Search Results (327)

Health literacy improves informal caregivers’ knowledge and ability to provide care. The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of a group-based intervention on the health literacy of informal caregivers of children with special health needs (SHNs). The intervention focuses on movement, hydrotherapy, walking, and relaxation, with three evaluation stages. Participants included 34 informal caregivers of children with SHNs, recruited at a Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Service. We collected sociodemographic data of the participants and measured their health literacy through the short-form version of the European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q16). Around 70% of the participants were female, with a mean age of 41.06 ± 4.98 years, and nearly 85% were married or in a de facto union. About 26% were unemployed, and more than 65% had completed secondary education or higher. The mean scores of the HLS-EU-Q16 were statistically significantly higher throughout the intervention, with differences over the evaluation stages [F(2,56) = 75.55; p < 0.05]. A structured, dynamic, and group-based intervention plan showed improvements in the health literacy of the participants, with an increase in the percentage of participants with sufficient and excellent levels of health literacy at the end of the intervention. Full article

Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a critical area of study within natural language processing, attracting growing attention from both academia and industry. This systematic literature review provides a comprehensive and reproducible analysis of recent developments and advancements in SLMs post-2023. Drawing on 70 English-language studies published between January 2023 and January 2025, identified through Scopus, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, and ACM Digital Library, and focusing primarily on SLMs (including those with up to 7 billion parameters), this review offers a structured overview of the current state of the art and potential future directions. Designed as a resource for researchers seeking an in-depth global synthesis, the review examines key dimensions such as publication trends, visual data representations, contributing institutions, and the availability of public datasets. It highlights prevailing research challenges and outlines proposed solutions, with a particular focus on widely adopted model architectures, as well as common compression and optimization techniques. This study also evaluates the criteria used to assess the effectiveness of SLMs and discusses emerging de facto standards for industry. The curated data and insights aim to support and inform ongoing and future research in this rapidly evolving field. Full article

Teaching of embedded systems, including communication protocols such as SMBus, is commonly faced with difficulties providing the students with interactive and personalized, practical learning experiences. To overcome these shortcomings, this report presents a new conceptual framework that exploits generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) via customized DV-GPT. Coupled with prepromises techniques, DV-GPT offers timely targeted support to students and engineers who are studying SMBus protocol design and verification. In contrast to traditional learning, this AI-based tool dynamically adjusts feedback based on the users’ activities, providing greater insight into challenging concepts, including timing synchronization, multi-master arbitration, and error handling. The framework also incorporates the industry de facto standard UVM practices, which helps narrow the gap between education and the professional world. We quantitatively compare with a baseline GPT-4 and show significant improvement in accuracy, specificity, and user satisfaction. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed GenAI-enhanced educational approach have been empirically validated through the use of structured student feedback, expert judgment, and statistical analysis. The contribution of this research is a scalable, flexible, interactive model for enhancing embedded systems education that also illustrates how GenAI technologies could find applicability within specialized educational environments. Full article

Background/Objectives: After many years of research and the successful development of therapeutic products by a few industrial actors, the COVID-19 vaccines brought messenger RNAs, as well as other nucleic acid modalities, such as antisense oligonucleotides, small interfering RNA, and aptamers, into the spotlight, eliciting renewed interest from both academia and industry. However, owing to their structure, relative “fragility”, and the (usually) intracellular site of action, the delivery of these therapeutics has frequently proven to be a key limitation, especially when considering endosomal escape, which still needs to be overcome. Methods: By compiling delivery-related data on approved and late clinical-phase ribonucleic acid therapeutics, this review aims to assess the delivery strategies that have proven to be successful or are emerging, as well as areas where more research is needed. Results: In very specific cases, some strategies appeared to be quite effective, such as the N-acetylgalactosamine moiety in the case of liver delivery. Surprisingly, it also appears that for some modalities, efforts in molecular design have led to more “drug-like” properties, enablingthe administration of naked nucleic acids, without any form of encapsulation. This appears to be especially true when local administration, i.e., by injection, is possible, as this provides de facto targeting and a high local concentration, which can compensate for the small proportion of nucleic acids that reach the cytoplasm. Conclusions: Nucleic acid-based therapeutics have come a long way in terms of their physicochemical properties. However, due to their inherent limitations, targeting appears to be crucial for their efficacy, even more so than for traditional pharmaceutical modalities. Full article

