Search Results (403)

Canals, as linear cultural landscapes, have profoundly influenced social structures, ecological patterns, economic activities, and human well-being. Canal-related ecosystem services (ES), particularly cultural ecosystem services (CES), have received increasing scholarly attention, but evidence specific to canal landscapes remains fragmented and has not been systematically synthesised across different contexts. Therefore, this scoping review synthesises the existing evidence to clarify the range of canal-related ES, particularly CES, and stakeholder representation across different contexts. Following PRISMA-ScR, we searched the Web of Science Core Collection on 27 September 2024 using the topic query TS = ((canal* OR waterway*) AND landscape*). After screening, 86 peer-reviewed English-language studies were included, spanning 2000–2024. We charted and synthesised the evidence using descriptive statistics and framework-based coding guided by a CES typology. The synthesis identified 15 CES types, including two emergent themes, and revealed variation in CES valence, associated cultural disservices, and stakeholder representation. This review identifies imbalances in attention to non-material values and stakeholder representation across canal-related CES research and offers an integrated synthesis to inform future canal conservation, landscape planning, and environmental management. Full article

Between 2018 and mid-2019, Kyrgyzstan implemented wage reforms in education, healthcare, and social services, sectors in which women are strongly represented. This study examines gender wage inequality over this reform period using the 2016 and 2019 waves of the Life in Kyrgyzstan survey. The empirical analysis combines OLS wage regressions, supplementary sector-based DiD/DDD specifications, a Heckman sample-selection correction, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and RIF-based distributional methods. The results indicate a persistent conditional wage disadvantage for women in both survey waves. For the mean wage gap, observed worker characteristics explain only a small share, whereas the unexplained component is substantially larger and remains dominant across alternative reference wage structures. Distributional estimates similarly indicate a statistically significant male wage advantage in the lower, middle, and upper parts of the unconditional wage distribution. Differences between 2016 and 2019 are interpreted as changes across survey waves rather than as causal effects of the wage reforms. Full article

Complex hot-stamping dies are prone to concentrated wear in protruding die-surface regions, such as rounded corners, under high loads during service, whereas friction between the sheet and adjacent die surfaces mainly occurs before die closure. Consequently, different die-surface regions require different strengthening methods, with a gradual transition in mechanical properties between adjacent strengthened regions. In this study, a zoned strengthening method combining Fe901 laser cladding and laser quenching was proposed for H13 die steel. A Fe901 cladding layer was deposited in the high-wear rounded-corner region, laser quenching was applied to the adjacent region, and a transition zone between the cladding and quenching regions was constructed. Based on cladding microstructural strengthening, beveled geometric transition, and quenching microstructural strengthening, relationships among microstructure, elemental distribution, and cross-sectional hardness in the transition zone were analyzed. The microstructural continuity, hardness transition behavior, and geometric continuity of the transition zone were evaluated through a comparison of SEM/EDS characterization, cross-sectional microhardness testing, and curved-specimen zoned-strengthening experiments. Adjacent laser quenching refined columnar crystals in the top region and disrupted cellular crystals in the bottom region, accompanied by C and Cr enrichment, attenuated B segregation, and localized elemental redistribution. The curved transition zone between the Fe901 cladding layer and the adjacent laser-quenched region mitigated abrupt hardness changes and enabled a continuous hardness gradient. Full article

