Search Results (4,963)

This study investigated the intricate relationships among motivational intensity, foreign language enjoyment, boredom, shyness, and second-language (L2) willingness to communicate (WTC) in Pakistani university students. Using a quantitative cross-sectional de-sign, data were collected from 1050 English language learners via validated surveys. Partial Least-Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test a moderated-mediation model examining how psychological variables influence L2 communication behavior. Results revealed that motivational intensity was significantly associated with L2 WTC via both a direct pathway (β = 0.251, p < 0.001) and a statistical indirect pathway involving foreign language enjoyment (β = 0.410 from motivational intensity to enjoyment and β = 0.339 from enjoyment to WTC; specific indirect effect, β = 0.139, both p < 0.001). Shyness demonstrated a complex dual moderating role: while it significantly constrained the enjoyment–WTC pathway (β = −0.140, p < 0.001) and showed a strong adverse direct effect on WTC (β = −0.232, p < 0.001), it also strengthened the direct motivational intensity–WTC relationship, consistent with (β = 0.110, p < 0.001). Contrary to previous research conducted primarily in East Asian contexts, boredom showed no significant effects as either a direct predictor or moderator in the Pakistani context. The model explained 34.2% of the variance in L2 WTC. These findings extend the theoretical understanding of psychological mechanisms in L2 communication by revealing culturally specific patterns in a South Asian context, suggesting that multilingual environments may produce different psychological dynamics. Pedagogical implications stress the need to increase motivation alongside an understanding of the complex nature of personality variables within a particular cultural setting. Full article

Interwell interference has become a routine engineering concern in closely spaced, vertically stacked shale gas development, yet pressure responses observed in offset wells do not necessarily represent direct hydraulic or fluid communication. This study investigates the DH21 deep shale gas pad in the Daan area, western Chongqing, by integrating fracturing records, continuous offset-well pressure monitoring, three-dimensional well geometry, geomechanical information, natural-fracture interpretations, and gas/water tracers. Clear pressure responses are identified in 316 of 334 reviewed, evaluable events (94.61%), indicating frequent pressure communication within the documented event dataset. Response occurrence generally decreases with increasing three-dimensional separation, but spacing alone does not explain the marked variability among well pairs. Same-layer responses generally become established earlier than cross-layer responses, and this contrast remains in receiver-adjusted sensitivity analysis, highlighting the importance of vertical geological and mechanical heterogeneity. Most responses are initiated during the early stage of treatment, whereas observed pressure maxima commonly occur after pumping, demonstrating that interference diagnosis should cover both early treatment and post-pumping pressure evolution. Treatment intensity does not translate directly into stronger offset-well responses; instead, source loading is selectively transmitted through spatial, stratigraphic, and fracture-controlled pathways. Accordingly, pressure monitoring is most effective for real-time disturbance identification, natural-fracture interpretation for screening potential preferential pathways, and tracers for verifying actual mass transport. These findings support a source–path–receiver framework for monitoring prioritization, interference warning, and post-treatment connectivity assessment in vertically stacked shale gas development. The quantitative relationships are derived from a single pad and, therefore, require local validation before application to other shale gas developments. Full article

Optical vortex beams that carry orbital angular momentum are widely used in optical communication, quantum information, and optical manipulation, where precise detection of the topological charge is essential, but existing machine learning approaches treat topological charge detection as a discrete classification problem, which limits the extraction of fractional topological charge, as it varies continuously and requires a regression-based model. Here, we developed a customized model for extracting the charge of fractional optical vortices using their perturbed intensity distribution, i.e., speckles, obtained by scattering them through a rough surface. When evaluated on experimentally generated speckle patterns, the fully supervised model achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.0394 and an $R^2$ value of 0.9997. To assess its interpolation capability, the model was trained using sparse data, specifically integer and half-integer charges, and successfully detected previously unseen fractional topological charges, achieving an MAE of 0.122 and a mean absolute percentage error of 3.11%. These results demonstrate the potential of the model as a non-interferometric method for fractional topological charge detection in scattering environments, particularly under data-scarce conditions. Full article

