Search Results (206)

Background: Exclusive breastfeeding is recognized as an effective public health intervention; however, its practice is shaped by complex social, emotional, and cultural dynamics, particularly within collectivist societies. This study aims to explore in depth the meaning of exclusive breastfeeding in the early postpartum period within the socio-cultural context of the Banjar community with a focus on postpartum stress and the dynamics of social support. Methods: This qualitative study, grounded in a constructivist paradigm and designed as a case study, was conducted among 15 Banjar mothers aged 18–35 years with infants aged 0–6 weeks in Banjarmasin City and Banjar Regency, South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke between May and August 2024. All interview data were translated and verified through collaborative review among bilingual researchers to ensure accuracy. Results: The analysis identified five main themes: breastfeeding knowledge, social support, postpartum stress, attitudes toward breastfeeding, and exclusive breastfeeding practices. Although some participants experienced formula introduction, breastfeeding practices were often described as efforts to maintain exclusive breastfeeding rather than continuous exclusive adherence. The findings reveal that breastfeeding is interpreted not only as nutritional provision but also as a relational, moral, and religious practice embedded within collectivist values and Islamic teachings. Social support is experienced as ambivalent, functioning as both a protective and normative force within extended family structures. Postpartum stress specifically related to breastfeeding emerges from limited early initiation of breastfeeding, surrounding formula-feeding dilemmas, and internal conflicts between feelings of guilt and commitment to breastfeeding. Maternal attitudes are shaped by personal commitment, religious beliefs, and critical reflections on medical interventions, while exclusive breastfeeding practices are enacted through adaptive strategies, breast milk management, and reinforcement from the social environment. Conclusions: This study provides a context-sensitive understanding of early postpartum exclusive breastfeeding as a culturally embedded maternal experience. By highlighting how social support, cultural expectations, postpartum stress, and maternal attitudes intersect to shape breastfeeding practices, the study contributes new insights for culturally grounded maternal health interventions in collectivist Muslim societies. Full article

Objectives: The objective of this study was to compare visual outcomes three and six months after bilateral implantation of extended monofocal Isopure 1.2.3 lenses. Methods: Prospective study: 20 patients (40 eyes) aged 51–75 years underwent uncomplicated bilateral cataract surgery with the implantation of Isopure 1.2.3 lenses. Three and six months after surgery, the following examinations were performed: monocular and binocular UDVA, UIVA, UNVA, contrast sensitivity, patient satisfaction, spectacle independence, incidence of photic phenomena, and defocus curve (only 6-month assessment). Results: Three months after surgery, the means of monocular and binocular UDVA were 0.06 ± 0.08 logMAR and 0.02 ± 0.07 logMAR, respectively. The mean binocular UIVA values were 0.15 ± 0.12 logMAR (66 cm) and 0.19 ± 0.11 logMAR (80 cm), and those for UNVA 0.32 ± 0.12 logMAR (40 cm). Binocular contrast sensitivity was within the normal range. Defocus curve indicated prolonged depth of focus for intermediate vision. High level of patient satisfaction, low frequency and intensity of photic phenomena, and significant independence from glasses were achieved. Six months postoperatively, the visual outcomes and patient satisfaction did not differ significantly from the three-month follow-up. Conclusions: Bilateral implantation of Isopure 1.2.3 IOLs provides very good distance, good intermediate and acceptable near vision. With low incidence and perception level of photic phenomena, as well as significant spectacle independence, it should be considered an option for patients not suitable for multifocal IOLs. The investigated visual outcomes are stable starting from the third postoperative month, which could be the result of good neuroadaptation in a short period of time. Full article

