Search Results (344)

Background/Objectives: Hemorrhage remains a leading cause of early mortality in trauma patients, and timely transfusion guided by a structured massive transfusion protocol (MTP) is critical for improving outcomes. Although regional trauma centers have been established, standardized MTPs remain insufficiently developed in many settings. This study aimed to evaluate current MTP practices across five major trauma centers within a national trauma care system. Methods: Participating institutions provided written protocols and completed a structured survey addressing key domains, including activation criteria, transfusion strategies, laboratory monitoring, adjunct therapies, termination processes, and performance improvement measures. Findings were analyzed and compared against established international recommendations. Results: All centers had implemented MTPs and were capable of delivering initial blood products within 15 min. However, considerable variation was observed in activation triggers, transfusion ratios, and laboratory monitoring protocols. None of these centers maintained thawed plasma or whole blood in immediate readiness. Only one of five centers had a formal performance improvement monitoring system. Tranexamic acid was included in all institutional protocols. Conclusions: This review highlights significant variability and critical gaps in MTP implementation across trauma centers. Inconsistent activation criteria, the absence of essential components, and limited quality monitoring may compromise the efficacy of current practices. To improve patient outcomes, a standardized, evidence-based MTP framework should be developed and implemented nationwide. Full article

Indefinite integrals of products of exponential functions, power functions and generalized hypergeometric functions of some types are considered. Necessary and sufficient conditions are established for the algebraic independence of large sets of such functions (for various parameters) and their derivatives, as well as their values. All the algebraic relations between these functions are written out explicitly. Full article

In the past hundred years, three pontiffs have written apostolic letters to commemorate anniversaries relating to Dante: in 1921, Benedict XV marked the sixth centenary of the death of the great poet; in 1965, Paul VI judged it opportune to write on the occasion of the seventh centenary of his birth; and in 2021, Pope Francis added his voice to the numerous others wishing to honour the memory of the supreme Florentine poet on the seventh centenary of his death. Each letter is a product of its time: one hundred years ago, the Pope—still confined within the Vatican and refusing to recognise the Kingdom of Italy due to the Roman Question—addressed his text “to the beloved sons, professors and pupils of literary institutes and centres of higher learning within the Catholic world”; Paul VI, in full accord with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and its vision of a Church seeking collaboration with the world, addressed his writing to Dante scholars more broadly, and within the same letter, together with other academic authorities, established the Chair of Dante Studies at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan; Pope Francis today, in his outward-facing style of evangelisation, challenges everyone to (re)read Dante, whose teaching remains relevant seven hundred years after his death. Despite the differing political contexts and ecclesial agendas, Benedict XV, Paul VI, and Pope Francis are united on one point: Dante is a Christian poet—critical of the Church, certainly, but loyal to his faith and desirous of a religious institution that is more serious and less corrupt. This brief study presents the homage which the Church, today, seven centuries later, renders to this Poet—now widely recognised as a passionate witness of an arduous and active faith, in pursuit of justice and freedom. Full article

Fish production faces various challenges throughout its cycle, from rearing to consumption. Organic acids have emerged as an effective fish feed and meat treatment solution. They promote health and well-being, control pathogens, improve digestion, and contribute to food preservation. This study was therefore carried out to evaluate the evolution of publications on the use of organic acids in aquaculture over time, identifying the leading journals, authors, countries, and relevant organizations associated with the publications and determining the keywords most used in publications and research trends on this type of accommodation using bibliometric analysis. For this analysis, the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases were used, with the keywords and Boolean operators “organic acid*” AND (“pathogens” OR “microorganism*” OR “bacteria” OR “fungi”) AND (“fish” OR “fry” OR “pisciculture”). Ninety-six articles were found in 44 journals, with the participation of 426 authors and 188 institutions, from 1995 to 2024. The most crucial publication source with the highest impact factor was the journal Aquaculture, with 14 articles, 2 of which were written by the most relevant author, Koh C., who received the highest number of citations and had the highest impact factor among the 426 authors. China had the most scientific production, with 26 publications on organic acids in aquaculture. However, Malaysia was the country that published the most cited documents, a total of 386. The most relevant affiliation was the University of Sains Malaysia, which participated in the publication of eight articles. The 10 most frequent keywords were fish, organic acids, citric acid, article, bacteria, growth, microorganisms, Oncorhynchus mykiss, animals, and digestibility. The results indicate increased publications on the benefits of using organic acids in aquaculture, highlighting their effectiveness as antibacterial agents and promoters of zootechnical development. However, gaps still require more in-depth research into the ideal dosages, mechanisms of action, and long-term impacts of these compounds. Full article