Weight management has become an important domain of digital health communication, yet how expert authority is constructed and negotiated in associated comment discourse on Chinese social media remains underexplored. Using Sina Weibo as a case study, this study employed a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 856 expert-mediated weight-management posts and a cleaned analytic corpus of 4265 associated comments. The analysis combined TF–IDF keyword extraction, document-level co-occurrence analysis, topic modelling, automated polarity classification, and qualitative discourse coding to examine how authority was constructed in verified-account health communication and how sampled commenters responded. The findings show that authority was constructed through medicalised explanations, clinical lexicons, biometric parameters, and quantified norms that translated bodily variation into health risks and behavioural targets. Automated classification labelled 91.54% of the cleaned comments as positive, but manual validation of 100 stratified comments identified 31 neutral/mixed cases and substantially weaker performance for negative than for positive comments (macro-F1 = 0.603 on 69 unambiguous positive/negative cases). Model confidence is therefore treated as classification certainty rather than as emotional intensity, and positive labels are not interpreted as compliance or trust. Qualitative analysis assessed compliance, tactical negotiation, embodied resistance, criticism of expert knowledge, and continued biometric self-monitoring. Some commenters challenged particular advice through bodily experience while continuing to use quantified vocabularies of weight, duration, and measurement. We interpret this coexistence as recurring discursive reliance on expert-derived metrics, not as a directly measured psychological effect. The findings show how medicalised and quantified language can structure weight-management communication while remaining open to situated negotiation and embodied counter-evidence. Full article

With the rapid proliferation of collaborative mobile applications, edge computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to deliver ultra-low latency and localized services. However, conventional Edge Server Placement (ESP) strategies primarily optimize physical transmission delay and server load balancing, largely overlooking the intense cross-server communication overhead induced by user social interactions. Furthermore, directly utilizing fine-grained user trajectories and social graphs to guide placement poses severe privacy risks. In this paper, we propose a socially aware edge server placement framework, termed Fed-STSR, where the primary contribution is a multi-objective optimization formulation that explicitly integrates user social relationships alongside network latency, service migration, and server load balancing. To enable this framework without compromising user confidentiality, federated representation learning coupled with a calibrated Laplace differential privacy mechanism serves as an enabling layer, compressing sensitive spatiotemporal patterns into bounded representations locally. The resulting discrete placement problem is solved using an enhanced Trees Social Relations (TSR) algorithm operating over sparse adjacency structures. Extensive trace-driven simulations based on the Gowalla and Brightkite datasets mapped onto real urban base station layouts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, Fed-STSR reduces average service latency by up to 31.5% and achieves superior server load balance while maintaining rigorous user-level privacy guarantees. Full article

Background: Moral injury is increasingly used to describe clinician distress after perceived moral transgression, forced complicity, or institutional betrayal. Its distinction from burnout and its empirical organisation in healthcare remain insufficiently defined. Methods: We combined a conceptual review with a document co-citation analysis of moral-injury literature indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection from 1961 to 2026 (20 April 2026). The network comprised 1573 cited references and 5497 co-citation links and was clustered in CiteSpace. Results: The network contained ten communities and showed strong structure (modularity Q = 0.73; mean silhouette S = 0.74). Four findings were most relevant to clinical and occupational mental health: the definitional core remains unsettled; healthcare and veteran literatures have developed as partially parallel traditions; measurement and operationalisation papers occupy disproportionately prominent positions in the citation-burst and sigma rankings; and the healthcare instrument that the network identifies as structurally prominent, the Moral Injury Symptom Scale for Healthcare Professionals, retains religious or spiritual elements that require calibration in secular and confessionally heterogeneous settings. Anaesthesiology and intensive care medicine are present in the empirical literature, but as of the search date no specialty-specific work had become an organising reference for the field; citation lag accounts for part of this. Conclusions: Moral injury should not be treated as a synonym for burnout or as a deficit of individual resilience. Future research should specify definitions, validate instruments cross-culturally, stratify by clinical role and specialty and empirically test interventions directed at the moral architecture of work. Full article

