Search Results (97)

In this paper, we derive novel results concerning third-order differential subordinations for meromorphic functions, utilizing a newly defined linear operator that involves the inverse of the Legendre chi function in conjunction with the Mittag-Leffler identity. To establish these results, we introduce several families of admissible functions tailored to this operator and formulate sufficient conditions under which the subordinations hold. Our study presents three fundamental theorems that extend and generalize known results in the literature. Each theorem is accompanied by rigorous proofs and further supported by corollaries and illustrative examples that validate the applicability and sharpness of the derived results. In particular, we highlight special cases and discuss their implications through both analytical evaluations and graphical interpretations, demonstrating the strength and flexibility of our framework. This work contributes meaningfully to the field of geometric function theory by offering new insights into the behavior of third-order differential operators acting on p-valent meromorphic functions. Furthermore, the involvement of the Mittag-Leffler function positions the results within the broader context of fractional calculus, suggesting potential for applications in the mathematical modeling of complex and nonlinear phenomena. We hope this study stimulates further research in related domains. Full article

Recognizing that traditional science education materials often overlook students’ cultural and social contexts, this research examines the teacher-driven design of science teaching enactment—specifically, how teachers reflect on and adapt their science instruction to teach social justice through pursuits of identity and criticality using a framework rooted in cultural and historical responsive practices. The data for this study were collected from 14 online discussion sessions where three experienced science teachers engaged in adapting existing lessons, reflecting on their practice toward developing their own understandings of social justice. Through qualitative analysis of the teachers’ reflections, this study investigates how teachers think together about incorporating and nurturing students’ identities and criticality perspectives. The findings show themes related to challenges teachers faced, including parents’ concerns about addressing social justice topics in science class. Teachers also struggled with navigating discussions about identity, particularly when their race differed from that of their students. The teachers also reflected on aspects that promoted the work, such as students’ positive responses, and the deepening of their relationships with students. The teachers’ adaptations centered on students’ identities and the critical examination of societal issues, which were seen as accessible avenues for deepening scientific understanding and promoting engagement. Implications for teachers include using a reflective discussion approach for supporting curricular adaptations. There is a need for professional learning frameworks that empower teachers as agentive, intellectual actors to align science education with social justice principles. This will foster more inclusive and transformative learning experiences for diverse student populations. Full article

Bacillus subtilis NCD-2 demonstrates exceptional biocontrol potential against cotton Verticillium wilt. While previous studies have established its direct antifungal activity (e.g., inhibiting Verticillium dahliae mycelial growth and spore germination), our work reveals a novel mechanism: NCD-2 primes systemic resistance in cotton by activating plant immune-signaling pathways. Firstly, transcriptional profiling uncovered that NCD-2 triggers a defense response in roots analogous to V. dahliae infection, allowing cotton to maintain a more balanced state when confronted with pathogen attacks. Meanwhile, the mutant strains ∆fen and ∆srf—defective in lipopeptide synthesis—also improved cotton resistance to Verticillium wilt by activating partially identical defense pathways in cotton roots. Furthermore, the application of lipopeptide compounds derived from NCD-2, particularly surfactin and fengycin, could enhance host resistance to V. dahliae. Using an RT-qPCR approach, we found that numerous resistance-related genes were induced by these lipopeptide compounds. The up-regulation of SA/JA pathway markers (e.g., NPR1, ICS1, COI1, and LOX1) revealed NCD-2’s activation of plant immune signaling. Using virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS), we conclusively linked SA and JA signaling to NCD-2-induced defense priming. Silencing either pathway abolished resistance, highlighting their indispensable coordination. By bridging mechanistic insights and agricultural applicability, our work positions NCD-2 as a sustainable alternative to conventional fungicides, addressing both crop productivity and environmental health. Full article

The researchers of this qualitative case study explored an interdisciplinary collaboration in STEM integration through the lens of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). We examined a co-teaching integrated STEM model of a biology teacher and a family consumer sciences (FCS) teacher who collectively taught 38 students in an urban secondary high school in the United States. We aimed to answer, “in what ways did the biology teacher and FCS teacher demonstrated their PCK in integrated STEM to teach energy through food systems?” The results showed energy was not the centerpiece in the integrated STEM lessons that teachers developed even though the overarching problem focused on food waste as wasted energy. The two teachers’ different disciplinary thinking and professional identities informed their pedagogical knowledge. In addition, when teachers developed integrated STEM lessons, their knowledge of students’ preconceptions was not positioned to emphasize students’ learning difficulties related to certain concepts, but helped them identify what students needed most in their daily learning. The teachers taught within their disciplinary knowledge and experiences when they designed integrated STEM instruction. Teachers may change their PCK by working collaboratively with teachers from other disciplines, but this may take multiple successions and years for teachers to understand and develop their collaborative PCK. Full article