Background/Objectives: From early 2020, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic spread rapidly worldwide, bringing unprecedented challenges. It severely disrupted health, social, and financial systems while exacerbating poverty and socioeconomic problems globally. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics and general health status—including age, comorbidities, and COVID-19 vaccination status—of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients as documented in Greek national registries, with a particular emphasis on COVID-19-related mortality. Methods: Anonymized individual-level data were obtained from the national digital registries of COVID-19 patients and vaccinations. Data extraction was initiated on 7 January 2023, and the linked anonymized dataset was provided to the research team on 18 January 2023. The data sets were linked by the e-Government Center for Social Security Services using the Greek social security number (AMKA). Data on comorbidities were estimated by, and extracted from, medicine prescriptions in outpatient settings using the standardized therapeutic prescribing protocol as defined by the Ministry of Health of the Hellenic Republic. Multivariable logistic regression was used to examine factors associated with COVID-19 death. Results: Of 33,740 people who died of COVID-19 infection, 70.0% (23,606) were not vaccinated. Sixty-seven point two percent (18,474) of individuals dying from COVID-19 were 70 years or older and not vaccinated. Hypertension was the most common comorbidity among patients who died from COVID-19 (67.1%). Among the 27,489 recorded COVID-19 deaths in individuals aged 70 years or older, unvaccinated individuals with two comorbidities accounted for 17.6% of deaths, while unvaccinated individuals with three comorbidities accounted for 16.7%. The multivariable analysis showed a much lower risk for people who had received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine compared to those who are unvaccinated [odds ratio (OR) = 0.35; 95% CI: 0.33–0.36]. The existence of one or more comorbidities increased the risk of death (OR = 1.10; 95% CI: 1.09–1.11). Conclusions: Most COVID-19 fatalities in Greece occurred among unvaccinated individuals over 70 years of age. Mortality among vaccinated individuals was relatively low and was predominantly observed in those with multiple underlying health conditions. Thus, increasing Greece’s vaccination rate and addressing non-communicable diseases could significantly lower future COVID-19 deaths. Full article

The premature degradation of aluminium extrusion dies remains one of the major challenges affecting process efficiency, product quality, and tooling costs. Although numerous studies have investigated wear mechanisms and proposed solutions such as surface treatments, coatings and lubrication, the absence of a generic and reproducible laboratory methodology for evaluating tribological performance under representative extrusion die contact conditions limits the objective and systematic comparison of alternative tribological solutions. This study proposes and experimentally validates a generic tribological methodology for laboratory simulation of aluminium extrusion die contacts. Rather than reproducing the complete extrusion process, the methodology isolates the dominant physical mechanisms governing die degradation and reproduces their essential characteristics under controlled laboratory conditions, providing a representative platform for systematic tribological investigations. The methodology was developed through the selection and scaling of representative contact parameters, including contact geometry, normal load, sliding velocity and operating temperature. The experimental programme incorporated physical similarity principles, a controlled run-in procedure and repeated use of the same hardened steel counterface to reproduce cumulative die exposure under successive aluminium contacts. Two aluminium alloys (AA6063 and AA6082) were evaluated using a small ring-on-disc configuration against a hardened GCr15 steel counterface. Experimental validation was carried out using two extrusion lubricant systems, complemented by three additional commercial lubricants to assess the robustness and general applicability of the proposed methodology. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology provides repeatable and sufficiently sensitive measurements of friction and wear, allowing clear differentiation between lubricant systems and aluminium alloy–lubricant combinations while maintaining representative contact conditions. The study also demonstrates that steady-state friction should be identified from the actual friction evolution rather than by applying a fixed averaging interval. Although lubricant evaluation is employed here as the experimental validation case, the proposed methodology is intended as a generic experimental framework applicable to the assessment of surface treatments, coatings, tool materials, lubrication systems, and other tribological strategies aimed at extending extrusion die service life. Full article

Philanthropic hospitals are key providers within Brazil’s public healthcare system and benefit from the Certification of Beneficent Social Assistance Entities in Health (CEBAS-Saúde), a tax relief program designed to incentivize service provision in underserved areas. We analyze a balanced panel of 1641 philanthropic general hospitals from 2005 to 2019, employing a conditional Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model with heterogeneous treatment exposure and entropy balancing to ensure comparability between certified and non-certified hospitals. The results show that certification significantly improved geographic access, mainly by reducing macro-regional patient evasion—the outflow of patients seeking care outside their designated health regions. This effect, most pronounced after ten years of certification, translated into an average annual reduction of approximately 8700 avoided hospitalizations between 2015 and 2019. The reduction was particularly concentrated in small hospitals and in the Northeast region, where access barriers are historically greater. These findings suggest that CEBAS-Saúde is an effective policy instrument for strengthening the regionalization of healthcare provision, reducing geographic inequities, and addressing service gaps in areas with limited healthcare supply. Full article