Multi-Focus Image Fusion is a technique that combines the in-focus regions from multiple images of the same scene, captured at different focal planes, to generate a single image with an extended Depth of Field compared to the source images. Despite improved fusion quality, recent approaches are constrained by high computational cost and the need for large training datasets, reducing their feasibility in resource-limited scenarios. In this work, a multi-focus fusion method based on a soft decision map is proposed, where the map is generated from local focus measurements in each scene. Subsequently, two Fusion Rules are employed: the Additive Fusion Rule, commonly used in the state of the art, and the Multiplicative Fusion Rule, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been previously reported in the MFIF context. The method is evaluated using the public MFI-WHU and Lytro datasets through both reference-based and non-reference metrics. The results demonstrate that the proposed method produces visually coherent fused images and achieves competitive performance in terms of structural similarity, edge preservation, and information content, while maintaining low computational complexity. Full article

Radiation therapy is central to the management of gynecological cancers, including endometrial, cervical, ovarian, and vaginal malignancies. Despite advances in photon-based techniques, treatment-related toxicity remains significant owing to the anatomical proximity of pelvic targets to critical organs at risk (OARs), including the bowel, bladder, and bone marrow. Proton beam therapy exploits the Bragg peak to deliver a precise dose at depth with minimal exit dose, potentially reducing OAR exposure. This review develops the physical principles, dosimetric evidence, and early clinical data for proton therapy in gynecological malignancies, including cervical, endometrial, ovarian, vaginal, and vulvar cancers. Major focus is given to clinical conditions where conventional brachytherapy is not practical, and proton therapy may offer the greatest advantages, such as reirradiation for recurrent disease, post-operative pelvic irradiation, and extended field nodal treatment. This review also emphasizes current constraints that have slowed down wide clinical implementation, such as the lack of mature prospective data, cost, and accessibility. Finally, we emphasize future directions, including well-designed comparative trials, integration with systemic and immunotherapies, and adaptive treatment strategies. As the body of accumulated evidence evolves, the proton beam therapy potential for the treatment of gynecological malignancies has tremendously increased due to its role in safety and personalization of radiation treatment. Full article

The stroboscopic effect and phantom array effect caused by temporal light modulation (TLM) in light-emitting diode (LED) lighting are important temporal light artifacts (TLAs) that can influence visual perception, task performance, and visual comfort. This review systematically analyzes 40 studies published between 1998 and 2024 to provide a comprehensive overview of the current understanding of both effects. The reviewed literature covers visibility thresholds, influencing parameters, experimental methodologies, and assessment metrics. The analysis shows that reported visibility thresholds for the stroboscopic effect typically range from 550 to 1000 Hz, whereas thresholds for the phantom array effect may extend to 10–15 kHz, suggesting substantial differences in the underlying perceptual mechanisms. In addition to modulation frequency, modulation depth, waveform, duty cycle, luminance, retinal image motion, and observer factors have been identified as important determinants of visibility. The review further highlights significant methodological differences among studies, including variations in experimental design, stimulus generation, participant characteristics, and psychophysical procedures. Although the stroboscopic visibility measure (SVM) provides a standardized framework for evaluating the stroboscopic effect, no comparably validated metric is currently available for the phantom array effect. The review identifies major knowledge gaps regarding the interaction of influencing parameters and the lack of standardized assessment methods. Future research should focus on establishing unified experimental protocols and developing robust metrics for the phantom array effect to support comprehensive lighting standards that protect visual comfort, well-being, and consumer health. Full article

Large-scale location-based virtual reality (LBE VR) has become an important form of immersive cultural tourism, but its role in supporting sustained value transformation remains insufficiently understood. In this study, “sustained value transformation” refers to the extension, reinterpretation, and circulation of cultural, educational, social, and engagement-related value across physical venues, embodied virtual narratives, and digital platforms. Rather than assessing economic performance, environmental impact, or long-term operational viability, this study focuses on the cultural and social circulation of experiential value. It examines how physical venues, embodied virtual narratives, and digital platforms jointly mediate visitor experience in LBE VR-based cultural tourism. It compares representative LBE VR projects in museums and heritage institutions, emerging public cultural spaces, and commercial venues in China. A total of 10,862 project-related textual items and 464 visual samples were collected from Xiaohongshu and Douyin and analyzed through comparative content and visual analyses. The findings show that visitor choices are shaped by both the spirit of place in physical venues and platform-visible experience labels. In museums and heritage institutions, institutional knowledge authority and embodied narrative depth help visitors recognize interactive educational value. In emerging public cultural spaces, the intertwining of historical narratives and commercial operations produces more ambiguous experience labels. In commercial venues, platform discussions focus more strongly on value-for-money judgment, sensory stimulation, product quality, and service experience. The study argues that sustained value transformation in LBE VR-based cultural tourism cannot rely solely on platform traffic. Instead, it depends on collaboration among cultural institutions, tourism enterprises, platform content creators, educational actors, and community stakeholders to preserve cultural distinctiveness, improve experience quality, and extend cultural and social value beyond the immediate on-site experience. Full article