This paper aims at addressing sustainability concerns in vulnerable insular territories. Such concerns are due to the rising overtourism phenomenon that affects islands at a rapidly escalating pace and renders sustainable local development of these outstanding areas—from a natural and cultural viewpoint—at stake. Towards this end, this work capitalizes on current literature and attempts to structure a methodological framework and a respective set of indicators’ groups that are capable of assessing dimensions of overtourism in each single tourism destination, thus providing evidence-based and more robust guidelines for articulating policy decisions that can remedy incidents of overtourism. The proposed methodological framework follows a place-based approach and combines tourism demand and supply data with environmental, social, economic and spatial data and respective indicators for assessing the tourism density and intensity of each destination’s tourism pattern and related multi-dimensional impacts. Validation of both the proposed framework and indicators’ groups is conducted in Santorini Island, Greece, i.e., an island that lies at top positions of many lists of destinations, marked as suffering by overtourism. Results show that Santorini Island is confronted with severe overtourism impacts, which are highly affecting its identity, productive model and spatial pattern, while endangering its natural and cultural wealth. Full article

Research shows that family conversations about STEM topics positively influence children’s STEM identity development. This study expands on these findings by exploring how family conversations beyond STEM content contribute to this development. Specifically, we focus on how non-academic forms of family support—as described by students who face systemic racial discrimination in STEM—shape these conversations. In this way, we extend existing work by exploring the extent to which families’ dispositions to talk about a wide range of topics—not just in STEM—might further support youth identification with STEM fields. Using Family Communication Patterns Theory (FCPT) to guide our analysis, we examined data from a survey of first-year college students (n = 1134) attending Minority-Serving Institutions and public universities in the United States. The survey asked students to reflect on their childhood conversations and their current sense of identity in STEM. Using structural equation modeling, we found that family disposition to engage in conversations about a broad range of topics was linked to more frequent STEM-related conversations during childhood and, in turn, greater identification as a “STEM person” in college. These findings highlight the complex ways that family communication patterns can support construction of an individual’s sense of themselves as a STEM person in later years. By interpreting these findings using FCPT, we highlight the nature of family communication patterns that can contribute to STEM identity formation. Full article

Danielle Abrams’s performance art critically engages with late twentieth-century debates on race, queerness, and identity, positioning her as a vital figure in challenging monolithic and heteronormative structures of identity. Her early work Quadroon (1998), a live performance and four-channel video installation blending music, costume, gesture, and speech, compounds impassioned debates within the art world and beyond around the impact of multiculturalism on identity-based art, the invisibility of Jews of color and other marginalized members of the Jewish community, and the state of Black/Jewish relations in the United States following the Crown Heights riots of 1991. Abrams’s pieces frequently negotiate the tensions and intersections between her Black and Jewish familial heritage and her lesbian identity through the embodiment of semi-fictional personae grounded in family lore, self-perceptions, and cultural stereotypes. This paper explores how Abrams destabilizes the readability of “authentic” identities on the surface of the body in Quadroon via her adoption of personifications of her Black grandmother, her Jewish great grandmother, her identification as a butch lesbian, and her (unsuccessful) teenage attempt at passing for Greek. Pairing video recordings of each character with interludes from an unpublished performance script, I consider the anxieties of passing expressed in the personas of Dew Drop and Janie Bell, and through the lens of Abrams’s diaries, pose Butch in the Kitchen’s potential as an indefinite body to queer socially imposed constructions of monolithic and essentialist identity. Full article

In this paper, we define a novel family of arithmetic sequences associated with the Fibonacci numbers. Consider the ordinary Fibonacci sequence ${\left\{f_n\right\}}_{n\in {\mathbb{N}}_0}$ having initial terms $f_0=0$, and $f_1=1$ and recurrence relation $f_n=f_{n-1}+f_{n-2}(n\ge 2)$. In many studies, authors worked on the generalizations of integer sequences in different ways, some by preserving the initial terms, others by preserving the recurrence relation, and some for numeric sets other than positive integers. Here, we will follow the third path. So, in this article, we study a new extension $t{f}_n^{\ast }$, with initial terms $t{f}_0^{\ast }=(f_0^{\ast },f_1^{\ast },f_2^{\ast })$ and $t{f}_1^{\ast }=(f_1^{\ast },f_2^{\ast },f_3^{\ast })$, which is generated by the recurrence relation $t{f}_n^{\ast }=t{f}_{n-1}^{\ast }+t{f}_{n-2}^{\ast }(n\ge 2)$, the Fibonacci-type sequence. The aim of this paper is to define Tricomplex Fibonacci numbers as an extension of the Fibonacci sequence and to examine some of their properties such as the recurrence relation, summation formula and generating function, and some classical identities. Full article