The electrification of transportation pushes traction inverters, on-board chargers, and aircraft propulsion systems toward higher power density, increasingly enabled by wide-bandgap devices, thereby concentrating ever-larger heat fluxes on power semiconductor dies as package-level cooling nears its sustainable limit. Junction temperature is the resulting bottleneck: it caps the usable rating and, through the thermal cycling that fatigues module interconnects, governs reliability and service life. Managing junction temperature therefore requires a coupled chain of processes spanning the device loss that generates the heat, the models that predict it, the parameters which these models require as input, the cooling that removes it, and the control that bounds its excursion. This review traces heat transfer along this chain, organizing each link by method class and comparing representative methods against the limitation that marks its open problem. The methods within each link are relatively mature, whereas the couplings between links and their validation against realistic missions are not. The cross-cutting gaps, among them sparse drive-cycle validation, weak coupling between electro-thermal and aging models, and the absent co-design of cooling and control, are consolidated into a forward research agenda. Full article

As previous research in the context of primary and secondary schools in Italy demonstrates, intersectional needs of multilingual disabled migrant students are siloed. Similarly, when transitioning into adulthood and independent living, this group of students is pushed into disability or migration/language services, according to the perceived needs or availability of support. As part of the CRPD national implementation process, Italy has recently passed a disability reform legislation, emphasizing the emancipation of disabled people. The main tool established by the reform legislation to overcome the fragmentation of support services is Progetto di Vita Individuale, Personalizzato, Partecipato [Individual, Personalized, Participatory Life Project—IPPLP]. We believe that the implementation of this tool holds the potential to re-frame and re-organize support services available to multilingual disabled migrant youth in intersectional terms. Drawing from the integrated framework of Critical Disability Raciolinguistics, this paper advances understanding of how the IPPLP pushes for innovative practices to train educators and providers in services available to multilingual disabled migrants. For this purpose, we focus on services in the Piedmont region, because of its recent policies on the transition into adulthood of marginalized youth (Delibera Dirigenziale-Administrative Decision, 2024). Full article

Reliable short-term freeway traffic forecasting is essential for proactive traffic management, including congestion warning, ramp metering support, and traveler information services. However, many existing forecasting models treat spatial dependencies as synchronous or weakly directional, limiting their ability to represent delayed upstream–downstream traffic propagation. This study proposes Traffic-DiMAGNet, a lightweight and interpretable lag-aware directed spatio-temporal graph neural network for real-time freeway flow forecasting. The model constructs a sparse directed sensor dependency graph by integrating physical road adjacency, training-set lead–lag traffic priors, and learnable source–target node embeddings. A lag-aware bidirectional propagation module then shifts inter-sensor messages according to estimated propagation delays, while directed random-walk normalization, directional gating, and multi-scale causal convolutions preserve asymmetric traffic semantics with low computational cost. Experiments on four Caltrans PeMS datasets show that Traffic-DiMAGNet consistently outperforms recurrent, diffusion-based, attention-based, and adaptive-graph baselines regarding MAE, RMSE, and MAPE values. The learned directed lag structures provide interpretable propagation information, and the lightweight architecture supports rolling 5 min forecasting, indicating practical potential for real-time freeway monitoring and proactive traffic management. Full article