Despite growing attention to inland water-stressed basins, few investigations have explicitly linked urbanization water resource coupling assessments to the SDG 6 and SDG 11 targets in water-scarce coastal urban agglomerations. Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—particularly SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities)—depends critically on sustainable water management in rapidly urbanizing coastal regions. This study examines the dynamic coupling and coordination between urbanization and water resources in the Minnan Delta Region (Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou). We constructed an integrated evaluation index system comprising 16 indicators across urbanization (population, economic, social, and spatial dimensions) and water resources (resource level, utilization efficiency, and conservation) subsystems. Using the entropy weight method and a coupling coordination degree model, we analyzed spatiotemporal evolution patterns from 2014 to 2024. Additionally, the geographical detector model was applied to quantitatively identify the drivers of coupling coordination differentiation. The results reveal that: (1) the comprehensive urbanization index exhibited a sustained upward trajectory, with subsystem importance ranking as economic urbanization > social urbanization > spatial urbanization > population urbanization; (2) the water resources comprehensive index followed a fluctuating yet generally rising pattern, with subsystem contributions ordered as water conservation > water utilization > water resource level; (3) the coupling coordination degree (D) rose from 0.2008 in 2014 to 0.4173 in 2024; and (4) pronounced spatial heterogeneity remained evident, with Quanzhou achieving primary coordination (0.6033), Xiamen reaching barely coordinated status (0.5149), and Zhangzhou remaining on the verge of imbalance (0.4764) by 2024. These findings underscore that sustainable urbanization in water-stressed coastal regions hinges on governance intensity and targeted infrastructure investment rather than on natural water abundance, thereby offering actionable pathways for SDG 6 and SDG 11 localization in similar global contexts, though persistent spatial inequalities necessitate differentiated, city-specific strategies and enhanced inter-city collaborative mechanisms. Full article

Due to the widespread deployment of large-scale satellite constellations, Spatial Information Networks (SINs) exhibit increasingly high-order node and service coupling characteristics, rendering them vulnerable to node removal and cascading failures. Traditional graph-theoretic models fail to capture the inherent multi-node cooperative relationships within SINs, while conventional centrality metrics overlook service coupling features and cross-community propagation risks, leading to inaccurate key node identification. To address these issues, this paper proposes a key node mining method based on soft community partition and hypergraph interweaving degree. The method first constructs a hypernetwork to characterize the high-order associations among three types of services—communication, remote sensing, and navigation. Second, a probabilistic generative model, Hypergraph-MT, is introduced to detect overlapping communities and capture the multi-role attributes of satellites. Finally, the Interweaving Degree (IW) and its derived Bridge Score (IWBS) are defined to quantify node importance from two dimensions: load capacity and cross-community connectivity. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with degree centrality and betweenness centrality, the proposed method increases the service interruption rate from 27.4% to 64.8% under a 5% removal ratio, and the service efficiency loss is elevated by more than 60%. In comparison with pure interweaving degree removal, IWBS triggers deeper cascading removal at a 30% removal ratio, reduces the removal cost by 8.9%, and improves the input–output ratio by 8.2% under high-intensity removal. Moreover, the algorithm exhibits linear scalability and strong robustness to parameter variations. The proposed method significantly enhances the accuracy and efficiency of key node identification in SINs, providing theoretical support for constellation deployment optimization and priority protection decision-making. Full article

Community-managed irrigation systems in Andean mountain catchments often operate with limited hydrometric information, complicating crop- and water-allocation planning. This study developed a reproducible annual linear-programming framework for the Santul Irrigation System, Ecuador, combining census data from all 46 registered irrigators with documented agronomic, climatic, economic, phenological, and irrigation-efficiency parameters. Three allocation configurations were compared: an economic-only benchmark, a maximum-share diversification model, and a hypothetical crop-specific four-crop diversification scenario. Survey-informed proxy annual water budgets were derived from the reported nominal flow and self-reported irrigation intensity. Under the reference specification, all nine baseline cases used the complete 15.945 ha modeled-crop domain; the land constraint was binding, whereas the water constraint was non-binding. Annual gross output values were USD 129,634, USD 79,845, and USD 76,412, while annual modeled supplemental irrigation requirements were 9007, 8445, and 7740 m³/year, respectively. Under maximum planting-month demand, water became binding and modeled land use declined to 69.6%, 81.5%, and 80.0%. Of 328 baseline and robustness runs, 324 were feasible. The framework is a diagnostic decision-support tool whose outputs are interpreted from a social-ecological perspective; it does not directly optimize social-ecological outcomes or prescribe a crop plan. Full article