This paper examines how historic wooden-built environments and open-air museums can function as pedagogical settings for craft education. Drawing on teaching experiences from higher education in Norway, it analyses how students develop knowledge through guided engagement with tools, materials, and traditional practices in situated learning environments. Two teaching cases, spoon carving in a museum workshop and the investigation of a historic log-built structure, are presented as pedagogical designs. The analysis focuses on how learning is structured and develops through relational and responsive engagement with materials, tools, and professional guidance, rather than solely on learning outcomes. The cases demonstrate how teaching can be organised to support the development of embodied and practice-based knowledge. The paper develops a theoretical framework grounded in 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition) and Tim Ingold’s concepts of meshwork and wayfaring. These perspectives are applied as analytical tools to examine how learning emerges through action, feedback, and iterative engagement within specific learning environments. Historic workshops, tools, and buildings are approached as pedagogical resources that shape the conditions for learning. While such environments carry historical and material depth, the focus here is on how they structure students’ engagement and influence learning processes in practice. The paper argues that craft pedagogy involves the design of learning situations where material engagement, reflection, and professional guidance are integrated. It proposes an understanding of learning as a situated and relational practice, in which knowledge develops through participation in practice rather than through transmission alone. Full article

Background/Objectives: Choosing the most appropriate intraocular lens (IOL) for presbyopia management may be challenging given the expanding selection of available designs. This review provides an updated overview of current monofocal plus, extended depth of focus (EDoF), and trifocal IOLs, summarizing their optical properties and laboratory and clinical findings, including visual acuity outcomes and side effects. Methods: A literature search was conducted using PubMed to identify studies on monofocal plus, EDoF, and trifocal IOLs, with emphasis on optical characteristics, visual acuity outcomes, and reported photic phenomena. Results: Monofocal plus IOLs demonstrate an improvement in depth of field compared to monofocal lenses, as evidenced by significant broadening of the defocus curve. Both refractive and diffractive EDoF IOLs show improved intermediate visual acuity, with diffractive models offering greater depth of field but a higher risk of dysphotopsia. Trifocal IOLs offer the best visual acuity at all three foci: near, intermediate, and distance. Patients’ needs may be customized using sulcus- or capsulotomy-fixated IOLs, mix-and-match strategies, and binocular IOL systems. Conclusions: Based on this literature review, clinical and optical bench studies to date support optimized IOL selection based on individual patient needs for presbyopia management. However, consideration of understudied or newly released IOL models is limited as future research is needed. Additionally, further prospective, randomized, controlled, and masked studies with large sample sizes on all IOL models may further support patient decision-making by contributing to a more comprehensive literature. Full article