This article presents a comparative study of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and articles authored by professional journalists, focusing on the perspective of a Kazakhstani audience. The analysis was conducted based on several key criteria, including the structure of the article, writing style, factual accuracy, citation of sources, and completeness of the information. The study spans a variety of topics, such as politics, economics, law, sports, education, and social issues. The results indicate that AI-generated articles tend to exhibit greater structural clarity and neutrality. On the other hand, articles written by journalists score higher in terms of factual accuracy, analytical depth, and the use of verified sources. Furthermore, the research explores the significance of journalistic ethics in ensuring transparency and information completeness in content production. Ultimately, the findings emphasize the importance of upholding rigorous journalistic standards when integrating AI into media practices. Full article

Horizontal wells have revolutionized hydrocarbon production by enhancing recovery efficiency and reducing environmental impact. This paper presents an enhanced Black Oil Model simulator, written in Visual Basic, for three-dimensional two-phase (oil and water) flow through porous media. Unlike most existing tools, this simulator is customized for horizontal well modeling and calibrated using extensive historical data from the South Rumaila Oilfield, Iraq. The simulator first achieves a strong match with historical pressure data (1954–2004) using vertical wells, with an average deviation of less than 5% from observed pressures, and is then applied to forecast the performance of hypothetical horizontal wells (2008–2011). The results validate the simulator’s reliability in estimating bottom-hole pressure (e.g., ±3% accuracy for HRU1 well) and water–oil ratios (e.g., WOR reduction of 15% when increasing horizontal well length from 1000 m to 2000 m). Notably, the simulator demonstrated that doubling the horizontal well length reduced WOR by 15% while increasing bottom-hole pressure by only 2%, highlighting the efficiency of longer wells in mitigating water encroachment. This work contributes to improved reservoir management by enabling efficient well placement strategies and optimizing extraction planning, thereby promoting both economic and resource-efficient hydrocarbon recovery. Full article

In teacher education research, the primary source of data used to measure teachers’ reflective skills are written reflection products, which are often collected in the context of field experiences following specific structural guidelines (e.g., portfolio texts). However, it is unclear how appropriate written products are for this purpose, considering teachers’ everyday professional lives, in which reflection is a mostly verbal, highly self-directed process depending on the teachers’ level of expertise. Therefore, in our study, we analyzed how teachers’ free, unstructured reflections differ from reflections structured by model-based reflection prompts. In an exploratory qualitative research design with theoretical sampling, a total of 22 prospective teachers at four different levels of expertise were asked to reflect on two standardized fictitious vignettes using a think-aloud approach. For the first vignette, participants reflected in an unstructured way. For the second vignette, the reflection was structured using simple model-based reflection prompts. On average, the participants showed a significantly better reflective performance in the structured condition, but no significant differences in relation to the level of expertise were observed. The results contribute to a better understanding of the validity of typical reflections used in teacher education as an indicator of reflective practice in the professional field. Full article

Western written travel narratives are a byproduct of the privileging of vision as the primary means of knowledge production, an epistemology often imposed on indigenous peoples through colonial practices. In contrast, indigenous cultures in Brazil have long relied on listening as a central way of engaging with their environment. In the present essay, I examine how listening practices appear in the written accounts produced by members of three foreign river expeditions in Brazil from the 16th to the 20th century. I analyzed travel accounts from Gaspar de Carvajal’s Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del Famoso Río Grande (XVI century), Hercules Florence’s Voyage Fluvial du Tieté à l’Amazone (XIX), and Theodore Roosevelt’s In the Jungles of Brazil (XX). To explore what these travelers might have heard, I also collaborated with a sound designer to create a soundscape using actual recordings of local fauna and indigenous chants and music. The results show a variety of listening modes put into practice such as conquest-driven, scientific observation, contemplation, and hunting-focused and aesthetic appreciation. These narratives illustrate how European epistemologies reinforced Western dominance by shaping both colonial encounters and scientific approaches to Brazilian wilderness exploration. Full article