Greeting and farewell formulae are highly conventionalized routines that index social relations, regional norms and situational formality. This paper investigates pragmatic variation in greetings and farewells in rural Austria, focusing on age, region, setting and prosodic design. We analyze greeting and farewell formulae and metalinguistic comments produced by 152 adults from 13 rural locations across two project phases. The dataset combines spontaneous interactions with controlled elicitations in two greeting experiments contrasting a formal urban service encounter and an informal local dialect encounter. In spontaneous greetings, the supraregional call formula hallo predominates and is significantly rarer among older speakers. Across age groups, participants strongly preferred grüß Gott in the formal urban store scenario and griaß di in the informal local bakery scenario. Pronominal address is largely avoided, with T forms restricted mainly to western locations and familiar contexts. Prosodically, participants use [ˈhalo] and [haˈloː] at similar rates, whereas interviewers strongly favor the marked variant [haˈloː], suggesting different interactional roles in greeting management. Older speakers produce significantly more metalinguistic comments, revealing a mismatch between politeness ideologies and recorded practice. Overall, the findings reveal age-graded and context-dependent patterns of pragmatic variation in rural Austria. Full article

High Bandwidth Memory couples many DRAM dies to a host through independent channels, and a memory controller presents each channel to the workload as either available or isolated. This paper takes that binary service interface as the modeling primitive and builds a closed-form framework for evaluating stack and system behavior on top of it. Each die is treated as a binary component whose reliability is composed from DRAM, through-silicon via and micro-bump contributions, with the via bundle itself modeled as a threshold subsystem; the dies are then aggregated as a threshold structure over the stack, and stacks are aggregated over the system. The result is an evaluation whose cost grows linearly rather than exponentially with the number of dies, and which yields not only reliability but the full distribution of delivered bandwidth, its moments, and the sensitivity of system availability to each component. Three design questions are answered directly: where to direct reliability investment, how many stacks to provision for a given availability target, and which bandwidth threshold minimizes cost when bandwidth and reliability requirements are imposed together. The approximations the framework makes are bounded rather than assumed. A three-state baseline quantifies the error introduced by the binary representation and shows it is governed by a single measurable quantity, and distribution-free inequalities bound the effect of correlation among component failure mechanisms, which proves negligible in the regime where HBM parts are qualified. Application to a representative stack identifies DRAM cell reliability as the dominant bottleneck and shows that a single spare via per bundle is sufficient at typical defect rates. Full article

Urban green infrastructure (UGI) serves as a core pillar of sustainable urban development, delivering multiple benefits including urban heat island mitigation, stormwater regulation, and health promotion. However, allergenic pollen released by urban vegetation represents a typical ecosystem disservice, creating a prominent sustainability trade-off between greening benefits and residents’ allergy risk. For a long time, research in this field has evolved along two largely independent lines: vegetation allergenic hazard assessment and atmospheric pollen exposure analysis. Marked disconnections persist in indicator systems, spatial scales, and outcome translation, and an integrated spatial assessment framework remains lacking. Based on a systematic review of 127 publications from the Web of Science Core Collection (2000~2025) using framework synthesis methods, this study constructs a hazard–exposure–risk–planning (HERP) framework for the spatial assessment of allergenic pollen risk in UGI. This paper systematically synthesizes the core indicators, technical approaches and inherent limitations of each framework layer and identifies five key barriers: inconsistent indicator definitions, lack of cross-validation between surface vegetation and atmospheric pollen data, missing population vulnerability layer, insufficient multi-scale coupling, and weak translation of research into planning practice. The proposed framework provides a potential comparable and reproducible standardized pathway for cross-regional allergenic risk assessment and offers methodological support for healthy urban planning that balances ecosystem services and residents’ respiratory health. Full article