The integration of distributed big data analytics into modern industrial environments has become increasingly critical, particularly with the rise of data-intensive applications and the need for real-time processing at the edge. While High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems offer robust petabyte-scale capabilities for efficient big data analytics, the performance of big data frameworks, especially on ARM-based HPC systems, remains underexplored. This paper presents an extensive experimental study on deploying Apache Spark 3.0.2, the de facto standard in-memory processing system, on an ARM-based HPC system. This study conducts a comprehensive performance evaluation of Apache Spark through representative big data workloads, including K-means clustering, to assess the effects of latency variations, such as those induced by network delays, memory bottlenecks, or computational overheads, on application performance in industrial IoT and edge computing environments. Our findings contribute to an understanding of how big data frameworks like Apache Spark can be effectively deployed and optimized on ARM-based HPC systems, particularly when leveraging vectorized instruction sets such as SVE, contributing to the broader goal of enhancing the integration of cloud–edge computing paradigms in modern industrial environments. We also discuss potential improvements and strategies for leveraging ARM-based architectures to support scalable, efficient, and real-time data processing in Industry 4.0 and beyond. Full article

This article examines the land-use politics of recreation development in rural China. Extending the lens of spatial informality, it analyzes how the appropriation and acquisition of space by small suburban leisure enterprises have constituted a de facto vehicle for rural spatial reconfiguration amidst land-use constraints. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies, we illuminate emerging scenarios in which inbound businesses burgeoned through the production of informal spaces, which were subsequently formalized or tolerated by local governments geared towards social economic growth. More so, we reveal the potential and limitations of such an informal-to-formal approach for rural spatial reconfiguration by showing how its sustainability and survival depend upon the enterprises’ ability to enter into a tacit alliance of interests with local authorities. This article casts new light on emerging bottom-up processes of spatial reconfiguration, alongside its repercussions for local suburbs, in the development of rural tourism and suburban leisure. It further suggests that, as an analytical approach, a nuanced understanding of rural restructuring under the recent national rural revitalization strategy can benefit from moving beyond the sole emphasis on formal institutions to analyze the role played by ordinary market actors and their spatial practices that shape rural territories and spatial relationships. Full article

Language-in-education policies often serve hidden political and economic agendas, and thus language policy research must examine policies beyond official state discourse. This article critically analyzes Morocco’s Language Alternation Policy (LAP), introduced in 2019, using the historical–structural approach. It examines the broader historical context and structural factors that shape the adoption and implementation of LAP. While the official policy discourse frames LAP as an egalitarian reform aimed at promoting balanced multilingualism by alternating instructional media in science education, its de facto implementation reveals a stark contradiction. The ideological underpinnings of LAP are the resurgence of French as the exclusive medium of instruction in science and technology classrooms. This policy undercuts a decades-long Arabization of science and the promotion of the Amazigh language, as well as denying Moroccans the potential advantages of learning English. The disparity between official policy discourse and implementation reveals the influence of France’s neocolonial agenda, exercised through Francophonie, international clientelism, and financial patronage. Through implementing LAP to align with France’s interests in Morocco, French-trained political actors undermine the country’s decolonization efforts and preserve the long-standing socioeconomic privileges of the francophone elite. We analyze how LAP functions ideologically to resolidify France’s cultural and linguistic hegemony and reinforce pre- and post-independence linguistic and social inequalities. Full article