Wine production is an important sector of the food industry in Bulgaria, contributing to both economic development and cultural heritage. The present study aims to show how natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning methods can be applied to analyze expert-written Bulgarian wine descriptions and to extract patterns related to wine quality and style. Based on a bilingual dataset of reviews (in Bulgarian and English), semantic analysis, classification, regression and clustering models were used, which combine textual and structured data. The descriptions were transformed into numerical representations using a pre-trained language model (BERT), after which algorithms were used to predict style categories and ratings. Additional sentiment and segmentation analyses revealed differences between wine types, and clustering identified thematic structures in the expert language. The comparison between predefined styles and automatically derived clusters was evaluated using metrics such as Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI). The resulting analysis shows that text descriptions contain valuable information that allows for automated wine profiling. These findings can be applied by a wide range of stakeholders—researchers, producers, retailers, and marketing specialists. Full article

Clinical documentation, particularly the hospital discharge report (HDR), is essential for ensuring continuity of care, yet its preparation is time-consuming and places a considerable clinical and administrative burden on healthcare professionals. Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and the use of prompt engineering in large language models (LLMs) offer opportunities to automate parts of this process, improving efficiency and documentation quality while reducing administrative workload. This study aims to design a digital system based on LLMs capable of automatically generating HDRs using information from clinical course notes and emergency care reports. The system was developed through iterative cycles, integrating various instruction flows and evaluating five different LLMs combined with prompt engineering strategies and agent-based architectures. Throughout the development, more than 60 discharge reports were generated and assessed, leading to continuous system refinement. In the production phase, 40 pneumology discharge reports were produced, receiving positive feedback from physicians, with an average score of 2.9 out of 4, indicating the system’s usefulness, with only minor edits needed in most cases. The ongoing expansion of the system to additional services and its integration within a hospital electronic system highlights the potential of LLMs, when combined with effective prompt engineering and agent-based architectures, to generate high-quality medical content and provide meaningful support to healthcare professionals. Hospital discharge reports (HDRs) are pivotal for continuity of care but consume substantial clinician time. Generative AI systems based on large language models (LLMs) could streamline this process, provided they deliver accurate, multilingual, and workflow-compatible outputs. We pursued a three-stage, design-science approach. Proof-of-concept: five state-of-the-art LLMs were benchmarked with multi-agent prompting to produce sample HDRs and define the optimal agent structure. Prototype: 60 HDRs spanning six specialties were generated and compared with clinician originals using ROUGE with average scores compatible with specialized news summarizing models in Spanish and Catalan (lower scores). A qualitative audit of 27 HDR pairs showed recurrent divergences in medication dose (56%) and social context (52%). Pilot deployment: The AI-HDR service was embedded in the hospital’s electronic health record. In the pilot, 47 HDRs were autogenerated in real-world settings and reviewed by attending physicians. Missing information and factual errors were flagged in 53% and 47% of drafts, respectively, while written assessments diminished the importance of these errors. An LLM-driven, agent-orchestrated pipeline can safely draft real-world HDRs, cutting administrative overhead while achieving clinician-acceptable quality, not without errors that require human supervision. Future work should refine specialty-specific prompts to curb omissions, add temporal consistency checks to prevent outdated data propagation, and validate time savings and clinical impact in multi-center trials. Full article

Despite the increase in studies on Spanish as a heritage language (SHL), few focus on spelling, with research limited to the U.S. According to the adaptive control hypothesis, language production is governed by control processes, which adapt to the demands of real-world interactional contexts. In this article, these control processes are inferred from the interlingual spelling errors observed in Gibraltarian SHL speakers. The hypothesis is that the Gibraltar dense code-switching context will be manifested in a high number of interlingual misspellings in Spanish due to English interference. Misspellings were identified in the written productions of a sample of 80 Gibraltarian pre-college SHL students (N = 40 in Spanish; N = 40 in English), collected via availability tests and stored in the Dispolex dataset by the members of the project “Lenguas en contacto y disponibilidad léxica: la situación lingüística e intercultural de Ceuta y Gibraltar”. Gibraltarians’ Spanish misspellings were then compared with those found in the U.S. The high percentage of spelling errors in SHL students in Gibraltar might be explained in light of lower inhibitory control of interferences in dense code-switching interactional contexts. Full article