Impervious surfaces create heterogeneous planting sites for urban trees, but whether crown-scale sealing is associated jointly with leaf economics and reproductive dispersal morphology remains unclear. We aimed to test these associations in mature female Populus tomentosa while treating impervious surface area (ISA) as a composite indicator of site context rather than a direct measure of thermal or hydrological stress. In a single-season, cross-sectional survey of 180 trees in Beijing (60 per low-, mid-, and high-ISA descriptive stratum), we measured crown-scale ISA, short-term midday ground-surface temperature, a pervious-soil access-moisture index (PSAMI), eight leaf traits, and five reproductive traits, and analyzed continuous associations, group contrasts, effect sizes, and multivariate patterns. Greater ISA was associated with lower PSAMI (R² = 0.581) and higher land surface temperature (R² = 0.845). Compared with low-ISA trees, high-ISA trees had lower specific leaf area (117.5 ± 29.1 vs. 90.9 ± 19.0 cm² g⁻¹; Hedges’ g = −1.07, 95% CI [−1.50, −0.71]) and longer seed hairs (0.564 ± 0.067 vs. 0.727 ± 0.078 cm; g = 2.24, 95% CI [1.82, 2.78]), together with greater fuzz biomass and lower seed mass. Multivariate analyses showed coordinated shifts in mean leaf and reproductive phenotype without stronger within-stratum cross-module integration. We conclude that the study’s principal contribution is the joint description of vegetative economics and reproductive dispersal morphology on the same mature urban trees. Because ISA co-varied with land use and management and PSAMI includes structural zeros, the findings are preliminary and do not establish causal stress mechanisms, plant-available water status, airborne exposure, or management effects; multi-year matched-site validation is required. Full article

Background: Lower gastrointestinal endoscopy is a critical diagnostic and therapeutic procedure that is inherently resource-intensive. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, backlogs grew significantly, necessitating innovative management solutions. This study evaluates a multidisciplinary strategy integrating organizational interventions supported by a machine-learning-based semantic appropriateness assessment system to reduce pre-appointment waiting lists within the ULSS (Unità Locale Socio Sanitaria) 3 Serenissima health authority in the Venice metropolitan area. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed administrative and prescription data for adult patients undergoing lower gastrointestinal endoscopy from 2021 to 2024 across five hospitals. Evaluation metrics included the size and composition of the pre-appointment list (first vs. follow-up), service volumes, and prescription trends. Clinical appropriateness was assessed pre-procedure by adherence to RAO (Raggruppamenti di Attesa Omogenea, i.e., Homogeneous Waiting Groups) priority protocols and post-procedure by specialist reviews against guideline-based criteria in two samples from 2023 and 2024. Results: The pre-appointment list decreased significantly from 1, 542 in 2021 to only 14 in 2024. Procedural volume increased (+8% in 2023 vs. 2022), while overall prescriptions decreased, reflecting improved demand management. The provided-to-prescribed ratio rose from 64% in 2021 to 80% in 2024. Furthermore, RAO priority discordance declined, and inappropriate priority-class lower gastrointestinal endoscopy dropped from 26% in 2023 to 21% in 2024—a 5% absolute reduction. Conclusions: A combined strategy targeting both supply and demand—utilizing multidisciplinary governance, computerized decision-support management based on semantic analysis and RAO appropriateness assessment, structured pathways, and continuous audit—was associated with a marked reduction in waiting lists and improved appropriateness while simultaneously increasing service delivery. Expanding specialist–primary care consultation pathways, including teleconsultation, may further consolidate these improvements. Full article

Digital infrastructure (DI) and agricultural socialized services (ASSs) are key drivers of agricultural value chain efficiency (AVCE), yet their causal effects remain confounded by endogeneity bias. This study constructs an integrated SFA-Tobit-DML framework using 31-province Chinese panel data (2011–2023). SFA estimates provincial technical efficiency; Tobit provides associational benchmarks; and Double Machine Learning (DML) with K = 5 cross-fitting identifies causal average treatment effects (ATEs). The DML results validate the Tobit benchmark for DI (LassoCV ATE: 0.810, 95% CI [0.656, 0.963]; Tobit: 0.826), while revealing Tobit overestimates ASSs by approximately 37% (LassoCV: 0.850 [0.599, 1.101]; Tobit: 1.347). Bootstrap mediation tests confirm that agricultural R&D investment mediates 61.58% and 47.45% of DI and ASS effects. Heterogeneity analysis shows that urbanization amplifies DI marginal returns (ATE: 1.401 in low-urban vs. 0.711 in high-urban regions), while government intervention exhibits conditional crowding-out effects. These findings imply that policies should shift from uniform investment toward regionally differentiated strategies that account for local absorptive capacity. Full article