Background and Objectives: The use of presbyopia-correcting intraocular lenses (IOLs) has become an integral part of modern cataract surgery. Trifocal IOLs are designed to provide functional vision at multiple distances but may be associated with dysphotopsia and reduced contrast sensitivity. In contrast, extended depth-of-focus (EDOF) IOLs offer a smoother defocus profile and fewer photic phenomena; however, they often provide insufficient uncorrected near visual acuity. To overcome the limitations of each design, a mix-and-match implantation strategy, involving implantation of a trifocal IOL in one eye and an EDOF IOL in the fellow eye, has been proposed. The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate whether mix-and-match implantation can maintain high visual acuity at near, intermediate, and distance ranges in the early postoperative period. Materials and Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted in five electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect, following PRISMA guidelines. Studies reporting outcomes of mix-and-match implantation with a trifocal IOL in one eye and an EDOF IOL in the fellow eye were included. Only studies presenting binocular uncorrected visual acuity (UCVA) at a distance, intermediate, and near ranges, expressed in logMAR units, were considered. Visual outcomes assessed at approximately 3 months postoperatively were extracted. Results: Five studies involving 225 patients were included. The pooled mean logMAR UDVA at 3 months was 0.05 (95% CI: 0.03–0.07), with substantial heterogeneity (I² = 80.1%). The pooled mean logMAR UNVA was 0.09 (95% CI: 0.05–0.14), with high heterogeneity (I² = 87.9%). For intermediate vision, the pooled mean logMAR UIVA was 0.03 (95% CI: −0.00 to 0.06), with moderate heterogeneity (I² = 72.5%). Meta-regression analyses did not show statistically significant associations between publication year and visual outcomes for UDVA (p = 0.695), UNVA (p = 0.469), or UIVA (p = 0.099). Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the pooled estimates. Conclusions: Mix-and-match implantation of a trifocal IOL in one eye and an EDOF IOL in the fellow eye provides favorable early binocular visual acuity across distance, intermediate, and near ranges. However, substantial heterogeneity across studies and very low certainty of evidence warrant cautious interpretation of these findings. Full article

This study explores the impact of internationalization on the financing decisions and finance costs of Chinese enterprises listed in Hong Kong, extending the pecking order theory to an international context. Utilizing data from 785 companies from 2010 to 2020, the research investigates how the degree of internationalization influences corporate finance strategies, with a focus on the mediating role of the pecking order and the moderating effects of international business factors. The findings reveal that while broader internationalization increases finance costs, deeper internationalization reduces them. Legal distance is found to negatively moderate this relationship, whereas the structure of the financial system positively influences it. The results suggest that multinational enterprises with extensive overseas resource allocation demonstrate greater flexibility in financing decisions, particularly in foreign markets characterized by strong investor protection and efficient direct finance mechanisms. Managers should be cautious about pursuing wide geographic expansion without adequate operating depth because a broad but shallow international presence may increase financing frictions. By contrast, deeper resource commitment abroad can strengthen financing flexibility and improve access to lower-cost funds, especially when institutional conditions in the financing market are favorable. Full article

With the in-depth advancement of the “Digital China” initiative, policies and research discourses related to the digital economy have continued evolved, making it necessary to systematically examine their stage-specific characteristics and underlying logic from a long-term perspective. Accordingly, this study adopts information society theory as the analytical framework and selects the annual series of reports on China’s digital economy development published by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) from 2015 to 2024 as the research corpus. Using text mining techniques and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, this paper conducts a longitudinal examination of the stage-wise systemic evolution of key topics in China’s digital economy development. The findings indicate that over the past decade, the topic structure of China’s digital economy has followed a clear evolutionary trajectory, progressing from “informatization-driven development” to “platform expansion,” and subsequently to “data factors and institutional governance.” In the early stage, the focus was on information infrastructure development and industrial integration; the middle stage shifted toward the platform economy and enterprise growth; more recently, the emphasis has increasingly been placed on the construction of data factor markets and the improvement of governance frameworks. This process of topic evolution not only reflects changes in the practical forms of the digital economy but also reveals the ongoing adjustment of the state’s cognitive framework and governance logic regarding digital economy development. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding the systemic evolution of China’s digital economy over time. By identifying the stage-specific pathways of China’s digital economy, this study extends the application of information society theory within this context and provides new empirical evidence for understanding the evolutionary logic underlying high-quality digital economy development. Full article