This study empirically examines how employee compassion relates to job performance. Specifically, this study is a constructive replication and expansion of a previous study on the relationship between compassion and job performance using multiple sources of measurement. It investigates unexplored pathways within the public art sector in South Korea. Focusing on the mediating roles of positive work-related identity (PWRI) and positive psychological capital, we collected data from public art institutions in Korea, including galleries and museums, using a survey method. We tested the hypotheses using structural equation modeling and the PROCESS bootstrapping method. Our findings demonstrate a positive association between compassion and job performance, serially mediated by PWRI and positive psychological capital. Theoretically, by constructively replicating and expanding the previous findings, our study contributes to a robust understanding of how compassion could enhance employee performance. Practically, this study reinforces the value of fostering compassion and positive psychological resources to improve job performance, particularly within the public art sector. Full article

Traditional food products comprise an important part of the gastronomic identity of every nation. Their significance for national culture is major, which is why they are increasingly studied and included in the development strategies of many countries. This research focuses on the factors—economic, sociocultural, ecological, and tourism—that influence the offering of dishes made with traditional food products. The objective of the research is to examine whether certain characteristics of catering establishments in the Bačka region (Republic of Serbia) and their managers affect the appraisal of the factors that affect the offering of dishes prepared with traditional products. By conducting a survey (n = 187) and analyzing the data using the non-parametric techniques of the Mann–Whitney and Kruskal–Wallis tests, it was found that, although all the factors have a significant influence on the offering of dishes prepared with traditional food products, tourism-related factors were distinguished as the most important. The research also showed that the characteristics of managers like the length of work experience in hospitality, employment tenure at the specific establishment, the work position of the respondent, as well as the type of gastronomic offering and the location of the catering establishment affected the appraisal of the factors that influence the offering of dishes prepared with traditional products. Full article

Identification of features with high levels of confidence in liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) lipidomics research is an essential part of biomarker discovery, but existing software platforms can give inconsistent results, even from identical spectral data. This poses a clear challenge for reproducibility in biomarker identification. In this work, we illustrate the reproducibility gap for two open-access lipidomics platforms, MS DIAL and Lipostar, finding just 14.0% identification agreement when analyzing identical LC–MS spectra using default settings. Whilst the software platforms performed more consistently using fragmentation data, agreement was still only 36.1% for MS² spectra. This highlights the critical importance of validation across positive and negative LC–MS modes, as well as the manual curation of spectra and lipidomics software outputs, in order to reduce identification errors caused by closely related lipids and co-elution issues. This curation process can be supplemented by data-driven outlier detection in assessing spectral outputs, which is demonstrated here using a novel machine learning approach based on support vector machine regression combined with leave-one-out cross-validation. These steps are essential to reduce the frequency of false positive identifications and close the reproducibility gap, including between software platforms, which, for downstream users such as bioinformaticians and clinicians, can be an underappreciated source of biomarker identification errors. Full article

Researchers have emphasized how the high school STEM-themed career academy model benefits ethnically and racially diverse learners by promoting positive STEM identities and raising the interest of students to pursue STEM college and career pathways. The purpose of this study was to examine the reasons why Black boys participated in a high school academy of engineering. We were also interested in identifying academy features that helped promote (or inhibit) positive STEM identities among Black male students. In this qualitative study, we used data from 17 Black male high school academy of engineering students. We analyzed the interview transcripts using a constant comparative method. Using an embedded case study approach, we compared our findings to the community cultural wealth (CCW) factors and the factors that researchers have found to influence students’ STEM identities. We found that the participants brought six forms of capital with them that served as sources of motivation to participate in the program. The forms of capital that were related to the CCW framework included aspirational, familial, navigational, resistance, and social. While we did not uncover linguistic capital in our data analysis, we did find an additional source of capital that was not reflected in the CCW framework. We found that the Black boys had natural STEM talent based on the formation of STEM identities. The students had high aptitudes in STEM-related subjects, and they were engaged by participating in hands-on activities. We recommend that schools integrate STEM curricula for Black boys and provide Black men to serve as STEM role models through guest speaking opportunities, job shadowing, mentoring, internships, and other work-based learning experiences. Full article