Rising summer temperatures and recurrent heatwaves are changing European travel decisions and stimulating coolcation: travel motivated partly by the search for thermal comfort. This conceptual framework article examines how Slovenia could engage with this trend without transferring overtourism from heat-stressed coasts to Alpine lakes, valleys, forests and protected areas. A structured integrative review combines research on climate-sensitive tourism, overtourism, demarketing and behavioral communication with official Slovenian statistics and policy evidence. Longitudinal SURS releases show strong tourism growth from 2017 to 2025 and a rising absolute importance of mountain resorts, but they do not identify heat avoidance as the cause of travel. This synthesis therefore treats recent mountain-coast differences as exploratory signals rather than proof of a structural coolcation shift. It develops the five-stage COOL-SMC conceptual framework, which connects capacity intelligence, ecologically screened offer design, communication, local legitimacy and adaptive evaluation. The framework’s distinctive proposition is that promotional intensity should be governed by ecological, infrastructural and social readiness rather than optimized independently for reach or arrivals. COOL-SMC is not empirically validated; it specifies propositions, indicators and decision processes for expert assessment, field pilots and longitudinal testing in small, nature-rich destinations. Full article

As a path to promote undergraduate student success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), this paper introduces the Conceptual Organizational Framework for Expanding Excellence (COFFEE), which is informed by the longitudinal adaptation of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at a large, research-intensive historically white institution. Drawing on over a decade of program evaluation and academic research, we articulate how foundational cultural ethos—shared values, STEM community, and affirming multidimensional identity environments—are transversally integrated across the structural, agentic, and academic architecture of institutional practice. The framework advances the literature by positioning core organizational conditions for STEM persistence and excellence. This work offers a theoretically grounded organizational model informed by organizational theory and prior empirical work documenting the ongoing success of a STEM program to guide research, practice, and systemic reform in STEM education. Full article

Background: Concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) is the standard treatment for locally advanced cervical cancer, but resistance and recurrence remain major clinical challenges. Tumor immune–metabolic reprogramming profoundly affects treatment response and immune evasion; however, the molecular mechanisms of lipid metabolism remodeling and its interaction with T cells after CCRT in cervical cancer are still unclear. This study aimed to investigate how CCRT-induced metabolic changes in cervical cancer cells influence T cell function and immune evasion. Methods: We performed metabolic pathway activity analysis, cell–cell communication prediction, and transcriptomic analysis on paired single-cell transcriptomic data from three cervical cancer patients before and after CCRT (n = 3 paired). Validation was conducted using multiple independent GEO cohorts, in vitro cell culture experiments, and multi-sample immunofluorescence staining. Results: CCRT was associated with upregulation of FABP4/5 in malignant epithelial cells and activation of the PPAR and adipocytokine signaling pathways, leading to lipid metabolic reprogramming. Epithelial cells with high FABP4/5 expression showed enhanced predicted intercellular communication with T cells via the computationally inferred ligand–receptor axes PTGER4 and CXCR4. T cells with high communication intensity exhibited an immunosuppressive phenotype signature, accompanied by metabolic alterations in lipid and carbohydrate pathways and enrichment of regulatory T cell subsets. Validation experiments confirmed the association between FABP4/5 and inhibitory T cells. Conclusions: This study suggests that FABP4/5-mediated lipid metabolism reprogramming may represent a key mechanism contributing to the immunosuppressive crosstalk between cervical cancer epithelial cells and T cells after CCRT. Targeting this axis may reverse T cell dysfunction and provide a potential immunometabolic strategy to reduce post-CCRT recurrence. Full article