LiDAR-based 3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving perception. Ensuring robust sensing under adverse weather is essential for safe deployment. Current physics-based simulation methods focus on atmospheric effects but offer limited ground-level modeling, leading to domain gaps between simulated and real-world snowy data. Ground-level effects are challenging to model due to diverse physical interactions: wet surface reflectivity changes, vehicle-induced spray, and multi-layer snow scattering. This paper proposes a simulation method with more comprehensive ground-effect modeling for snowfall scenarios. Our approach introduces two modules: (i) an extended spray model with precipitation-controlled parameters that jointly models spray noise and wet ground attenuation, and (ii) a multi-layer dual-mode backscattering model that captures both diffuse and specular reflections on snow-covered ground. Both modules share a unified precipitation-driven parameterization. Higher snowfall rates simultaneously control spray generation, wet surface reflectivity, and snow accumulation depth. This design ensures physical consistency and makes the approach applicable across diverse LiDAR systems without sensor-specific tuning. Experiments on the STF dataset demonstrate consistent improvements over four state-of-the-art methods under both heavy and light snowfall. Clear-weather performance is preserved. Evaluations on roadside LiDAR further confirm generalizability to infrastructure-based scenarios. Full article

The integration of AI into journalism has intensified debates about the future of news production, yet existing scholarship has focused predominantly on AI’s capabilities rather than on irreplaceable human competencies. This study shifts analytical focus from replacement to complementarity, investigating the boundaries of AI through the perspectives of both journalists and AI developers. Ten participants—including field reporters, news anchors, broadcast journalists, and AI developers—were interviewed through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis revealed three core dimensions of irreplaceable human competency: embodied presence and rapport-building, contextual judgment and meaning-making, and investigative initiative requiring moral agency. Practitioners and developers converged on AI’s persistent limitations in factual reliability, emotional authenticity, and ethical accountability. Based on these findings, a three-tier human–AI collaborative model is proposed, allocating computational tasks to AI while preserving human authority over editorial judgment, source relationships, and ethical decisions. These findings contribute to human–machine communication theory, extend algorithmic journalism literature beyond capability assessments, and offer practical implications for newsroom workflow design, journalism education, and AI governance. Findings are situated within the Korean media context and should be interpreted accordingly, with implications that may extend to other broadcasting-oriented journalism cultures. Full article

Background: Production systems are complex environments where logistics processes play a crucial role alongside manufacturing. Although the digitalisation of value-creating processes is increasingly important, production-supporting logistics activities are often missing from digital models. Their absence reduces the accuracy of digital representations and may lead to suboptimal operational decisions. Methods: This study reviews digitalisation solutions in manufacturing systems with a focus on integrating production logistics activities. Relevant research articles are analysed, and integration problems are organised into a problem tree supported by practical experience. Based on these findings, an extended process modelling methodology and related indicators are applied to quantify digital transparency. The methodology is demonstrated through tests on a physical laboratory model. Results: The literature review and practical observations highlight several issues that hinder the integration and quantification of production logistics activities in digital models. The proposed modelling approach addresses these challenges by defining appropriate modelling depth and placement of logistics processes, enabling a clearer evaluation of digital transparency. Conclusions: Experiments conducted on the physical model confirm the feasibility of the methodology. The approach provides an important initial step toward the digital integration of production logistics and supports the development of more effective digital twin models for industrial applications in future research. Full article

The concept of sustainability has evolved far beyond its initial environmental foundations, expanding into a multidimensional framework that integrates multinational policies, multicultural values, and multigenerational knowledge, but there is a paucity of bottom-up or grassroots research. This paper is a case history comprising oral history supported by rigorous documentation including military records, census data, genealogical records, and scholarship extending over four centuries. A more nuanced understanding of resilience and adaptation emerges. An analysis of recent scholarship indicates that sus-tainability is a dynamic, narrative-driven process that requires an in-depth understanding of the spatial and temporal consequences of global shifts, ranging from climate catastrophes to the global flows of capital and large migrations of people. This paper uses oral history to show the adaptation of a multinational, multicultural, multigenerational family in North America to the social, political, economic, and technological challenges faced over 400 years with a focus on sustainability and resilience. Full article