored, generating OAM-CBC beams by manipulating the tilts and phases of the CBC (T&P-CBC) of hexagonal architecture. (3) Results: The specially arranged T&P-CBC shows typical properties of OAM, such as annular profiles for the zero diffraction order and 1st-order replicas in the far field and correlation coefficients of 1% between different OAM-CBC fields. (4) Conclusions: The differences between classical OAM beams and OAM-CBC are substantial due to hexagonal lattice properties. Moreover, applications in free space optical communications are feasible as T&P CBC fulfills the main conditions and requirements for OAM generation. Full article

Research on helicopter dispatching has received considerable attention, particularly in relation to post-disaster rescue operations. The survival chances of individuals trapped in emergency situations decrease as time passes, making timely helicopter dispatch crucial for successful rescue missions. Therefore, this study investigates a collaborative helicopter rescue routing problem with time window and limited survival time constraints, solving it using an improved iterative greedy (IIG) algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, a heuristic initialization strategy is designed to generate an efficient and feasible initial solution. Then, a feasible-first destruction-construction strategy is applied to enhance the algorithm’s exploration ability. Next, a problem-specific local search strategy is developed to improve the algorithm’s local search effectiveness. In addition, the simulated annealing (SA) method is integrated as an acceptance criterion to avoid the algorithm from getting trapped in local optima. Finally, to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed IIG, 56 instances were generated based on Solomon instances and used for simulation tests. A comparative analysis was conducted against six efficient algorithms from the existing studies. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs well in solving the post-disaster rescue helicopter routing problem. Full article

Older patients from long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) presenting to emergency departments (EDs) exhibit a higher prevalence of frailty than those from the community. However, no study has examined frailty in patients from LTCHs in the ED. This study compared frailty in older patients from LTCHs and the community. We retrospectively analyzed data from the EDs of three university hospitals between 1 August and 31 October 2023, involving 5908 patients (515 from LTCHs and 5393 from the community). The Korean version of the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS-K) was used to assess individuals aged 65 and older. We compared clinical characteristics, frailty, length of stay (LOS), and diagnosis between patients from LTCHs (LTCH group) and the community (community group). Among ED patients, 55.0% and 35.2% in the LTCH and the community groups, respectively, were frail (p < 0.001). Of these, 71.7% in the LTCH group were hospitalized compared with 53.1% in the community group (p = 0.001). The odds ratio for in-hospital mortality was 4.910 (95% CI 1.458–16.534, p = 0.010) for frail LTCH patients and 3.748 (95% CI 2.599–5.405, p < 0.001) for frail community patients, compared to non-frail patients. patients from LTCHs with frailty had higher hospital admission rates and increased in-hospital mortality compared to those in the community at the same frailty level. This study offers essential insights into the characteristics of older patients in LTCHs for healthcare administrators and medical staff worldwide. Full article

Open Science describes the movement of making any research artifact available to the public, fostering sharing and collaboration. While sharing the source code is a popular Open Science practice in software research and development, there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve the openness of the whole research and development cycle from the conception to the preservation phase. In this direction, the software engineering community faces significant challenges in adopting open science practices due to the complexity of the data, the heterogeneity of the development environments and the diversity of the application domains. In this paper, through the discussion of the 5Ws+1H (Why, Who, What, When, Where, and How) questions that are referred to as the Kipling’s framework, we aim to provide a structured guideline to motivate and assist the software engineering community on the journey to data openness. Also, we demonstrate the practical application of these guidelines through a use case on opening research data. Full article

Objective: To investigate whether the relationships between acute care occupational therapy (OT) and physical therapy (PT) utilization and community discharge are moderated by functional or physical performance at discharge among individuals hospitalized with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Setting: 14 acute care hospitals in the state of Colorado. Participants: We studied 5599 adults hospitalized with TBI between June 2018 and April 2021. Design: In a secondary analysis of de-identified electronic health record (EHR) data, multivariable moderation logistic regression models were performed to calculate odds ratios (ORs) for the likelihood of community discharge among patients who utilized OT/PT services. Main Measures: Functional (activities of daily living [ADL]) and physical (mobility) performance at discharge, OT and PT utilization, and community discharge status. Results: Overall, 67% of patients discharged to the community. The mean age of the sample was 55 years (SD = 20 years). Most participants were male (64%) and non-Hispanic White (72%). Mean hospital length of stay was 6 days (SD = 6 days). Both OT and PT utilization (OT: OR = 1.21, 95% CI [1.11, 1.33]; PT: OR = 1.22, 95% CI [1.14, 1.30]) and discharge ADL and mobility scores (ADL: OR = 1.34, 95% CI [1.30, 1.39]; mobility: OR = 1.38, 95% CI [1.33, 1.42]) were significantly and positively associated with community discharge. The OT and PT utilization-by-discharge ADL and mobility interaction terms yielded slightly negative, but statistically significant moderation effects in both models (ORs = 0.99, 95% CIs [0.98, 1.00]); indicating the magnitude of the OT and PT utilization effect diminished as ADL and mobility scores increased. Several sociodemographic characteristics and clinical factors were also independently associated with community discharge in both models (p-values < 0.001–0.04). Conclusions: Greater OT and PT utilization was associated with increased odds of community discharge. Similarly, higher ADL and mobility scores at discharge were associated with increased odds of community discharge. The small, but statistically significant negative interaction terms in both models indicated that the magnitude of the OT and PT utilization effect diminished as ADL and mobility scores increased. This study’s findings can guide occupational and physical therapists in their efforts to facilitate a safe transition to the community for patients with TBI. Full article