Urban traffic congestion poses significant challenges to sustainable development in rapidly growing cities. This study examines the spatiotemporal dynamics of traffic congestion in Enugu, Nigeria, a representative mid-sized sub-Saharan city, through a comprehensive analysis of volumetric traffic flows along three major distributors: Abakpa, Nike, and Trans-Ekulu Road. The research employed direct observation and vehicle counts, conducting a week-long traffic census during peak morning (7:30–9:30 AM) and evening (4:00–8:00 PM) periods. Data was analyzed using peak hour factor (PHF), mean plots, and chi-square tests. The results reveal a daily mean of 2334 vehicles/h. Abakpa/Nike Road demonstrated the highest traffic volumes (mean = 809.2 vehicles/h) and most concentrated peak flows (PHF = 0.79), while Trans-Ekulu Road exhibited lower, more uniformly distributed volumes (mean = 719.4 vehicles/h, PHF = 0.93). Evening peaks (6:00–8:00 PM) consistently surpassed morning volumes, with Abakpa/Nike Road reaching 974 vehicles/hour during the evening rush compared to 620 vehicles/hour in the mornings. Chi-square analysis (χ² = 55.5, df = 8) confirmed statistically significant differences in flow distribution among the routes. The complete absence of Monday traffic due to regional “sit-at-home” orders created a distinctive weekly pattern, with Tuesdays experiencing disproportionate congestion as the de facto first workday. Non-linear relationships between volume increases and congestion severity were observed, where modest volume changes produced amplified system-wide effects. Spatial analysis revealed that evening congestion disparities between distributors (14.9%) significantly exceeded morning differences (8.9%), indicating uneven network utilization. These findings illuminate how socio-political factors, activity patterns, and complex network dynamics shape urban mobility in rapidly developing contexts. This study offers empirical evidence supporting targeted interventions, including Tuesday-specific traffic management, evening-focused congestion mitigation strategies, and corridor-specific infrastructure improvements to enhance mobility in this representative mid-sized sub-Saharan city. Full article

As high-performance computing (HPC) platforms continue to scale up, communication costs have become a critical bottleneck affecting overall application performance. An effective strategy to overcome this limitation is to overlap communication with computation. The Message Passing Interface (MPI), as the de facto standard for communication in HPC, provides non-blocking communication primitives that make such overlapping feasible. By enabling asynchronous communication, non-blocking operations reduce idle time of cores caused by data transfer delays, thereby improving resource utilization. Overlapping communication with computation is particularly important for enhancing the performance of large-scale scientific applications, such as numerical simulations, climate modeling, and other data-intensive tasks. However, achieving efficient overlapping is non-trivial and depends not only on advances in hardware technologies such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), but also on well-designed and optimized MPI implementations. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the principles of MPI non-blocking communication, the core techniques for achieving computation–communication overlap, and some representative applications in scientific computing. Alongside the survey, we include a preliminary experimental study evaluating the effectiveness of asynchronous progress mechanism on modern HPC platforms to support the development of parallel programs for HPC researchers and practitioners. Full article

Little is known about monthly home visits, a traditional Japanese Buddhist custom, wherein Buddhist priests visit their parishioners’ homes every month. This study aimed to explore this custom in terms of community health care. Qualitative data were collected from 14 Buddhist priests from various areas, followed by quantitative data collection on all the temples in the Osaka parish, where 486 questionnaires were distributed and 299 were retrieved. From the interviews, the functions of the monthly home visits were categorized into the following six categories: “finding incidents”, “preventing suicides”, “caring for older people”, “grief care”, “a peaceful passing”, and “connecting people”. Ninety-one percent of Buddhist priests made monthly home visits in the Osaka parish, with a median of 30.0 times per month. The median duration of their visits was 25.0 min. Those who carried out a high number of monthly home visits had more experience in: noticing dementia or physical deterioration; being asked for advice about a serious issue; dealing with the grief of bereavement; finding someone whom they were concerned about, but being unsure to what extent to get involved; finding someone in cardiopulmonary arrest or unconsciousness; and finding someone whom they were concerned about but not knowing where to ask for help. Full article

The non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture is the de facto norm in modern server processors. Applications running on NUMA processors may suffer significant performance degradation (NUMA effect) due to the non-uniform memory accesses, including data and page table accesses. Recent studies show that the NUMA effect of long-running memory-intensive workloads can be mitigated by replicating or migrating page tables to nodes that require accesses to remote page tables. However, this technique cannot adapt to the situation where other applications compete for the memory controller. Furthermore, it was only implemented on x86 processors and cannot be readily applied on ARM server processors, which are becoming increasingly popular. To address this issue, we designed the page table access latency aware (PTL-aware) page table auto-migration (Auto-PTM) mechanism. Then we implemented it on Linux ARM64 (the Linux kernel name for AArch64) by identifying the differences between the ARM architecture and the x86 architecture in terms of page table structure and the implementation of the Linux kernel source code. We evaluate it on real ARM NUMA servers. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art PTM mechanism, our PTL-aware mechanism significantly enhances the performance of workloads in various scenarios (e.g., GUPS by 3.53x, XSBench by 1.77x, Hashjoin by 1.68x). Full article