This article seeks to explain the political responsibility that Polish right-wing female politicians directly associated with the 2015–2023 Polish government and the then-ruling Law and Justice Party bear in the state-sanctioned violence against minors in the context of LGBT- and immigration-related issues. Its main assumption is that, in times of the nationalist surge that has been sweeping Poland, women using anti-LGBT and anti-immigration discourses helped to legitimize discriminatory state practices and, consequently, made a significant contribution to the enactment of white, Christian, and heteronormative identity on Polish children. Drawing upon Critical Discourse Analysis, this work examines the anti-LGBT and anti-immigration political talk by female politicians who, in their narrative strategies, adopt the position of a “Polish mother” on a mission to save a “child in danger”. Through my analysis, I aim to demonstrate that anti-LGBT and anti-immigration discourses are equally significant areas of women’s political engagement. Despite the prevalent cultural norms of caring motherhood, women do exercise their agency in political struggles as supporters of discriminatory state policies directed against minors by re-politicizing a symbolic figure of the “Polish mother”. Full article

The aim of this research is to reflexively analyze and discuss organizational citizenship behaviors. By conducting an empirical test based on the assertions within the fields of the positive organizational behavior and the social identity theory, the specific objective is to analyze the relationship between organizational citizenship and sociodemographic and professional variables. A study was carried out by surveying employees of Portuguese hotel units. The sample consisted of 798 employees, mostly males, between 30 and 34 years old, with secondary school education, serving as operatives or undifferentiated employees, and having middle levels of seniority in the organization. The main results show that hotel employees develop organizational citizenship behaviors, albeit of different types and levels, which are supported by some sociodemographic and professional variables. The findings show that age and seniority are the most important and strongest variables significantly related to organizational citizenship behaviors. This study has several implications, highlighting the role and support that managers and decision-makers must have in reinforcing positive voluntary personal and social behaviors among hotel employees. This research aims to contribute to the formulation and implementation of management strategies anchored in organizational citizenship behaviors, supporting the formulation of management systems centered on behavioral attitudes at work in the context of the hotel sector. Full article

The identification and expression of germ cells are important for studying sex-related mechanisms in fish. The vasa gene, encoding an ATP-dependent RNA helicase, is recognized as a molecular marker of germ cells and plays a crucial role in germ cell development. Silurus asotus, an important freshwater economic fish species in China, shows significant sex dimorphism with the female growing faster than the male. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying these sex differences especially involving in the vasa gene in this fish remain poorly understood. In this work, the vasa gene sequence of S. asotus (named as Savasa) was obtained through RT-PCR and rapid amplification of cDNA end (RACE), and its expression in embryos and tissues was analyzed using qRT-PCR and an in situ hybridization method. Letrozole (LT) treatment on the larvae fish was also conducted to investigate its influence on the gene. The results revealed that the open reading frame (ORF) of Savasa was 1989 bp, encoding 662 amino acids. The SaVasa protein contains 10 conserved domains unique to the DEAD-box protein family, showing the highest sequence identity of 95.92% with that of Silurus meridionalis. In embryos, Savasa is highly expressed from the two-cell stage to the blastula stage in early embryos, with a gradually decreasing trend from the gastrula stage to the heart-beating stage. Furthermore, Savasa was initially detected at the end of the cleavage furrow during the two-cell stage, later condensing into four symmetrical cell clusters with embryonic development. At the gastrula stage, Savasa-positive cells increased and began to migrate towards the dorsal side of the embryo. In tissues, Savasa is predominantly expressed in the ovaries, with almost no or lower expression in other detected tissues. Moreover, Savasa was expressed in phase I–V oocytes in the ovaries, as well as in spermatogonia and spermatocytes in the testis, implying a specific expression pattern of germ cells. In addition, LT significantly upregulated the expression of Savasa in a concentration-dependent manner during the key gonadal differentiation period of the fish. Notably, at 120 dph after LT treatment, Savasa expression was the lowest in the testis and ovary of the high concentration group. Collectively, findings from gene structure, protein sequence, phylogenetic analysis, RNA expression patterns, and response to LT suggest that Savasa is maternally inherited with conserved features, serving as a potential marker gene for germ cells in S.asotus, and might participate in LT-induced early embryonic development and gonadal development processes of the fish. This would provide a basis for further research on the application of germ cell markers and the molecular mechanisms of sex differences in S. asotus. Full article