For authentication and interpretation of palm-leaf manuscripts, material analyses are required that enable identification of specific characteristics of written artefacts. In this study, we apply infrared spectroscopy (DRIFTS) in combination with principal component analysis (PCA) as a fingerprinting technique for the analysis of eleven palm-leaf manuscripts. We demonstrate that manuscript-specific information is obtained and that a differentiation regarding the taxonomic species of palm leaves used for production and of their geographical origin in South and Southeast Asia is possible. The results show the potential of infrared spectroscopy for fingerprinting and authentication of written artefacts. Full article

In this article, we analyse durational variation for inherently long consonants in Italian. Productions by 40 speakers of four regional varieties were elicited via a read-aloud task containing target words with inherently long consonants in the post-consonantal vs. intervocalic position. The analysis of acoustic durations revealed variation. Overall, we found that /ts/, /dz/ and /ʎ/ were considerably longer intervocalically than post-consonantally, although by smaller ratios than those reported in the literature for contrastive geminates; the effect was smaller for /ʃ/ and barely detectable for /ɲ/. We also detected a trend to lengthen /dz/ and /ʃ/ after a morphemic boundary. In terms of regional variation, north-eastern speakers were found to diverge from the others, with shorter durations and less consistent durational patterns. Additionally, we verified the existence of lengthening induced by double letters for /ts/ (vizi—vizzi) and /dz/ (Gaza—gazza), and only found it for /dz/, particularly for north-eastern speakers. We argue that this may originally have been an orthographic effect due to the acquisition of Italian at school via the written form by past generations, which has been lost for /ts/ but preserved for /dz/ under the influence of loanwords spelled with <z> and pronounced as short intervocalically. Full article

While research articles on students’ perceptions of large language models such as ChatGPT in language learning have proliferated since ChatGPT’s release, few studies have focused on these perceptions among English as a foreign language (EFL) university students in South America or their application to academic writing in a second language (L2) for STEM classes. ChatGPT can generate human-like text that worries teachers and researchers. Academic cheating, especially in the language classroom, is not new; however, the concept of AI-giarism is novel. This study evaluated how 56 undergraduate university students in Ecuador viewed GenAI use in academic writing in English as a foreign language. The research findings indicate that students worried more about hindering the development of their own writing skills than the risk of being caught and facing academic penalties. Students believed that ChatGPT-written works are easily detectable, and institutions should incorporate plagiarism detectors. Submitting chatbot-generated text in the classroom was perceived as academic dishonesty, and fewer participants believed that submitting an assignment machine-translated from Spanish to English was dishonest. The results of this study will inform academic staff and educational institutions about how Ecuadorian university students perceive the overall influence of GenAI on academic integrity within the scope of academic writing, including reasons why students might rely on AI tools for dishonest purposes and how they view the detection of AI-based works. Ideally, policies, procedures, and instruction should prioritize using AI as an emerging educational tool and not as a shortcut to bypass intellectual effort. Pedagogical practices should minimize factors that have been shown to lead to the unethical use of AI, which, for our survey, was academic pressure and lack of confidence. By and large, these factors can be mitigated with approaches that prioritize the process of learning rather than the production of a product. Full article

In his update on Basic Language Cognition (BLC), Hulstijn formulates a number of predictions derived from BLC Theory, and explains how BLC differs from Extended Language Cognition (ELC). BLC is used to refer to an individual’s capacity to process spoken language productively and receptively in everyday life, while ELC is defined as control of the written standard language, as taught in school. In the literature on heritage speakers, so far surprisingly little attention has been paid to the differences between BLC and ELC, despite the relevance of the distinction between oral and written language for our understanding of heritage speakers’ language profiles. In this commentary, I argue that BLC Theory can be used to inform studies of heritage languages, and conversely, how insights from heritage languages can be used to develop BLC Theory further. By way of example, I revisit some of the literature on subordination in Turkish as a heritage language. I also point to issues that need to be clarified and future directions in the study of these phenomena. Full article