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent literature on passkeys, a more secure and phishing-resistant authentication method compared to traditional passwords. Despite their clear advantages, passkeys have not yet replaced the de facto standard of password authentication. This literature survey aims to outline a holistic picture of the related research, focusing on technical aspects as well as user-centric perspectives on usability and perception. The main challenges hindering passkey adoption are misaligned user perception and technical issues regarding account recovery, sharing, and delegation. Research suggests that improved user education and awareness could address these challenges. Existing studies have also analyzed and contributed to enhancing the usability of passkeys. However, the current literature highlights a clear gap for more academic research focusing on effective strategies to improve the user perception of passkeys, as the existing work primarily concentrates on technical and usability aspects. Addressing this research gap may lead to increased passkey adoption among end users, ultimately improving the overall security of authentication systems. Full article

In his recent paper, Vlatko Vedral claims that the Schrödinger picture can describe quantum systems as locally as the Heisenberg picture, relying on a product notation for the density matrix. Here, I refute that claim. I show that the so-called ‘local factors’ in the product notation do not correspond to individual systems and therefore fail to satisfy Einsteinian locality. Furthermore, the product notation does not track where local gates are applied. Finally, I expose internal inconsistencies in the argument: if, as is also stated, the Schrödinger-picture locality ultimately depends on the explicit bookkeeping of all operations, then the explanatory power of the product notation is de facto undermined. Full article

This study evaluates urban resilience to earthquakes in Daegu Metropolitan City, South Korea, by analyzing outdoor evacuation sites through a dual-axis matrix framework to provide feasible solutions for enhancing urban resilience. Evacuation capacity was assessed by use of resident and de facto population data, while Geographic Information System (GIS) network analysis identified evacuation-feasible and evacuation-infeasible areas. The matrix categorizes areas along two axes: capacity (x-axis) and evacuation-infeasible areas (y-axis), facilitating targeted improvement strategies. Findings reveal that only 54 of 139 census blocks possess sufficient capacity and no evacuation-infeasible areas. For areas with adequate capacity but extensive infeasible areas, redistributing evacuation sites is recommended to improve accessibility. Areas with limited capacity but no infeasible areas require additional outdoor evacuation sites to accommodate the population. In regions constrained by both capacity and accessibility, establishing new evacuation sites within infeasible areas is essential. For critically low-capacity areas without infeasible areas, multi-use spaces, such as disaster prevention parks, are desirable to address evacuation needs. Lastly, areas lacking both capacity and accessibility urgently require new evacuation sites concentrated in infeasible areas. By simplifying complex variables into a capacity–accessibility matrix, this study integrates population dynamics, spatial accessibility, and site capacity, offering implementable solutions for earthquake preparedness in densely populated urban settings. Additionally, this approach supports urban planning efforts to mitigate seismic damage and enhance urban sustainability. Full article

Background/Objectives: There exist several interconnected issues that hinder the development of family medicine in Commonwealth realms such as the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. These issues affect both the medical and nursing professions. Family physicians, in most countries including the United Kingdom, are not considered “specialists” and are called “general practitioners” instead. The term GP is an outdated and potentially demeaning term relegated to the early 20th century when they did not receive any more than a few rotations as staff grades before being allowed to run their own community clinic. Registered nurses often cover a minor and subaltern role when working as practice nurses in the UK. They are often replaced by cost-effective, licensed practical nurses in most other English-speaking countries. Nurse practitioners in the UK, though being de facto entirely equal to family physicians in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most US states, do not hold a special registration status. Their training is not defined in specific legislation, and they do not function as alternatives to general practitioners in the sense that patient may register with them alone which is often the case in Canada or the USA. Family medicine is, therefore, generally left lacking leadership with members of the medical and nursing professions often struggling for “power” in a way that undermines the foundation of family medicine which is to serve the health needs of a large population ranging from children to seniors. Methods: The purpose of this paper is to describe a solution to management in a Family Medicine Clinic in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Results: In this model, the physician-nurse team developed a highly trained role of Clinical Nurse Specialist which serves as an overall clinic manager. Conclusions: The implementation of the Clinical Nurse Specialist-led model in family medicine has improved clinic efficiency, patient access, and provider satisfaction. This approach demonstrates a viable framework for enhancing primary care management across Commonwealth realms. Full article