As robots take on a growing role in creative work, an important question is often overlooked: how do we preserve people’s sense of psychological ownership over what they create together with a machine? This study integrates a large-scale scientometric analysis of 817 publications (2015–July 2026) with a PRISMA 2020–guided systematic review of 52 studies on Ownership-Preserving Autonomy in creative Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). Bibliometric mapping (a keyword co-occurrence network built with NetworkX and Louvain community detection, together with publication-trend, citation, author, country, and keyword temporal-intensity statistics computed directly from the corpus) shows a compound annual growth rate of approximately 26.5% over the complete calendar years 2018–2025, as well as a Core HRI and Autonomy thematic cluster that dominates a much smaller Psychological and Ownership cluster, a pattern that is at least partly attributable to the intentionally broad search strategy. The systematic review shows that only 3.8% of the 52 studies (n = 2) report a concrete algorithmic implementation coupled with robotic integration and empirical evaluation, while 96.2% do not meet this specific implementation criterion. Considered alongside converging industrial and HCI evidence on authorship erosion in AI-assisted design, as well as a previously reported ∼20% ownership decline under passive AI use in a single non-embodied creative-writing study, these SLR findings point to a pronounced theory–practice gap: rich conceptual discussion of ownership, agency, and Diminished Creative Agency contrasts sharply with the scarcity of technical implementations, validated evaluation frameworks, and real-world deployments. To help bridge this gap, the paper offers an exploratory positioning of Ownership–Autonomy Adaptive Collaboration (OAAC), a preliminary four-layer conceptual reference model; a set of falsifiable research hypotheses; and a structured research agenda on dynamic scaffolding, negotiated autonomy, and multidimensional evaluation intended to guide future ownership-preserving, human-centric co-creativity research in Industry 5.0. Full article

The Internet of Things has increasingly enabled advancing real-time environmental monitoring through the integration of Low-Power Wide-Area Networks. Among these technologies, LoRa (Long Range) has emerged as a prominent communication technology due to its combination of long-range communication, low energy consumption, and affordability, making it particularly suitable for remote and infrastructure-limited environments. Its adaptability is further enhanced through the use of open-source hardware, renewable energy sources, and intelligent algorithms. Despite LoRa’s limitations in bandwidth and data rate, recent innovations enabled increasingly data-intensive applications, including image transmission. This review critically examines recent advances in image transmission over LoRa networks, synthesising approaches across four interconnected strategies: image compression, packetisation and reliability, communication optimisation, and application-specific techniques. The analysis evaluates trade-offs among image size, transmission latency, energy consumption, coverage, and reconstructed image quality. These considerations are particularly relevant for environmental sensing applications, including water quality assessment, air pollution monitoring, wildlife tracking, and underground mining. This review synthesises recent advances in LoRa-based environmental and visual sensing and highlights persistent challenges, including duty-cycle restrictions, limited throughput, and energy constraints, that must be addressed for broader adoption in data-intensive sensing applications. By analysing current strategies and proposing future directions, including adaptive encoding, lightweight encryption, and energy-aware scheduling, the review demonstrates the potential of LoRa to play an increasingly important role in enabling sustainable, scalable, and accessible Internet of Things solutions across diverse environmental settings. Full article

Intensive poultry farming produces substantial volumes of chicken manure that require effective and hygienic management. This study investigated a composite inoculant formulated with four microorganisms: Kocuria rosea  ACCC 10488, Bacillus subtilis ACCC 60364, Trichoderma longibrachiatum ACCC 32584, and Lactobacillus plantarum ACCC 11118. This study investigated a composite inoculant formulated with four microorganisms obtained from the Agricultural Culture Collection of China (ACCC): Kocuria rosea ACCC 10488, Bacillus subtilis ACCC 60364, Trichoderma longibrachiatum ACCC 32584, and Lactobacillus plantarum ACCC 11118. Its performance was examined both without amendment and after addition of plant-derived bulking materials. The experiment included five treatments: untreated chicken manure (T1), the bulking-agent mixture without microbial addition (T2), a commercial inoculant combined with the same bulking materials (T3), the newly prepared inoculant without bulking agents (T4), and the newly prepared inoculant combined with the bulking mixture (T5). Three independent 50-kg piles were prepared for every treatment. Temperature was recorded for 45 days; physicochemical characteristics, odor indicators, nutrient concentrations, enzyme activities, seed-bioassay responses, and Ascaris egg mortality were evaluated over the initial 15 days. T5 reached 74 °C on days 5 and 10 and remained above 50 °C through day 30 at the plotted observation points. On day 15, this treatment had lower measured levels of odorous compounds, greater concentrations of available phosphorus and potassium, a 99% germination index, and complete mortality of the assayed Ascaris eggs. Collectively, T5 showed favorable changes across several indicators of early composting performance under the conditions tested. The study did not examine microbial community structure, persistence of the introduced strains, functional genes, whole-pile nutrient mass balances, or longer-term agronomic performance. Consequently, the data neither establish synergistic interactions among the component strains nor identify specific nutrient-transformation pathways. Full article